Story perspectives

Colleges Drop Book Assignments as Student Reading Plummets

7/11/2026

Summary

Story summary

Professors nationwide report that students read only a few pages, leading many courses to drop book assignments.
An Atlantic cover story cites a Harvard student who described a book as written in “Old English,” underscoring the literacy gap.
Colleges like Brown saw perfect take-home exam scores disappear on in-person finals, prompting calls to ban phones and assign whole books while warning that labeling deep reading as “white supremacy” endangers self-government.

History

Historical Context

In 1995 the NSF-net shutdown freed commercial use of the Internet, and CERN’s earlier release of the World Wide Web code, combined with Netscape’s Navigator, drove the dot-com boom, moving the Web from university labs to everyday life. The ensuing Web 2.0 era, with social-media platforms, shifted student reading from printed texts to screens, prompting universities such as Harvard to reconsider literacy curricula.

1 of 2

Story summary

Professors nationwide report that students read only a few pages, leading many courses to drop book assignments.
An Atlantic cover story cites a Harvard student who described a book as written in “Old English,” underscoring the literacy gap.
Colleges like Brown saw perfect take-home exam scores disappear on in-person finals, prompting calls to ban phones and assign whole books while warning that labeling deep reading as “white supremacy” endangers self-government.

1 / 2