I’ve been teach college students for decades. Most of them can no longer finish a book
I have spent two decades teaching humanities and social sciences at Amherst College, and my classes have always been built on one assumption: that students would do the reading. Lately, that assumption has started to feel naive.Recommended Video Students now come to my office not to discuss what they’ve read, but to ask how to skim it. I try instead to teach them close reading — the slow, deliberate kind that can’t be shortcut.
- ▪I have spent two decades teaching humanities and social sciences at Amherst College, and my classes have always been built on one assumption: that students would do the reading.
- ▪Lately, that assumption has started to feel naive.Recommended Video Students now come to my office not to discuss what they’ve read, but to ask how to skim it.
- ▪I try instead to teach them close reading — the slow, deliberate kind that can’t be shortcut.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/07/26/why-dont-college-students-read-amherst-college/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T09:43:57.564Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T09:43:57.564Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | p0ymXgxSj-V3 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I have spent two decades teaching humanities and social sciences at Amherst College, and my classes have always been built on one assumption: that students would do the reading. Long, dense texts, week after week. Lately, that assumption has started to feel naive.Recommended Video Students now come to my office not to discuss what they’ve read, but to ask how to skim it. I generally refuse. I try instead to teach them close reading — the slow, deliberate kind that can’t be shortcut. But I’ve started to wonder whether I’m fighting a trend that started long before these students ever reached my classroom. The numbers behind my hunch I’m not imagining this.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
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