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Princeton Pre-read 2026
Princeton University's selection of Reader, Come Home as the 2026 Pre-read for the Class of 2030 — the first institutional defense of deep reading staged as an explicit AI response.
In April 2026, Princeton University selected Maryanne Wolf's Reader, Come Home as its Pre-read for the incoming Class of 2030. The Pre-read program assigns a single book to all entering students for summer reading and fall discussion with the president and faculty. President Christopher Eisgruber's announcement framed the selection explicitly in terms of the AI challenge: "I chose Reader, Come Home as this year's Pre-read because it addresses a question of vital importance to every entering student: Why should we continue to read long, challenging books when artificial intelligence agents can quickly summarize them for us?" The selection was the first institutional defense of deep reading staged as a direct response to AI's displacement of the practices that built the reading brain.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The timing carried structural significance. The 2026 incoming class would spend its college years working alongside AI tools that could produce competent summaries of any text in seconds. Eisgruber's framing treated the availability