Matthew Reisz, reporter and features writer inform, Scholars choose 'essential' texts to introduce sixth-formers to the academy.
"Our undergraduates – and postgraduate students as well – seem mainly not to be avid readers," says Jo Brewis, professor of organisation and consumption at the University of Leicester. As a result, she accepts that "recommending whole books would be rather daunting" for them, and she tends not to do so.
Tales of students' aversion to the traditional contents of university libraries are becoming commonplace among academics, with the internet typically fingered as the culprit.
Indeed, the flood of information with which they are deluged in the digital era means that even academics are reputedly reading fewer whole books than they used to. Stephen Curry, professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, was sufficiently keen to remind himself that "not everything can be argued in 800 to 1,000 words", so he made "a recent new year's resolution to read less on the internet and more [in] books".
Len Fisher, visiting fellow in physics at the University of Bristol, also regrets the increasing move towards seeking information on the internet, since books "drive and encourage readers to think for themselves in a way that just looking up answers does not" and "allow for serendipity – spotting that unexpected, fascinating titbit as you turn the pages or glance at the next book on the shelf". Students also have a lot to learn from "books that show why scientists ask the questions that they do, rather than mere explanations of the answers – not just 'history and philosophy of science' type books, but biographies, books about big questions and intimate histories". The point, he says, is to bring ideas to life by associating them with the lives and personalities of the people who first had them. As well as physicist Richard Feynman's memoir Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, he also recommends James Watson's The Double Helix as another prime example.
Brewis herself would like to see students reading more because "it would enable them to make more considered arguments in their coursework or examinations, and to demonstrate to us as assessors that they have considered the debates and controversies in the literature and arrived at reasoned conclusions on that basis". She also believes that reading a book on a topic ostensibly unrelated to that of the degree can bring a valuable external perspective to bear on assumptions that otherwise typically go unquestioned: "We always want our students to reflect on the status quo, on what we take for granted and on what the alternatives might be," she says.
One thought we had at Times Higher Education was that it might also be fruitful to start students early. What if heads of first year were to set incoming students a book to read before they even arrive on campus, as an introduction to university study? Of course, to inspire a bibliophilia that lasts until graduation day and beyond, the book would have to be particularly engaging, as well as instructive. So we asked a range of academics to contribute one recommendation each to a list that is also being published this week in our sister publication, TES, read by schoolteachers.
Although we stressed that the choice shouldn't be too specialist, we otherwise left the criteria pretty vague. It could be a book that would "help potential students hone their critical thinking, prepare them for independent learning, understand the basics of scientific (or social scientific) method or even negotiate the social and sexual minefield that lies ahead". Contributors were free to select "an inspiration or a warning, a classic of popular science writing, a polemic, a satire, a novel or a biography".
In the event, we were delighted to receive suggestions in all of these categories, ranging from Ludwig Wittgenstein to P. G. Wodehouse. Scholars are keen to warn students about everything from their own cognitive biases and the continuing obstacles faced by women to the often savage nature of intellectual progress and the battles within universities between the in-crowd and the out-crowd. Others want to inspire students to engage politically, to question authority and the views they grew up with, or simply to relish "the excitement of ideas and the possibility of life and sexuality". It is hard to believe that there isn't something in there for even the most bibliophobic of 18-year-olds.