Letter to the Queditor: Print Your Readings

A Letter to the Queditor,

At the end of every academic year, the students, staff, and faculty of Reed College go to considerable lengths to ensure that graduating Reedies can gather before the library to fling their thesis drafts into a large bonfire. What if the college went to similar lengths to encourage Reedies not just to Burn Your Drafts, but also to Print Your Readings? What if there were as much institutional support for ensuring a semester’s worth of words could end up in your hands, in hard copy at the semester’s outset, as there is for ensuring that you can watch it go up in smoke at the semester’s end? 

I make the proposal not just for the sake of cosmic and ritual balance, although there is a certain appeal to book-ending the academic year with acts of creation and destruction (plus, think of all the extra paper you’d have to burn!). Instead, I think there are compelling reasons for many Reedies to consider printing out their semester readings—and for the college to make it easier for them to do so. 

First, much empirical evidence suggests that printing out academic texts and reading them in hard copy benefits comprehension and retention. Given that a significant portion of the Reed education rests upon discussing with others things that you have all read together in advance, why not try to maximize what you retain? Second, there’s good reason to believe that having readings present in analog format boosts not just retention but attention. The clam-shell format of the laptop open on a seminar table, invariably accompanied by the hunched posture of one peering into a microscope or an ATM display, makes all too literal the functional and spatial dispositif of screen media: one must screen out the surrounding world in order to concentrate on the screen in front of them. As anyone who has ever had a MacBook open during a class discussion knows, even the best-intentioned conference participant finds it hard to resist the siren song of the web browser, the “quick glance” at Gmail or iMessage. As in the Garden of old, here too (at least for those using the Reed Computer Store’s official technology partner) the Apple stands not for knowledge but for temptation. 

Reed students should be encouraged to print their readings, but they should not be expected to do so without significant institutional support. Burn Your Draft succeeds, in part, because students, staff, and faculty have taken many steps to ensure that it can take place, in grand style, every year. What might it take for Print Your Readings to succeed on the same scale? 

First, the college would need to increase student print budgets. Currently, first, second, and third-year students at Reed get a $25 printing budget, while seniors (perhaps to ensure that they have something to burn) get $45. Even at the Reed Library’s relatively modest prices—$.05/page for black-and-white printing, a good deal in comparison to our peer institutions—won’t get you very far. By Reed standards, 500 pages might not cover a single semester of a single course! If Reed places emphasis on careful preparation of the assigned readings before class (and it does), I don’t think it’s unreasonable for students to expect a print budget that comes close to covering that. 

Second, the college should consider allowing students, as in days of yore, to purchase from the Print Shoppe at the outset of a semester a spiral-bound course reader containing all of a given class’s assigned readings, organized by week. I can’t speak for Olde Reede, but this was common practice at many universities well into the 21st century. Such a measure would be not only practical (no fighting with the printer every week!) but would also pay dividends long into the future. I still have a few battered course readers from my undergraduate classes, which I flip through again not just when I have to move, but also when I want to remind myself of what the class focused on and what I took from it. Like Proust’s madeleine, the course reader and its complement of highlighter marks, food stains, and marginalia triggers a wave of involuntary memories from that semester: what I read, what I understood of it and what was lost on me, who I read it to argue with and who I read it to impress. I’m not entirely sure why such readers went out of style, but if wide-leg jeans can make a comeback, surely course packets can too. 

Of course, I am not suggesting that Print Your Readings would be an unalloyed good, or that it should be adopted uncritically by everyone. Students with disabilities have benefited immensely from the opportunities afforded by digital text, and it is important to ensure that Reed classrooms remain accessible. Similarly, some might worry that a return to print would constitute a step backwards environmentally, and so steps should be taken to minimize the environmental impact of additional reading and writing. Fortunately, neither cost nor infrastructure would present insurmountable barriers: a college campus already has plenty of paper and laser printers, and it would be relatively easy to scale up print production!

Reedies love to read, and they also love to talk about what they have read with others. The senior thesis, as the intellectual fruit of a year of guided but largely independent reading and writing, testifies to this. So why not recognize this by boosting the student printing allowance for every year students are present at Reed, and not just their senior year? Burn your draft, yes, but first, print your readings!

Sincerely,

Jake Fraser

Associate Professor of German and Humanities