Faculty members at UC Berkeley say they have scaled back some coursework because many students are finding it harder to manage the reading load.
In several humanities classes at the California university, assigned reading has reportedly been trimmed down, reflecting a broader debate across higher education about attention, comprehension, cost and the effect of digital habits on how students engage with long-form texts.
For some courses, that has meant replacing full books with selected passages instead.
History professor Carlos Noreña told the New York Post that students in the past might have been expected to get through about 100 pages each week, with the assumption that most of that work would be completed.
He said a class he is preparing to teach this fall will now involve closer to 35 pages per week.
Noreña, who specializes in ancient history, has been part of Berkeley’s faculty since 2005.
He said the situation is becoming serious, warning that further reductions could undermine how effectively history can be taught.
“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” said Noreña.
He is not alone in saying course expectations have changed.
Mark Brilliant, an associate professor of history and American studies, said there are multiple reasons behind the shift.
“Part of this is to spare students the cost of purchasing books,” he said.
He also pointed to a growing number of objections from students about how much reading is being assigned.
“Part of it is also acquiescing to my sense of — and complaints about — the amount of reading assigned,” he said.
He noted that the criticism has continued even as reading lists have become shorter.
“Those complaints, curiously, haven’t gone away as I’ve shrunk the number of pages assigned.”
Not every lecturer has responded by lowering expectations. English professor Grace Lavery said she has kept her reading requirements in place.
“The reason is that the Dickens novels I teach are long and difficult.”
The discussion comes as reading performance in the US has drawn wider concern. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card, showed that reading scores remained below pre-pandemic levels, adding to long-running worries about comprehension and stamina before students even arrive at college.
Some educators argue that the problem is not simply the number of pages, but how students now read. Research on digital learning has suggested that on-screen multitasking and fragmented attention can weaken understanding of dense material, while the habit of moving quickly between tabs, messages and short-form content may make sustained reading more difficult.
The issue also comes at a time when universities are grappling with concern over artificial intelligence, including students using large language models to write essays or relying on AI summaries instead of reading entire books themselves.
That approach can leave readers with an incomplete understanding of a text, and in some instances the summary may not even represent the original work accurately.
UC Berkeley has also been examining how widely undergraduates are using generative AI. Research highlighted by the University of California in May 2026, based on spring 2024 survey data, described it as the largest study yet of undergraduate AI use and found major differences in access and in how students use the technology for coursework.
For professors in reading-heavy disciplines, that leaves an increasingly difficult balancing act: keep courses demanding enough to preserve academic standards, while acknowledging that many students now arrive on campus with weaker reading endurance and more tools that tempt them to bypass the work altogether.