“This year, I’ve shortened our reading list to the essentials only, so we must be fine,” my political philosophy tutor sighed as she handed out the Hilary term reading list.

She wasn’t exaggerating. Rather than assigning the full texts of The Politics or Nicomachean Ethics, she gave us a carefully trimmed selection: The Politics, Book 1 in full, Book 2 chapters 1 to 6, Book 3 in full; and Nicomachean Ethics, Books 5 through 10, and so on. It was still a mountain, just a smaller one than what she had faced when she was a student at Oxford.

I once asked her if she had actually read everything when she was a student at Oxford. She told me she had, though it had been difficult. She’d struggled, sometimes leaning on friends for summaries just to get through. When she first started teaching, she had tried assigning complete readings, too, but it never went well. Eventually, she’d had to compromise.

And still, we struggled.

One week, I managed to read only half of the material the day before class. I pulled an all-nighter to get through about three-quarters of it, then skimmed the rest minutes before the tutorial. Scanning pages as I crossed the street and hurried to class, I remember asking myself: “Did students in her day really read all of this?”

We no longer read. We skim, we browse, we outsource to catch up in class. 

The truth is, even beyond Oxford–the university built on books–the act of reading deeply, intentionally, and extensively, feels like it’s slipping out of academic life. 

Back in the US, where I study full-time, reading an entire book is rare. Most courses offer only selected chapters, articles, videos, or summaries. The only class that required me to read a whole book was an honours seminar with a heavy research focus, and yet it was just one or two books over four months of the semester. 

And now, with AI tools like ChatGPT, we have new ways to simulate reading without actually doing it. In 2023, the year ChatGPT was born, I was also in my first year at university, and we were assigned On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong for summer reading. Most of the class didn’t finish it. Many didn’t open it at all. Instead, we turned to the world’s newest technology; we fed the novel into AI, got a summary, and waffled our way through two hours of discussion.

Recently, more AI startups have emerged to provide various ‘shortcuts’ for academic reading, such as tools that generate chapter summaries, quizzes, or discussion prompts using nothing but a copy and paste. Some professors attempted to address students’ reluctance to read by converting their lectures into videos. But even those could be pasted into AI tools for auto-generated summaries.

Are people increasingly relying on AI to complete their academic reading? AI helps us offload the more demanding aspects of learning, freeing up time to scroll, binge, and game without feeling guilty. The machine, originally designed to handle repetitive tasks and give us more time to think, now performs the work that once required our critical thinking.

But do we need to read? To think?

If the ultimate goal is to acquire the lessons concealed within the book for discussion or to write papers, do we still need to read it when there is a much more effective method to obtain that?

At a university built on reading, in an age where machines can do it for us, do we still believe reading matters?