Is Email Making Professors Stupid? – The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Is Email Making Professors Stupid?” is the Q posed by
https://www.Chronicle.com/interactives/is-email-making-professors-stupid . My A: YES. The article has a nice description of the problem with 24/7 connectivity: how the urgent but unimportant crowds out the important but non-urgent
QT:(((”
“Knuth does provide his mailing address at Stanford, and he asks that people send an old-fashioned letter if they need to contact him. His administrative assistant gathers these letters and presents them to Knuth in batches, getting urgent correspondence to him quickly, and putting everything else into a “buffer” that he reviews, on average, “one day every three months.”
Knuth’s approach to email prioritizes the long-term value of uninterrupted concentration over the short-term convenience of accessibility. Objectively speaking, this tradeoff makes sense, but it’s so foreign to most tenured and tenure-track professors that it can seem ludicrous — more parody than pragmatism. This is because in the modern academic environment professors act more like middle managers than monastics. A major factor driving this reality is the digital communication Knuth so carefully avoids. Faculty life now means contending with an unending stream of electronic missives, many of which come with an expectation of rapid reply.”
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