I realize that I was an “outsider looking in,” but I was very impressed. I felt that the place oozed intellectualism. The students that we had as tour guides were brilliant. One told us that she was Test Optional and she was just as awesome as the other student who took an exam.
More importantly, the school seemed open minded and dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. Great culture for learning, IMHO.
Still, I do admit that taking an admissions tour does not make me an informed insider. And yet, W&L was WAY more impressive than a number of other schools that we toured.
I think this is accurate (more reading short texts, more reading as a group). A lot of it is simply because students get to college with lower reading skills and stamina than in generations past. I honestly don’t think it’s a superior way to teach reading (in other words, using shorter texts at the exclusion of long ones), but it’s the way to meet my students where they are. I do assign books, but if I assign more than 1-2 for my intro-level classes or 4-5 for my upper-levels, I get a lot of pushback, and I know that a lot of the students simply don’t do the reading. When we read texts as a group (as a class discussion), they are almost always primary sources. I teach early American history, so some of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose can be really challenging, which is why we talk about reading skills, and we decode the language together.
Now - I do not teach at a selective school, so I get students with a huge range of reading and writing abilities (some are outstanding and experienced, some have never had to write an essay). My daughter attends a highly selective LAC, and I’m surprised at how few books she has been assigned (she’s very much a humanities social sciences student, so I would have expected more). She’s a reader – she plows through novels in her spare time. But her professors assign relatively few books, and more chapters, articles, and of course primary sources. I know her workload is stimulating and challenging, but it’s very different from my own back in the dark ages when I was assigned a book a week for most classes (as a double major in history and American studies).
In high school both of my kids (D23 and S26) have had to read novels for English classes, but I can’t think of any other subject in which they were assigned full-length books other than textbooks. My current students who are in our social studies teaching licensure program (who are placed in middle and high schools for field experiences) tell me that other than in AP classes, they aren’t seeing textbooks assigned in the classes they’ve observed. So I really think there is a movement away from assigning books that starts early, and as a result college students often lack the stamina to read them. I think that’s a shame, but we have to work with students from their starting points, not ours.