Why University Students Can’t Read Anymore.

Functional Illiteracy, the Canon Wars, and the Quiet Collapse of Literary Education.

The Age of Functional Illiteracy

Functional illiteracy was once a social diagnosis, not an academic one. It referred to those who could technically read but could not follow an argument, sustain attention, or extract meaning from a text. It was never a term one expected to hear applied to universities. And yet it has begun to surface with increasing regularity in conversations among faculty themselves. Literature professors now admit—quietly in offices, more openly in essays—that many students cannot manage the kind of reading their disciplines presuppose. They can recognise words; they cannot inhabit a text.

The evidence is no longer anecdotal. University libraries report historic lows in book borrowing. National literacy assessments show long-term declines in adult reading proficiency. Commentators in The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times describe a generation for whom long-form reading has become almost foreign. A Victorian novel, once the ordinary fare of undergraduate study, now requires extraordinary accommodation. Even thirty pages of assigned reading can provoke anxiety, resentment, or open resistance.

It would be dishonest to ignore the role of the digital world in this transformation. Screens reward speed, fragmentation, and perpetual stimulation; sustained attention is neither required nor encouraged. But to lay the blame solely at the feet of technology is a convenient evasion. The crisis of reading within universities is not merely something that has happened to the academy. It is something the academy has, in significant measure, helped to produce.

The erosion of reading was prepared by intellectual shifts within the humanities themselves—shifts that began during the canon wars of the late twentieth century. Those battles were never only about which books should be taught. They were about whether literature possessed inherent value, whether reading required discipline, whether difficulty was formative or oppressive, and whether the humanities existed to shape students or merely to affirm them. In the decades that followed, entire traditions of reading were dismantled with remarkable confidence and astonishing speed.

The result is a moment of institutional irony. The very disciplines charged with preserving literary culture helped undermine the practices that made such culture possible. What we are witnessing now is not simply a failure of students to read, but the delayed consequence of ideas that taught generations of readers to approach texts with suspicion rather than attention, critique rather than encounter.

This essay is part of a larger project to trace that history, to explain how a war over the canon helped usher in an age in which reading itself is slipping from our grasp, and why the consequences of that war are now returning to the academy with unmistakable force.

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The Canon Wars: A Short Intellectual History

To understand the present state of literary studies, one must return to the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s—a conflict that reshaped the humanities with a speed and finality few recognised at the time. Although remembered now as a dispute about which books deserved a place on the syllabus, the canon wars were in truth a contest over the very meaning of literature and the purpose of a humanistic education.

In the decades after the Second World War, the curriculum in most Western universities still rested upon a broadly shared assumption: that certain works possessed enduring value, that they spoke across time, and that an educated person should grapple with them. This conviction, however imperfectly applied, formed the backbone of the humanities. It was also increasingly at odds with a new intellectual climate shaped by post-1968 radicalism, the rise of identity politics, and the importation of French theory.

By the early 1980s, tensions that had simmered beneath the surface erupted into public view. The most emblematic flashpoint came at Stanford University in 1987–88, when student demonstrators chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” in protest of the university’s required course on Western civilisation. The course was soon dismantled, replaced by a broader, more ideologically framed program. What happened at Stanford quickly reverberated across the country. Departments revised reading lists, restructured curricula, and abandoned long-standing core requirements.

On one side of the debate stood defenders of the canon—figures such as Harold Bloom, Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, and Roger Kimball—who argued that the great works formed a kind of civilisational inheritance. The canon, they insisted, was not a museum of privilege but a record of human striving, imagination, and achievement. On the other side were scholars like Edward Said, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, who contended that the canon reflected histories of exclusion and domination, and that expanding or dismantling it was a moral imperative.

But beneath these arguments lay a deeper philosophical rift. The defenders assumed that literature possessed intrinsic value, that texts could be read for their beauty, their insight, or their power. The critics, armed with concepts drawn from Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, argued that literature was inseparable from structures of power, that meaning was unstable, and that reading was less an act of discovery than an exposure of hidden ideological operations.

The canon wars ended not with a negotiated peace but with a decisive transformation. The traditional canon was not merely expanded; its authority was dissolved. And with it dissolved a set of shared assumptions about why we read at all.

How the Canon Collapsed: From Aesthetic Judgment to Power Analysis

The canon wars did not merely reorder reading lists; they transformed the very standards by which literature was understood and valued. What had once been read for moral complexity, imaginative power, or linguistic mastery increasingly came to be read for its complicity in systems of domination. Aesthetic judgment gave way to power analysis, and literature was reimagined less as an encounter with human experience than as evidence in an ideological case.

Several intellectual currents converged to produce this shift. The rise of French theory proved decisive. Michel Foucault’s claim that power saturates all cultural forms, Jacques Derrida’s destabilisation of meaning, and Roland Barthes’s declaration of the “death of the author” undermined the humanistic assumption that texts could disclose enduring insights into the human condition. Meaning was no longer something to be discovered through attentive reading; it was something to be exposed through critique.

At the same time, cultural studies expanded the definition of a “text” so radically that the privileged status of literature itself eroded. If novels, advertisements, and popular media could all be read in the same way, then the hierarchy of texts collapsed into a flat field of cultural artefacts, each equally available for ideological decoding. In this environment, aesthetic excellence became suspect—at best arbitrary, at worst a mask for exclusion.

This theoretical shift was reinforced by an increasingly moralised academic culture. Literature was judged less by what it demanded of the reader than by the identities it centered or marginalised. Texts were valued not for their capacity to enlarge perception or cultivate judgment, but for their alignment with prevailing political commitments. Difficult works often disappeared, either because they failed ideological scrutiny or because students, already drifting toward functional illiteracy, found them forbidding.

The result was a decisive change in how reading itself was taught. Where readers were once trained to approach a text with humility, they were now trained to approach it with suspicion. Interpretation became accusation; reading became a search for transgression. By the mid-1990s, the canon had not been overthrown so much as dissolved, its authority eroded by the slow acid of theory. What remained was not a broader canon, but a fundamentally altered understanding of what literature is and why it matters.

The Triumph of Postcolonial Theory

Of all the intellectual movements to emerge from the canon wars, none proved more decisive than postcolonial theory. What began as a legitimate effort to interrogate imperial history soon hardened into a moral and methodological orthodoxy that reshaped entire departments. Postcolonialism supplied both the vocabulary and the ethical authority to challenge the canon, offering what appeared to be an unimpeachable justification for its dismantling: liberation from Eurocentrism.

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) marked the turning point. Although not written as a direct attack on the canon, its critique of Western representations of the East quickly hardened into a general suspicion of Western literature itself. Canonical texts came to be read less as imaginative achievements than as instruments of domination. Subsequent theorists—most notably Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—extended this logic further. Reading was no longer an act of encounter, but an act of exposure; literature became evidence, and interpretation a form of moral adjudication.

This shift found its most influential expression in Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). In fewer than forty pages, Spivak advanced a claim that would shape postcolonial pedagogy for decades: that the most oppressed—especially women in colonial contexts—cannot speak within existing structures of representation, and that any attempt to recover their voices merely reinscribes power. The argument was sweeping, rhetorically powerful, and rapidly canonised.

Spivak grounded her thesis in the practice of sati, presenting a small and highly selective set of archival materials as proof that the “subaltern woman” appeared only as the mute object of competing patriarchies—what she famously summarized as “white men saving brown women from brown men.” Yet the historical record tells a far more complex story. My own research into nineteenth-century accounts of sati reveals women speaking with remarkable clarity and variety: articulating spiritual reasoning, resisting familial pressure, expressing doubt, negotiating circumstances, and in many cases openly opposing the practice. The archive does not confirm Spivak’s claim of silence; it contradicts it. What is more, the archive also preserves—though theory rarely acknowledges—moments of genuine intellectual and moral exchange between British officials and Indian women themselves: conversations about faith, duty, suffering, and choice. In these encounters, the woman is not silent, not ventriloquized, and not erased; she speaks about everything that theory insists she cannot.

This is not a minor scholarly disagreement but a methodological failure. The force of Spivak’s argument depends on an archive pruned to fit a theory rather than a theory tested against the archive. To sustain the claim that the subaltern cannot speak, the voices that do speak must be ignored. That pattern, where theoretical elegance overrides empirical fidelity, soon became characteristic of postcolonial pedagogy more broadly.

The consequences for reading were profound. Students were trained to distrust texts unless they confirmed a predetermined narrative of oppression. Primary sources ceased to be sites of discovery and became objects of correction. Once theory assumed sovereignty, reading itself became secondary. And when suspicion replaces attention as the primary interpretive posture, the slide toward functional illiteracy is not an accident, it is the logical outcome.

What We Lost and Where a New Renaissance May Yet Begin

This, then, is the great irony of the canon wars. Postcolonial theory promised to recover the voices of the colonised , yet too often replaced those voices with abstractions about structural silencing. Feminist theory vowed to amplify women’s experience, yet frequently reduced it to emblematic suffering within predetermined narratives. Postmodernism set itself against grand stories, only to become one of the most rigid grand stories of all. In each case, the stated aim was listening; in practice, listening was displaced by theory.

The long-term consequence of this displacement has now become unmistakable. If the canon wars fractured the intellectual foundations of literary study, the decades that followed revealed a harsher truth: the university is no longer the natural home of a reading culture. The habits that sustain literary life—attention, patience, reverence for difficulty, openness to being formed by what one reads—did not survive the institutional and theoretical transformations of the late twentieth century. And it is difficult to imagine that the same institutions which helped erode these habits will be the ones to restore them.

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that literary seriousness itself is finished. Outside the academy, one can discern the outlines of a quiet renaissance: a return to long-form thinking, close reading, and humanistic conversation taking place in independent spaces—online forums, reading groups, newsletters, and especially here on Substack. What is emerging is not a professionalized discipline but something older and more durable: literature as a way of forming the self.

This new culture is marked by a quality universities have largely forgotten: voluntary seriousness. Readers come not because a syllabus compels them, but because they sense that reading deepens attention, sharpens judgment, and enlarges the interior life. They come to literature not for credentials, but for orientation.

If a literary renaissance is possible—and I say this cautiously—it will not be institutional but personal. It will be built one reader at a time, in dispersed but connected communities, by writers willing to teach outside the academy and by readers willing to choose attention over distraction. My hope is that this Substack might serve, in some small way, as one of those gathering places: a space where reading is treated not as an ideological act, but as a serious and joyful encounter with the human voice.

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