“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor of great books and humanities at Pepperdine University, said. “It’s an inability to read sentences.”
That line lands less like an insult than a diagnosis. In classrooms built around the quiet assumption that students can sit with words long enough to extract meaning, some faculty now describe a more basic problem: not disagreement with a text, but a failure to get traction on the page at all. The result is a subtle redesign of college itself less a lowering of ambition than a scramble to rebuild the floor.
The cultural backdrop is stark. A YouGov survey found Americans aged 18 to 29 read 5.8 books in 2025 on average . In that same poll, 40% of Americans said they didn’t read a single book that year, and the typical respondent finished just two . Reading has not vanished; it has stratified, with a smaller set of heavy readers carrying most of the national total. For professors staring at incomplete annotations and untouched paperbacks, that polarization shows up as a widening gap inside the same seminar.
Faculty responses often look, from the outside, like “coddling,” but the adjustments are more technical than sentimental. Wilson has described reading passages aloud, moving line by line, and returning to the same short work repeatedly so students can practice comprehension in real time. She has framed the shift as method, not mercy: “I’m not trying to lower my standards,” she said. “I just have to have different pedagogical approaches to accomplish the same goal.”
Timothy O’Malley, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, has pointed to a change in what students do when they do not read. Earlier in his career, assigning 25 to 40 pages per class produced a familiar range of outcomes prepared students, underprepared students, and students who admitted it. Now, he said, many students “often don’t know what to do” with that volume, and some default to AI-generated summaries, collecting answers without building the mental stamina that reading requires. In the UK, a report commissioned by Oxford University Press found 80% of students ages 13 to 18 regularly used AI for schoolwork , and 62% said it had negatively affected their skills an unusually candid admission that convenience can hollow out competence.
Some professors describe the problem as less defiance than fragility: a lack of confidence, a low tolerance for dense prose, and a habit of scanning for extractable facts. O’Malley traces part of that formation to years of standardized testing, which can reward speed and retrieval over lingering with ambiguity. Brad East, a theology professor at Abilene Christian University, has said he cares less about stress-heavy exams than whether students learn, adjusting assignments in light of generative AI to force genuine thinking rather than outsourced summaries.
One small counterpoint sits in plain sight: young readers do gather, loudly, online. Scholarship on BookTok describes it as a “vast digital book club,” with the hashtag #BookTok surpassing 200 billion views. That scale suggests attention still exists just redistributed into shorter, more social forms of engagement. The difficulty for colleges is that liking books in public is not the same as reading them in private, and “community” built on clips does not automatically translate into the slower empathy that sustained reading can cultivate.
Wilson has linked the decline to more than grades or employability. In her view, reading trains people to inhabit another mind, and a society that stops doing it together risks trading shared interior life for isolation. “I think losing that polarization, anxiety, loneliness, a lack of friendship, all of these things happen when you don’t have a society that reads together,” she said.
