[maus42]

10 pages a week might be fine and well in a mathematics course and related fields, as it's a field famously characterized by it's use of a concise notation. You can state lots of things in a 10 pages. You can spend several hours working with a proof that you can fit on one page. The softcover edit of Rudin's Real and complex analysis is a small book of 400 pages, and and is supposed to a full-year course.

What about a less-mathematical course, say, history or philosophy? Well, lots of depends how dense and difficult the text is, and how many courses the student is assumed to be taking the same time.

But on the other hand, looking the bare page count, that's not much higher than the reading assignments we had when I was in high school (Finland, 00s), and there I was absolutely bored with the slow pace and had enough free time to read approx. 1 - 1.5 full-length / short-ish novels in a week. (edit. in retrospect, this feels like an overestimate, but I also read the Potters in less than 48 hours / one weekend when they were published, so maybe not.) Because the article mentions "professors", this is supposed to be about university level students: the selected few who actually are academic inclined and moreover, have chosen their field of study out of their free will. I have habit of reading books on my daily commute train trip, most recently Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow: I average around 4-5 pages per 20-30 minute trip. I'm mediocre student in internationally mediocre university, so I assume my mental faculties are not exceptionally high.

If there's is a problem of students simply not being able to find enough time to study (because they are working 2 jobs), this is an external problem which is not solved by changing curriculum but introducing financial support. If the problem is that students are not willing to find time to study preferring other activities, this is a problem solved by having different students.