Christopher Nolan’s "The Odyssey" opened this summer to sellout crowds. Whatever one thinks of the film, its ubiquity testifies to the enduring power of great stories. 

Nearly 3,000 years later, we are still thinking about Homer, author of the poem that inspired the movie. The story's themes – truth and cunning, hospitality and its lack, wandering and longing for home – these are ideas that get at the very heart of what it means to be human.

Even as we watched the latest rendering of one of humanity’s oldest stories capture public consciousness, an article in The Atlantic made waves nationwide with a title as bold as it was disconcerting: "The End of Reading Is Here."

As its central metaphor, the piece considers the fate of the Library of Alexandria. Long believed to have been destroyed by a single catastrophe, historians now suggest the Alexandrian library instead vanished over time due to gradual neglect.

Does declining literacy herald a new Dark Age?

Many fear that our own society is on the brink of a similar kind of loss. 

The article relays sobering statistics on declining literacy, arguing that while universal literacy was once thought a certainty, we appear to be entering a post-literateera, with an online headline suggesting “the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.” 

As a university president, my concern is with the........

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