As many students will know, recently UCL gave its student body a well-deserved week off to help students catch up on reading or jet off to Paris, depending on their respective tax brackets. This event, known as a “reading week”, occurs twice a year at the midpoint of the first two terms, and is a tradition amongst the majority of universities in the United Kingdom.
During this period, however, a shocking recent survey, conducted at The Institute (presumably some centre of higher education) went public. The survey, polling a range of students amongst UCL’s first-year cohort, showed that 24% of students self-declared that they did not know how to read. Additionally, another 32% claimed they only knew how to read “somewhat”.
This shocking discovery occurs off the back of recent complaints made by many UCL staff members concerning essays submitted over voice notes, in javascript and even, on one occurrence, in the form of a TikTok edit of a Boeing 747.
Furthermore, library book loans this year have reduced by close to 30%, with one student overheard in the Main Library last week asking his friend, “Why are there so many books in the White Monster and Zyn building?”
As a result of all these different problems, over reading week, I decided to sit down with a few different first years to get a better sense of how severe this issue really is.
I began with Michelle, a first-year PPE student, who assured me she was a completely capable reader, showing me the multiple menus and hinge profiles she had read with little to no trouble over the last few weeks.
Then came Mina, an English student who confessed: “When applying for English, I knew we were obviously going to have to speak it, but this whole reading thing lowkey caught me by surprise, I can’t lie lol”.
Zakaria, a first-year math student, was perhaps the shortest interview I held, as he bluntly confessed that he did not know how to read, although with the caveat that he did “know most of the numbers”.
To understand more about how this shocking situation came to be, I sat down with UCL Sociology professor and Gen Z expert, Dr Jove N. Isle. “The results of the survey were disheartening”, he confessed to me, “but not a surprise. Kids these days have no interest in reading or writing as they turn instead towards the new age of AI memes and online gambling”. He then began to recount to me the many sleepless nights he has spent studying contemporary teenage culture, before shaking vigorously, foaming at the mouth, and slowly collapsing to the ground as he incoherently uttered “6…7…6…7…” Clearly, this new generation was too much for him to handle, so I slowly made my way out of the room. I hope he’s okay.
It was a shocking few days of realisation. I had begun investigating this phenomenon with the hope that the survey was perhaps an anomaly. Perhaps the surveyors may have accidentally surveyed a group consisting of business majors, or worse, King’s students. After delving deeper, however, I began to confront the reality that our latest batch of UCLers are simply not that bright.
