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The modern university has quietly abandoned the long book, and almost nobody mourns it
I taught for thirty odd years and watched the syllabus shrink. First the novels went, then the long essays, then anything longer than a slide deck. We tell ourselves we are meeting students where they are. In truth we are meeting them where the algorithm left them. A mind trained on fragments can pass an exam and still fail to follow an argument across two hundred pages. I do not blame the students for that. I blame the faculty who found it easier to lower the bar than to defend it. Call me a relic if you like, provided you have finished a book this year.2