It was a comforting idea. By mastering the past, we could control the future. Hit the books, boys!

His class offered lessons and analogies galore, and I gleaned something else from that march through time: History is a cavalcade of unintended consequences and uncontrollable forces. It's not so much one darn thing after another, but a string of Pandora's boxes unloosing the unexpected upon the world.

I recalled my old teacher's words last weekend while reading about the high-stakes "canon wars" that roiled academia a few decades ago. It was a brutal battle, journalist Rachel Donadio observed in The New York Times Book Review, as great minds argued over the nature of greatness. What books should students be told to read? What history should they be taught? What standard should be used in establishing the canon -- that unofficial list of great books and ideas that we should consider the summit of human achievement?

As I read Donadio's essay, I marveled not just at the high purpose of the combatants but also their hubris. Looking back at these wars, it's clear how their efforts to control ideas were thwarted by unintended consequences and swamped by forces far mightier than they. In retrospect, they seemed like a gaggle of Neros, fiddling while their literary house was burning.

Donadio's piece begins 20 years ago, when the late Allan Bloom published his best-selling assault on academia, "The Closing of the American Mind." Bloom, then a professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, decried efforts to replace works by literary icons that had long defined the intellectual gold standard (Plato, Chaucer, Shakespeare) with works by women, African-Americans and members of other marginalized groups. The result, Bloom argued, was not a flowering of knowledge, but a dumbing down of universities that had forsaken eternal truths for political correctness.

Most of Bloom's opponents granted that dead white males had much to say. But, they argued, students were more likely to connect with newer works that depicted a broader range of ideas and experiences from a variety of cultures.

"It's generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars," Donadio reports. "Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers. ... there has been a decided shift towards works of the present and recent past."

The canon wars involved a host of issues but at bottom a battle over authority: Which writers would we trust to understand the world? The conflict was part of the broader effort that took flight during the 1960s to re-evaluate almost every societal value.

Just as Americans pushed to make more room in our political and cultural life for blacks, women, gays and other excluded groups, many scholars worked to make their fields more inclusive. By expanding the range of voices encountered by their students, they hoped to help them think more critically about their society.

Unfortunately, these vigorous debates have, by and large, proved to be beside the point. As scholars battled over which voices would have authority, larger forces were working to diminish interest in literature and thereby weaken its power to illuminate the world.

The U.S. Department of Education reports that 1.6 percent of America's undergraduates majored in English during the 2003-2004 school year, while 20 percent majored in business. Broader studies have documented sharp drops in the number of Americans who read. A 2004 survey by the National Endowment of the Arts reported that only about half of Americans read any type of fiction, whether by Danielle Steel or Margaret Atwood. An Associated Press-Ipso poll released last month found that one in four American adults said they had not read a single book during the previous year.

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