The decline in free reading time means American culture is at risk, according those who have been studying literary habits for nearly twenty years.
In a study compiled in 1987, around 17,000 Americans were sampled by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
The study investigated the percentage of those who had attended artistic performances, read literature or visited museums in the previous year.
After the NEA collected these results, they issued a grave warning for the nation.
The survey, entitled "A Nation at Risk," had revealed a younger generation of Americans "threatened by the rising tide of mediocrity."
A similar study was more recently compiled and published.
Entitled "Reading at Risk," the report supports those findings and further focuses on a more specific question: how much time on average does the average America dedicate to reading for pleasure?
In "Reading at Risk", the NEA investigates what they call "a culture at risk."
The number of Americans who have engaged in literary reading for pleasure has declined seven percent from the results of a 1992 survey, dropping to 46.7 percent from 54 percent.
According to the authors of the study, such a decline indicates a threat to other forms of "active civil participation," which they claim is directly correlated with the rise in popularity of other forms of electronic media.
For Doug Mao, an English professor, the rise in popularity of visual media is "very worrisome."
"If you're not reading for pleasure - or reading at all, no visual medium does for you what novels, poems and other forms of literature do.
"While film can do things that literature cannot, there's an intimacy of experience, a complexity of thought that visual media do not offer you," Mao said.
"Without that experience, I believe people would feel in cruder ways and be less able to interact with people different or even similar to themselves constructively."
Hopkins alumnus Jared Beloff completed his masters in the English department last year. He echoed the importance of reading for pleasure.
"Classic literature and the 'cultural literacy' that it promotes?is usually left to high schools, colleges and graduate programs ," Beloff said.
"In other words, they are read because they are assigned, not because we want to read them."
On the Hopkins campus, where a strenuous academic environment surrounds students, the opportunities for students to read for pleasure seem to be treasured, but limited.
For senior English major Mike Levin, the combination of in-class reading and the amount of work courses entail becomes a "net gain."
"I'm constantly learning about new authors to read, and my English courses have allowed me to get more out of my reading when I do have time," Levin said.
"I have less time to read for pleasure, but when I do, I feel like I've definitely learned a lot from what I've read in class."
"Pleasure reading, then, should become more of a part of our daily lives as students, because it allows for both an outlet outside of our normal study and an inlet into literature that we wouldn't normally read," Beloff said.
Despite the fact that the science, engineering and mathematics departments generally have less required reading for their classes, that doesn't necessarily mean that these students have additional time for pleasure reading.
"I don't have time to read new books, no," sophomore biology major Stuti Parasrampuria said.
"But for me, it's really relaxing. I have to get rid of science, so I pick up a book."
Sophomore Sneha Ramesh, also a biology major, finds it relaxing as well. "I would definitely read more if I had more time," she said.
However, the effect of less coursework is not a guarantee that the amount of pleasure reading for students would increase overall, as Professor Richard Halpern of the English department points out.
"The suggestion that heavier coursework plays any role at all is hedged about with reservations in the [NEA] report. It certainly isn't clear that students would devote the increased leisure time offered by a lighter course load to reading for pleasure,"he said.
Focusing on the reading and curricula offered in the English courses at Hopkins, both undergraduate and graduate students in the department emphasize their usefulness in critical theory alongside the importance of pleasure reading.
"What really matters isn't the reading of literature itself, but rather the way in which reading literature makes a person more literary, more attentive to the relation we have as individuals to the stories that we tell about ourselves and our society," said David Hershinow, a fourth-year English graduate student.
"While the decline in American readership is in many ways troubling, I'm not so worried as long as we get better at teaching students how to think critically about the visual texts that are all around us, and that is something that our younger generation is uniquely prepared to do."
With the ever-increasing amount of work and the reported decline in number of leisure-readers, a solution to what the NEA calls the threat of the "cultural legacy" may not necessarily be easy to obtain.
"I think that for those of us who do see reading as having the power to enrich us individually and as a culture," said second-year English graduate student Christiane Gannon.
