To me the actually critical variables are gestured at in your comments here, Tim, e.g. “Third, I do a lot of work with students in teaching them strategies of reading, in particular, a systematic practice of skimming, so I do my best to show them how to manage a reading load of this size.” Well yes, when professors have this kind of relational awareness of students and do this kind of groundwork all sorts of topics and readings can result in good classes. So only at that point do I look back at the reading list and think yeah, looks good.

I think this kind of point can be lost when one deals regularly with students who know how to learn through all kinds of bad teaching, as again you recognize. I don’t get that kind of student where I am.

I think you are right about institutional culture. Although this aversion to reading here appears to be a recent development, sometime during the 70s or 80s. There is also something about level of preparation. But, by their fourth year at what is a flagship university in the region a hundred pages a week should be routine, not something orders of magnitude to what they have been doing in previous years. Telling them that when Nkrumah was alive several hundred pages a week was the accepted norm here does not seem to be inspiring them.

I agree with a lot of what you say about picking readings, but one thing I have had good luck with is splitting them into common and optional readings. (So each week they read something in common and pick something from a list.) You usually have a critical mass of people in class who can talk about something (and the fact that others have not seems to sharpen their explanations.) Also, I feel less guilty about putting in things they may not like, since they don’t have to read them. When it works well it lets the students take the class in whatever direction they want.

Also, a book you may want to look at is Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949. University of California Press, 2011

I think also it takes some care in selecting readings–I do my best to create stylistic and genre contrasts within my reading, so keep it stimulating, and to avoid scholarly work that I think is excellent in its findings and craftwork but is not very accessible. Undergraduates can’t really find a point of purchase in a top-of-the-line monograph if it’s not also making some broad claims that they can work against their own experience or knowledge.

But it does come down to institutional cultures as well. We’re just fortunate here to have very serious students who remain earnestly dedicated to doing at least some of the work they’re asked to do by professors. You can’t build an institutional culture by yourself, and in some ways, even an institution can’t easily change an existing culture simply because it decides it wants to. Sometimes students are essentially calling a professor (or institution’s) bluff–knowing that they really won’t be held accountable for not doing assigned work. Also sometimes there’s a gap between what’s expected at a university and what the students are actually prepared to do, or have experienced in their past education. I think there’s no way to deal with that gap except with frankness and generosity–you have to talk about it, talk explicitly about why you want students to “jump the gap” to some new practices–you have to persuade them to do a new kind of work with a new kind of diligence, which means showing and modeling what that good outcomes of doing work that way might be (without papering over the limits).

I immediately thought that some of you might be interested in a book that I encountered as a young grad student at Wisconsin, in 1974: Stanislav Andreski’s Social Sciences as Sorcery. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1972).

For a good summary of its impact you might go to another person’s post: http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2010/09/andreski/

I’m grateful that you shared your syllabus. I teach poli sci at a small liberal arts college; and I have the good fortune to teach research and writing classes as a regular part of my load.

–Wes Martin, Keene State College, Keene NH wmartin@keene.edu

For a somewhat different course, doubtless.