As students balk at buying books, so the horizons of research, study and publishing narrow. Susan Bassnett reads between the lines
The Times Higher recently reported that managers in one university had demanded a rationale from lecturers as to why they had recommended certain books on their reading lists. I read this with amazement, wondering where bureaucrats will pry next, but then reflected that this news was just the latest in a series of controversial things I have heard about the compilation of reading lists.
You may have been thinking, complacently, that you knew what a reading list was and how to compile one. I thought that too: a reading list is a set of books, articles and/or websites that are recommended to students as a means of assisting them to complete fully the requirements of a course of study.
Not a bit of it. Years ago, we all had to start thinking about the cost of books. Even if a text is fundamentally important, if it costs too much we hesitate to put it on the obligatory list and try to persuade the library to order extra copies instead. Librarians now insist on being kept informed about changes to lists so that they can lay in stock in advance and demand clear information as to the necessity of the books in question. If tutors devise long reading lists with no indication of which are the most important works, librarians are faced with the dilemma of what to buy - it isn't only students who have to consider the financial implications of reading lists.
Shorter reading lists and lists that are created with cost in mind have had a serious knock-on effect on publishers. If students buy only cheap books, that distorts the market, hence the demise of heavyweight monographs that used to be the lifeblood of - guess what - the research assessment exercise. When I queried what looked like a slightly dated reading list recently, I was told that there simply had not been any new books published in that field over the past few years, a sure sign that something strange is happening on the research front.
Talking to students, it is clear that money matters. They have even argued that the purchase of books is a concealed cost that should be stated upfront when someone signs on for a course. The end result of such a system could be students opting for the course with the cheapest reading list, which makes a nonsense of academic quality.
Another issue is the way in which reading lists indicate priorities. Some tutors operate a system of highlighting the most important works, others leave it in abeyance until lectures and seminars reveal priorities. So, where once reading lists were indicative and intended to give a broad perspective on a subject, now they are increasingly directive and much narrower. The idea of a reading list being a guide to what students both need and might want to read has been transformed into a set of instructions - read x and y. This may have also come into being because of the changes in the pattern of student reading. There is general agreement that today's students cannot read as fast as previous generations because they have not been trained to do so. They find it hard to take in long works, and many tutors have had to adjust their expectations.
So when you next sit down to compile a reading list or to revise last year's, possibly the lowest priority will be scholarly importance. It can't be long before we are sent on training courses on how to produce reading lists that are suited to our times - and that must be approved by a new cadre of quality list inspectors.
Susan Bassnett is pro vice-chancellor at Warwick University with responsibility for campus life and community affairs.