Did you do the readings? I didn’t, and today I had to reckon with it.
For weeks, I’d been meaning to read Plato’s “Republic” before my midterm, but weeks came and went; now, as I hurried to the classroom where three in-class essays awaited me, I wondered how I got myself into this situation.
I’ve been a government student at Claremont McKenna College for a bit over six months now, and I was kind of expecting somebody to tell me what I’m supposed to be doing here by this point. With the number of potentially important events and opportunities flying by, I find it easy to feel very busy even on days when I get none of my core tasks done. Often, my classes feel more like background noise than the whole reason I’m going to college — and I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, because that would be really embarrassing.
The Claremont Consortium’s unique take on the small liberal arts college model allows students to explore many interests and gives rise to uniquely constructive discussions. But we seem scared to honestly discuss how this impacts the rigor of many of its core academic programs. Often, keeping up with peers means putting pre-professional activities ahead of academics, especially when it’s so easy to get by without doing things like assigned readings. Even in a shifting attentional landscape, normalization of ignoring stated expectations of academic effort should strike us as an alarming debasement of higher education.
In any case, today I was in luck: though I had ignored an entire book’s worth of readings for a month, I had read sections of the “Republic” before, and my professor’s lectures had more than covered everything we needed to know. Once I saw the questions on the midterm, I knew there had been no reason to worry about reviewing more than a couple of pages of the book.
After the test, I caught up with some classmates who had read even less than I had. They, too, were sure that simply listening to the lectures had given them plenty of information to write satisfactory essays. This is one of the main excuses I make for not doing my readings — if my professors have already resigned themselves to students not reading the texts they assign and having to explain all of their relevant details themselves, I feel doing the readings on my own makes class time redundant.
Of course, if I truly read more of my readings instead of simply skimming them at the last minute, I would be learning much more. But if everyone else has found something better to do than the readings, surely I should keep up and do the same.
After my exam, I had a dilemma: I hadn’t done my cultural studies readings, but I had long ago signed up for an Athenaeum lunch, forfeiting my meal swipe. I hesitated, but the thought of Swiss Miss hot chocolate was too enticing; the readings could wait.
I wound up sitting with a professor who was swapping anecdotes with students about the dangers of requiring generative AI use for efficiency in the workplace. The professor argued that while generative AI tools could increase productivity for experienced professionals, these types of mandates might prevent those just beginning their careers from ever developing a deep understanding of their field. This will eventually lead to a “transferring of competency” from humans to machines.
I don’t use generative AI myself, preferring to try and fail to skim than to delegate my skimming to someone or something else, but I sympathize with those who do. Many of my peers who do their readings feel bad about using AI to assist them. But they are ultimately victims of the same inhuman expectations of efficiency as young professionals — after all, undergraduates are increasingly seen not as students but instead as professionals in waiting.
Many of the most successful government majors I know juggle jobs and student organizations while attending presentations, roundtables or networking events almost daily. If students actually met the colleges’ stated standards for academic engagement, these opportunities would not be nearly as accessible. In theory, CMC expects students to spend between 2 and 3 hours studying outside of class for each hour that they spend in class. That would mean students spent about 40 hours per week on classes and schoolwork on average, far exceeding the daily reality for the vast majority of 5C students in most majors.
I suspect that, if students actually met these standards, they would not leave the 5Cs nearly as competitive in a modern job market which generally does not concern itself with raw academic talent — or even literacy. But even if our current system does make our 5C degrees competitive, our forsaking of the academic effort which they claim to represent calls into question whether we actually value a 5C education. When we list our academic credentials, many of our claims to have grappled with texts or struggled with ideas will be empty; in reality, we will have delegated the work, not just to AI or to online services but often to our professors themselves.
I can’t remember the last time one of my professors seriously forced me or my class to struggle through complex and lengthy texts on our own. In many introductory or even advanced courses, we seem to have made a silent pact that it isn’t worth our time. But I worry that replacing independent readings with discussion alone — as Plato’s works such as the “Republic” famously model — would starve us in the long term of the resources necessary for independent, constructive leadership.
After all, for a book about the proper education of leaders, Plato’s “Republic” doesn’t make much mention of books. Socrates, his main character, disapproved of writing as a medium for serious learning, preferring interactive, digestible in-person conversations — or Socratic seminars — like those typical of humanities classes at the 5Cs. These discussions can be easy and even fun to contribute to, but if we haven’t built comprehension on our own, it’s very difficult to add anything original. College is supposed to teach us to generate thoughts both grounded and critical — grounded in facts and arguments beyond our immediate surroundings, but critical of unquestioningly accepting others’ assumptions. In a world without readings, we seem doomed to generate ideas that are one or the other, but never both.
At the very Ath talk I attended instead of completing my readings, Philip Wallach, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, lamented the diminished role of Congress in setting federal policy, an existential threat to American democracy. He claims one of the causes is that while members of Congress were once encouraged to build a reputation through detail-oriented legislative work, now they seem to believe that making inflammatory statements and capturing attention on social media are the best way to gain influence. No longer are they ‘doing the readings;’ there is no need for grounded, critical thought when informed leadership is no longer the way to get ahead.
I can’t help but wonder if future generations of our elected leaders will read books at all. If they don’t, what need will there be for liberal arts colleges?
As I’m finishing this article on my laptop in class, another of my political science professors asked, “Who did the readings today?” For a few silent moments, he peered at 15 blank faces. He answered his own question: “Nevermind.”
Nicholas Steinman CM ’28 got an A-.
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