It’s Time for Harvard Students To Pick Up a Book

When was the last time you read a book cover to cover?

For me, a prospective English concentrator, it was last week. But ask my peers in other concentrations and you’re more likely to get a shrug.

Harvard students complain about readings constantly. They lament any assignments requiring they conquer more than twenty-five pages as tedious or overwhelming (if they aren’t passing the work off to ChatGPT). It’s far too rare that we’re assigned a full book to read and rarer still that we actually finish them.

Literature is worryingly absent from many Harvard students’ course of study. My proposal? The College should instate a new requirement: an English course.

Though it’s true that the College requires all students to engage with the liberal arts through the Arts and Humanities and Expository Writing requirements, literature courses have fallen by the wayside. It’s entirely conceivable that students could graduate Harvard College without having read a book of fiction in full.

Case in point: A number of Expository Writing courses don’t require students to read whole novels. The same is true for many classes that satisfy the Arts and Humanities requirement. Courses like these are still deeply valuable, but they cannot replace the study of literature.

No other medium offers the opportunity to engage deliberately with moral ambiguity quite like literature. Fiction allows us to stop and recognize a problem where we might not have otherwise. It requires that readers attempt to understand uncomfortable truths and sympathetic villains.

Through reading fiction, students find their own answers to these questions. As such, our aversion to literature results in a collective inability to engage in challenging conversations and disagreements — and puts at risk the University’s new favorite project of “intellectual vitality.”

Taking an English class at Harvard doesn’t just expand your perspective — it’s also enjoyable. The courses are personal; professors encourage their students to ask questions and disagree with them. Unlike my typical Harvard section which seems to always be filled with disengaged students obsessively checking the clock as they count down the minutes until they can race out the door, my English section is ripe with thought-provoking conversations.

Some argue, rightly, that the decline in reading books stems from inadequate reading requirements in high school rather than college curricular shortcomings. But it is exactly for this reason that Harvard has an obligation to its students to reinvigorate their respect for literature.

The current Quantitative Reasoning with Data requirement offers a model for a potential English requirement. To fulfill the QRD, students can take anything from ASTRON 2: “Celestial Navigation” to ECON 1123: “Introduction to Econometrics.”

Similarly, a required English class would not need to be one-size-fits-all — Harvard could create literary offerings targeted to those interested in medicine, law, math, or history to ensure the requirement is engaging for students who may not have signed up for a traditional English course otherwise.

Classes that fulfill the requirement need not overwhelm students with a book every week like Humanities 10: “A Humanities Colloquium.” Assigning a few novels and teaching them well is all it takes to cultivate an appreciation for literature.

And yes, I am well aware of the fact that many people don’t like reading — and that a required course may not change their minds. It’s perfectly acceptable to not enjoy reading, just as I don’t find joy in doing three problem sets a week for a calculus class.

However, education is not about simply liking what you’re learning; requirements give us a necessary well-rounded education. Through this course, more Harvard students would begin to see the merits of both reading and humanities, and perhaps might open to reading a book for pleasure in the future.

Every night, my friends and I sprawl across the couches of the Cabot Science Library. While I read whatever novel was assigned to me that week, they look over jealously, remarking on how cool it is that I have actual books in my backpack.

Reading physical books shouldn’t feel so foreign to Harvard students. An English requirement would go a long way to change that.

Claire V. Miller ’28, a Crimson Editorial comper, lives in Canaday Hall.