Article Club: Beth McMurtrie Interview by Mark Isero

Article Club: Beth McMurtrie Interview

Mark Isero

Jun 27, 2025 1:15 PM

Summary

Introduction to Topic (00:04 - 00:24): Mark introduces the podcast and outlines the focus for February—an article discussing the decline of reading among Gen Z in college. The article titled "Is This the End of Reading?" is authored by Beth McMurtry and highlights concerns from professors about students' reading stamina and skills.
Author's Background (01:44 - 02:36): Beth McMurtry explains her motivation for writing the article, referencing her ongoing work about teaching and the challenges faced by professors trying to engage Gen Z students who are often disengaged and struggling in their classes post-pandemic.
Challenges in Reading Skills (04:45 - 06:46): McMurtry discusses the lack of critical reading skills among students today, pointing out issues like limited vocabulary and reading endurance, which have left educators puzzled and concerned about student performance in college.
Professors' Perspectives (08:06 - 10:16): Many professors express deep concern over students' reading abilities, characterizing it as an existential crisis, feeling as if they are witnessing harm to their students due to declining reading skills, which impacts teaching efficacy and classroom dynamics.
Systemic Issues in Education (12:30 - 13:35): The conversation highlights how shifts in educational practices, particularly in high schools (like focused reading vs. balanced literacy), may have contributed to students entering college unprepared for the reading demands of higher education.
Teaching Strategies (16:51 - 20:03): Professors are exploring new methods to engage students better, such as reducing reading loads, incorporating quizzes, teaching requisite reading skills directly, and updating syllabuses to include diverse and engaging materials.
Importance of Reading (23:00 - 24:41): The discussion wraps up with reflections on the vital nature of reading within a multimedia culture, suggesting that while teaching long reading assignments is crucial, understanding the creative ways students engage with ideas and information today is equally important.

Transcript

Hi there, this is Mark, and welcome back to Article Club, where we read, annotate, and discuss one great article every month on race, education, or culture. Hi everyone, it's February, and this month we are diving deep into a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and that topic is reading. I think it's safe to say that you also care about this topic, so I'm excited to share with you our article of the month.

It's called Is This the End of Reading? It was published last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's by senior writer Beth McMurtry, who does an excellent job following the declining trend of reading that is happening among Gen Z college students. In this piece, Ms. McMurtry interviews a number of professors who I would say are stressing out about this phenomenon, that college students simply don't have the reading stamina or

the advanced reading skills that they used to have. But don't worry, this is not a complainy article where the older generation denigrates the younger generation. Ms. McMurtry knows what she's doing, and I trust her legwork on this, and I really appreciate how she includes in her piece what professors are trying to do to support their students and to promote reading in their courses. It's a great piece, and I hope you read it, and I also hope you listen to my interview

with Ms. McMurtry that's coming up in just a few seconds. She was warm and generous and wonderful to chat with. For me, as an educator who cares deeply about the state of reading, I just have to say it was wonderful to chat with someone who really knows what they're talking about. So thank you, Ms. McMurtry, and here's our conversation. Beth McMurtry, thank you so much for doing Article Club. Thank you so much, Marc, for having me here.

I'm so excited for your piece. So people know that I'm big on reading, but I'm not going to just feature an article about reading unless it's really good. So your piece, Is This the End of Reading, which was in the Chronicle of Higher Education, it was fantastic, and I'm so happy that you're here to talk to us about it. I wanted to first ask you, how did this piece even come to be? Can you talk about how this piece sort of emerged?

Sure. So for your listeners who don't know, I've been writing about teaching at the Chronicle for several years now, starting before the pandemic, and so I did a lot of reporting during the pandemic about the shift to online teaching and all of the stress that that was causing. But when it got really interesting was a couple of years in, and when campuses started to open up again, I was hearing that students were disengaged, were struggling in the classroom,

were coming in with sort of a lot of learning challenges and some attitudes and behaviors that were really puzzling to professors. So early last year, I remember talking to my editor and I said, you know, I actually want to do a series on what it's like to teach Gen Z today because professors are confused and they don't really understand why students are thinking and acting the way they are. So let's dig into this, right?

And I wanted to be careful about a couple of things. I wanted to be sure that it wasn't any of this kind of what I call kids today sort of thinking where it's just like, oh, kids used to be much better readers and now they're not, or they never cheated before and now they're cheating all the time with AI. I really wanted to avoid that. And I wanted to really look at kind of the systems that students were coming out of,

why they were coming in, like what they were being told or taught that shaped their thinking or their behavior. So anyway, that's all to say that I was sort of batting around a lot of ideas. And then I had come across that Adam Kotzko piece that you had mentioned, I think, to your readers. And that was really influential in my thinking because he put his finger on a couple of things that I think are distinct with students today that really do distinguish this moment from

previous years or what was going on 10 or 15, 20 years ago. So he talked about a couple of things. He talked about reading endurance and critical reading skills. So reading endurance, I think, is something we all feel, right? We all are struggling to sit down and read a book for like a good hour or so, right? Or to get into maybe a novel that's a little more dense than we're used to reading. And he even tells a story, if you remember, in his own piece about reading for an entire

train ride and then coming into work and sort of like humble bragging about that. And all his colleagues were like, wow, you read for a whole train ride. And these are, I think these are like great books, professors. And so like if they're struggling with this, right, what does it say for the rest of us? But the other thing, the critical reading skills, I think those are in some ways more alarming to educators because they speak to an ability to distill an argument, right?

Or compare and contrast ideas or synthesize information or vocabulary. A lot of people are talking about students' limited vocabulary. And so that was really seeing that framing and thinking about those ideas and having it register with what I have been hearing from professors. That's what really convinced me that I needed to write this story. Yeah. Thank you so much. So I really like how, yeah, that piece, I loved it too.

And I'm going to actually bring it back, you know, so folks who haven't read it, you know, can read it again. But yeah, it's really interesting. So like you have this piece, but you also know what you know, because you've been following this for a while. And I guess like my question is, you know, you do probably have a number of sources or you did reach out to just a number of professors. How then, you know, as a reporter, do you decide that this is sort of like a situation

where it's not, you know, the kids can't read anymore because now I'm older and now I get to complain about the kids? Yeah. How do you know that like this is something? Because a lot of times we know that folks just write about whatever they want to write about. Yeah. So I am a big believer in detail and specificity and complexity, right? Like I don't think you can ever find any one explanation for why things are the way they

are. And sometimes you can see a couple of different trends coming together and overlapping in a way that kind of creates new situations or new problems. It's not always negative too, right? And we can talk more about some of the things I think that Gen Z are doing that are really cool. But anyway, like you said, I had been informally collecting stories just over the course of my reporting. But one of the first things I did is I interviewed Kotzko and then I wrote up the interview and

pointed for, we have a weekly newsletter on teaching that goes out to about 20 or 25,000 readers. And I put in what I call a call out, you know, and I said, are you seeing this in your classroom? And you know, I put a Google form in there and I asked a bunch of questions. You know, what do you teach? What are you seeing when it comes to reading? Have you talked to your students about what's going on? How has your teaching changed because of this?

And I got, I'm forgetting the exact number, 50 or 60 responses. And you know, they definitely vary. And so I always want to be careful in saying this is not happening everywhere, right? And there are, again, many different kinds of students, many different kinds of professors. But I did start to see some through lines, right? So a number of people talked about how students are struggling to understand written instructions

and they need somebody to talk them through it in person, tripping up over what were once assumed basic vocabulary words, finding traditional college level novels hard and having to now teach novels that may have been taught in high school before. Students who, when they encounter problems in reading, they kind of freeze up and they just don't do the work. They don't, they don't push through. Students who confuse the author's point of view with something they're trying to argue

against, right? Like they can't, they can't figure out an argument that might have a lot of twists and turns in it. And also many of the people who wrote in said, this is not new and it probably started about 10 years ago, which goes back to Kotzko's argument in his essay that everybody wants to blame smartphones in the pandemic, but there's more to the story than this. So that's when I knew I really had to start to dig into what was going on.

Yeah. I, everything bad apparently happened about 10 years ago, but I do, I do, I do have a followup on that, but before I wanted to get at the emotions of some of the professors. So obviously you did this form and then you probably also talked to them and you write, you know, several quotes from different professors. And I feel like they're a little stressed out, but specifically on the reading endurance

and also in the critical reading, how much despair do you feel is out there with these professors? Because it seems like it's almost like an existential crisis here. Like they're, they're all of a sudden not assigning any reading. Like some of them are really like, I feel like they're really nervous and I know that I'm sure it's different for different people, but how would you characterize sort of like

the feelings behind what, what they were telling you? So the professor in the lead of my story, Teresa McPhail, I remember her, she told me she felt like a nun who had lost her faith, right? And if you think of teaching as a vocation, right, a calling, which a lot of academics do, this is really an existential crisis because you're, you're seeing harm come to your students. I didn't find many professors, at least those I interviewed who were angry at students,

right? They, they, they were sad for their students. They were certainly frustrated and sometimes wanted to beat their head against the walls, but they were sad for their students because they could see the anxiety that, that the students felt when they couldn't do the work. I mean, they always felt like, for the most part, they felt like their students were very aware of their own limitations. Not always.

I mean, sometimes, you know, they would often say to me, these students have no idea how much less I'm asking of them than I, than I asked of students 10 or 15 years ago. But it changes what you can do in the classroom and how you can teach. You can't get through as much material, which means students just simply aren't as learning as much, as much content, as much stuff. And this is happening in the sciences too.

You know, I quoted a biology professor who was saying she had to spend much more time in class teaching students how to, you know, contrast and compare articles or summarize something without changing its meaning. But also if you can't get through as much content, but also you may be, and you may end up having to teach the skills that you thought students had learned in high school. So then your teaching becomes a different kind of teaching.

And if you don't do those things, then you kind of have a dead classroom or you might have a discussion that goes off the rails because the students are not interpreting kind of what they're learning in a useful way. I guess that's the best way to say it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I want, I do want to ask a follow up on the 10 years ago. So, so obviously cell phones, smartphones, everybody says that that's one of the issues,

but you're saying it's not necessarily that, but it does seem to me just 10 years ago does point a little bit to some stuff going on with reading instruction, both with this idea about balanced literacy or versus sort of like the science of reading, but then also common core and this idea that I do find that it's true in many high schools, teachers did get the message, number one, to focus on nonfiction rather than a mix of fiction and nonfiction.

And then more importantly, don't read very much and read very closely several different paragraphs for the test. And I don't know if students necessarily even recognize that these texts are coming from a larger hole. And so, you know, I'm not somebody to blame, you know, educators, especially high school teachers. I'm one that myself, but I have to say that perhaps this is an issue of the pendulum going too strongly in one direction such that students are going to college, maybe not ever having

actually read a whole text. So just wanted to get your feelings about that as a reporter and what you noticed with the professors. Yeah, I think they would, to the extent that they understand how students are being taught in high school, I think they would agree 100% with that. That came up in my reporting. I talked to a few professors who had been high school teachers, and so they were fully aware of the shift to shorter readings.

Or they might talk to their students and the students might say, you know, I never was asked to read a full book in high school. And that, I think those had a lot of unintended consequences, right? I mean, I would actually defer to you on this as a high school educator because I have no professional knowledge of this. I talk almost exclusively to college professors. But what I've read and learned from experts is that that shift in the common core and

shift toward teaching to the test had the consequence of not training students to read at length, which is a whole different skill set, right? To absorb an entire novel and discuss the content and context and larger themes of a novel is very different than saying, read this passage and tell me what the author's main point is or tell me what style of writing or argumentation this is. Cosco said that he noticed this in his students and he talked about it as treating reading

like a scavenger hunt, which I thought was such a vivid way of describing how students are taught to read today. But again, I would be very interested to talk about that more. Yeah, because, OK, so definitely something that's been going on forever is this idea of fake reading, this sort of like performance by the teacher and the students. And I think this happens at all levels where there's sort of like a tacit agreement that

I'm going to assign you stuff to read. You're not going to really read it. This is even before chat GPT. And there's sort of like this dance where as long as as long as the discussion is sort of good enough and everybody plays along, then it's all fine. But I feel like there has been a shift here. Maybe I would say, and this is something that's coming through in your piece as well as in others, that folks, especially Gen Z, they're sort of calling the bluff and being actually

more genuinely honest, like actually saying, hey, if you really want me to read these hundred pages this week, that actually takes a lot of time. I am not yet a skilled reader. You are. You've already read this book, professor or teacher. And so if you really want me to put in this amount of time, we just have to have a real honest conversation about it. And I do sometimes wonder because it seems like there's a little bit of a sense of whose

fault is it? And there's no fault. We haven't. We've got to figure it out. But this idea of just assigning a book or a lot and then just assuming that it's going to happen outside of class time, we just have to like talk about that more is like my opinion. I think it's a really smart point. And I think, yeah, I wonder if you rewound the clock and talk to professors a generation ago if they would have agreed with all that or, again, they would have just assumed that

students did the reading. The students did have more reading literacy, so they could maybe skim in a way. The students don't today. I also think there's that question that you were getting at students wanting to know the why. I often think about millennials as the generation that when you say, jump, they would say, how high? And Gen Z's coming in and saying, well, why? I mean, it's stapled together with this level of cynicism that I think professors are finding

alarming, professors and teachers, and the sense of transactionalism. But on the positive side of that, they are not afraid to ask, why does this matter? Why do I need to learn that? The last story I did in the series was in interviews with professors who have found ways to connect with Gen Z. And one of them I talked to said he really doesn't get ascended when students ask why. He just simply answers the question, and then they move on, right?

It's not a challenging of, it's not a what do you know? It's a real sincere question of why. And if you can't answer the why, that's a whole other conversation about what is it that you're teaching and why do you think it's important? Yeah. I appreciate that piece. And I also appreciated how you also made sure to center what the professors not just were going through, but there was a lot of empathy there.

But also what I really liked is that this was not just a complaining piece. This was professors who are really trying to do the work to figure it out. And a large part of your piece was about professors trying different things. And I wanted to sort of see what you thought was working or what the professors thought was effective. Yeah. So for example, there was the idea of making sure to quiz students on their reading, just

to basically say that this is not a fake assignment. Did you notice any patterns or trends about what the professors thought was helpful? Yeah. So I'll start out by saying that I think those who simply reduced the amount of readings didn't find that that was enough. So the ones that have really been trying to figure the way through it, and you know that almost cliche, meet students where they are? Those are the people who I felt had a little bit more optimism or at least could see some

path through the fog. So I heard good reports from people who are very explicit about teaching reading skills. And so you have to talk to your students about why it's important to be a critical reader and give some examples that might help them in their everyday life, even if it's to talk about how to understand what you're looking at on TikTok, right? And then develop those critical reading skills through guided reading, which I think can

take many forms. Sometimes it's literally a guide that they fill out a follow as they're reading something. And you know, like with academic articles, that actually could be quite helpful. It might be the first time students are encountering kind of this dense academic text that has a sort of a formula to it. And one thing that I heard related to that is professors say that maybe they assume that their students, again, of an earlier time, had these skills coming into college, but

maybe they never did again. Like maybe just reading a lot gives you those skills, but maybe you also can kind of cover up what you don't know if you read a lot. But when you stop reading a lot, you really don't have those skills, so you can have to build them up again. You mentioned reading quizzes, which I've heard mixed things about because if students can frankly use AI or just game the system, it doesn't always work.

But I do think if you do it for points, students love points, that helps. The other thing that I think is really interesting and I've heard several people talk about is being really unflinching about updating your syllabus, right? Did you put something in there just because you like it and you never mention it in class? Can you mix in some podcasts or short pieces on topics that are just really well written?

You know, some professors said that their students really like memoirs or primary text, historical sources. And then I quoted this one professor who said, you know, textbooks are really boring. And I kind of agree, right? Sometimes it has to be the basis of your class, but I think acknowledging that and maybe balancing that with other things. But you know, that gets back to the point, like if you make sure that everything that

you're asking them to read comes back to why it matters, and then you can articulate why it matters. And that combined with teaching reading skills seems to be a useful combination, I'll say. I would assume though, this is just an assumption, that professors have not been taught like elementary school teachers in some of the specific things. So I was a little bit surprised when you said earlier that students are finding it difficult

to like sort of like see an overall argument or the author's main claim. And I think it actually has to do with more of the complex arguments, or if it's longer than a short, because that's that's all that happens in elementary and high school. But I think again, it's devoid of the greater piece, you know, sometimes it's so funny, sometimes students are reading a piece, and they don't actually even know that there's

an author behind the words, like the words just sort of appear, you know, devoid of any sort of source. But yeah, this is just like super, super interesting, because it seems like the professors are just really doing their best trying to figure it out. And also, what I'm trying to also think about is, are we at a time now not to convince students to read, but to continue to go back to a real question about what is reading actually

for? And I'm not really sure that we necessarily all educators really approach that we might assume different things, we might assume that students will do the reading or not. But I think that there's still just a foundational piece for anybody who is an educator. Well, of course, reading is good morally, or it's good for our soul or something. And it seems like we might need to go there a little bit, too.

What do you think about that? Is your question to really get into why reading is different than other forms of gathering information or wrestling with ideas? Yeah, specifically because your piece, is this the end of reading? Like if you take that question really just straight on, we have to assume that potentially maybe this is the end of reading. So if we're going to be able to, quote unquote, save it, I mean, I know that I'm getting dramatic,

but ultimately, we would have to make an argument for it, especially because of what you just said, which is like there's so many different various sources of gathering information. Yeah, I think that's an interesting argument. One I haven't really thought too deeply about in terms of how you would explain how reading is a different form of engaging with ideas than, say, a podcast. I mean, obviously it is.

And professors and teachers who I would assume tend to be heavier readers than your average person, that's why they maybe go into teaching, intuitively understand that. But students might think, well, I'm listening to a podcast and I'm engaging with the ideas on that level, or just even a better contrast, I'm listening to an audio book. And I've heard that high school teachers even are moving more toward audio books.

What is the difference between that and the written word? Can a professor articulate that? What is so special and so distinct about what's on the page versus what's in the person's ear or what they're watching? I think that's a fascinating question. Yeah, I hope to continue that dialogue with fellow article clubbers as well. And I just want to thank you so much for sharing all of your thoughts. I have one last question, which is actually how you end the piece.

First of all, again, I have a very high standard for education articles just because I'm an educator, and specifically about reading. So all of your reporting, I just have really appreciated, and I was very struck with how you ended the piece, because the question is, this is the end of reading, and you quote Stuart Patterson, who says, we need to prepare ourselves for a drastically different future. Makes sense.

Yeah, I agree. But then following up, humanity is going to take its course, no matter what I try to do about it. So why'd you end there? Well, it's interesting that you think it's maybe a bit of a, did you think it was a bit of alarmist or do you sort of? No, no. I felt like it was real. I felt it was similar to what we just talked about. We can't just assume that we're going to be okay. We've got to do something about it.

Yeah. I'm a big believer in ripping the Band-Aid off, right? You just got to take a look, look something straight on and say, okay, this is what's happening. Let's understand why it's happening, maybe understand where it's going, and then think about how to respond. I found that conversation to be among the most interesting because again, he was coming at it from a different way. He actually went back to talking about how when writing first appeared, people were bemoaning

the loss of the oral tradition, right? And I think his point was that in periods of profound or abrupt transition, we can only mourn what's lost because we don't really know what's coming. I think there's a discussion to be had related to that about the kinds of literacy that young people are developing and how that is shaping their interests and their thought process and what they want to do creatively.

I don't think, well, I would not argue that Gen Z is any less creative, interested, curious. They don't think any less deeply than older adults. Maybe we just don't see where they're wrestling with those things because it's happening at a different level or on platforms where older people don't spend that much time. And the other thing I think about is Patterson talks about reading being a means to an end.

And if the end is to grapple with the big questions in life, and those questions belong to all of us, it's can you develop new ways of getting into those conversations? So I think another way to say that is even if high schools across America bring back long reading lists and deep reading, and colleges do as well, we're still in a fully multimedia culture. So it's perhaps a more active and creative way to think about the reading dilemma than

to just wait until students will start picking up books again. I love it. That was perfect. Thank you so much, Beth, for not just the answer, but also for your piece. And thank you for being so generous with us and fellow Article Clubbers. I can't wait to continue the conversation with them. Thank you so much, Mark. This has been a lot of fun. I want to thank Beth McMurtry yet again for saying yes to Article Club, for sharing your

views on your piece, and for writing your article. I am deeply grateful. Article Clubbers, thank you, too, for listening to this interview, and I want to invite you warmly to read the article and come join our discussion on February 23rd at 2 p.m. Pacific Time. You can sign up at highlighter.cc slash discussion. And if you're not quite ready yet, you can find out more information at articleclub.org. Hope you have a great weekend ahead.

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Article Club: Beth McMurtrie Interview

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