Joe Cruz joins Tavis Smiley
Joe Cruz, chair of the Philosophy Department and the Program on Cognitive Science at Williams College, sets the record straight on why he believes writing isn’t as important as we think.
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Speaker 1: It's D'Angelo on Tavis Smiley. I didn't realize until Miles
told me that it was a year ago today that
we lost D'Angelo. And if you were listening to our
program a year ago, you'll recall that we spent a
couple days reprising some of the best of my conversations
with D'Angelo. And it was my great honor to have
had the last in-depth conversation with D'Angelo in his career.
And I hadn't heard that conversation for years. And when
we dug into the vault to listen to it again,
to share it with you a year ago, today or tomorrow,
it just hit me in ways I can't even describe.
But it's been a year now since we have lost D'Angelo.
I'm praying for their son still because D'Angelo and Prior
to that, Angie Stone, they, as you know, share a child,
have a child together, had a child together. And so, anyway,
D'Angelo's on our mind today, a year later. Missed that brother,
but his stuff sounds as good as ever. And that's
the great thing about being an artist, man. Your creation
becomes your afterlife. And so he's gone, but we can
always celebrate the best of D'Angelo. And so there's that.
We're in hour two, and I'm glad you're with us.
In this hour, two conversations on the B-side. October, as
you well know, is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and so
it is time for our annual checkup and check-in with Dr.
Fumi Olopade out of Chicago. So we'll talk to her
on the backside of this hour about the progress in
breast cancer research and the challenges that remain. We'll do
that again on the B-side of this hour. We commence
this hour, as promised, in conversation with Williams College Professor
joe cruz about his provocative new york times guest editorial
titled i am a college professor and writing isn't as
important as we think uh it got my attention and
so here he is on this program professor uh good
to have you on the program how are you today sir.
Speaker 2: Tavis so nice to to be on the show it's
an honor to be on the show i'm a fan
of you and your work and uh My mother passed
away some years ago, but she loved your work too.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm honored to hear you say that. And thank
you for sharing that. And again, we're delighted to have
you on our program. So provocative piece. I love the title.
I'm a college professor. Writing isn't as important as we think.
All right, take it away. Unpack it for me and
I'll get in where I fit in.
Speaker 2: Thomas, do you think it would have gotten the reaction
if it was called the 10-page college essay? is not
as important as you think it is. I mean, everybody
would have just said, said, yeah.
Speaker 1: That's right. Exactly. Exactly. No, I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2: I love it. So my idea for this, for this
piece was the, the result of 30 years of teaching
at the college level and teaching writing courses in, in my,
my college's writing intensive program. And, and let me be,
let me just be clear from the outset. Of course,
I think writing is important for expression, for creativity, for
a certain kind of critical thought. Of course, I think
it's important. But I think that universities have placed it
in such a central way in the curriculum and on
the college syllabus that it's made us uncreative. about different possibilities,
different ways of cultivating thinking in our students. Because that's
what we're trying to do, right? I'm a philosophy professor.
I teach in the program in cognitive science. So I
do work on the empirical side of how thought works,
how mind works. And if what we're trying to do
is develop critical thought in our students, there are other
ways to do that than assigning a five or 10
page paper or 20 page end of semester term paper.
There are other ways to do that in our arsenal.
And we have to take those seriously And maybe I
would have kept going for the next 10 years of
my career, not thinking much about it and having my
syllabus look the same way that it always has. But
the emergence of artificial intelligence technologies and the ways that
they can play a role in people's work and writing
has made it so that we now, I think, are
obligated to think more carefully about what we're trying to
achieve and different ways to achieve what we're trying to achieve.
Speaker 1: Oh, this is going to be good. This is going
to be good. I like that, Joe Cruz. You got
me going now. I love the frame, and I can
interrogate him inside the frame. I'm looking forward to this
half hour. Joe Cruz on Tavis Smiley. Professor Joe Cruz,
chair of the philosophy department and the program on cognitive
science at Williams College, who has written a piece that
got everybody's attention in New York Times. guest essay called
I'm a College Professor. Writing isn't as important as we think.
As I said, got everybody's eyeballs on it and I'm
honored to have him on this program to unpack it.
Let me start with this. I want to just raise
this at the outset and we'll build on it. And
I'm not being flippant about asking this question. There are
reasons for why I'm asking it, but I don't have
time to unpack. But I'm wondering whether or not education
as we know it today is still about critical thought
is the, is the goal here is the end in
aim still to teach students how to be critical thinkers.
If I had the time, I could debate you on that.
I won't, I think you understand why I'm asking them.
Speaker 2: Hmm. I want to say that the answer to that
is yes, that the goal of education, I mean, it's
not the only goal, uh, or a goal of education,
and maybe a premier goal of education, is to prepare people,
prepare young people for, of course, entering the workforce, but
more seriously, more, I think, more to do with our
souls and our existence, entering the conversation of democracy, entering
the conversation of their communities, and being the kinds of
thinking people who can understand this world and its global
presentation and manifestation. That's what I think education needs to be.
Speaker 1: I asked that question in part because of the frame
that we find ourselves in in Trump 2.0 and the
assault and the attack. We spent a better part of
the first hour talking about the assault and attack that
black women are under by Donald Trump, the raid of
Ilhan Omar's house a couple of days ago. He calls
Letitia James in New York disgusting, called her a dog.
He's going after Lisa Cook, the black woman on the Fed.
And on and on and on the list goes of
black women who are in Donald Trump's crosshairs right about now.
So we talked about, again, the affront to them in
the first hour. But it's also the case that Donald
Trump has engaged in an affront on higher education in
this country. And that's part of what I was thinking
when I asked about what the goal is these days.
Because a lot of institutions are sort of bending the
knee in this moment. You take my point. I digress
for now.
Speaker 2: I do take your point. And I guess the only
thing I want to add to that is that I
think our only future, no matter what side of the
aisle you're on, our only future together in this world
is to have people who are willing to think together,
to have a conversation, to come together and work out
differences through giving reasons and taking reasons seriously from one another.
And that's what I'm hoping that happens at a place
like Williams, at places of higher education.
Speaker 1: Yep. So you suggested earlier, and I won't be as
eloquent in restating this as you were in laying it out,
but the point ultimately was that you believe that the
uber focus on writing makes us uncreative in many ways.
If I'm right about that, take some time and unpack.
Speaker 2: It for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, look, I'm not sure how many readers of the
opinion piece in the New York Times realize that at
a university or college in the USA right now, in
the humanities and many of the social sciences, basically the
only way a student's work gets assessed is for them
to go home, write a paper, turn that paper in,
and then get some comments back from the professor. I'm
not trying to throw my colleagues under the bus, but
that's the way we do it and have done it
in the philosophy department for all of my career. And
that's the way so many of my colleagues do it.
Maybe giving a little bit of class credit to class
discussion as part of the seminar, if it's a small seminar.
But if it's a bigger class, chances are the only
way that a student is going to have their progress
measured is through writing a paper. Last year, I decided
that I wasn't going to do it that way. I
was going to have a paper writing component. But after
the students wrote the paper, I was going to give
them an oral examination. And I have the privilege of
having small seminars at my college. So I had 14
students in that class. And every single student, they had
to write a paper and they had to come to
my office and face me for 45 minutes. face me
in answering questions about their work, demanding that they be creative,
that they be critical, that they be agile on their feet.
You know, if they started to give an answer that
I thought was going one way and needed to go another,
I stopped them. I said, you owe me more reasons
for this. You owe more creative thinking on this. And
what I found was that, seriously, half the students in
that exercise were more impressive more agile, more dexterous with
their thought in that face-to-face conversation, then you would have
gotten the impression from their papers. And the other half
of the students were able and capable and great. And
at no point did I feel like these were students
who had used AI to write their papers. They had
written their papers, but they were also able, when I
demanded it, to express themselves in a different way. And
I thought, this is developing a core set of skills
that we need to think about more carefully in higher education.
Speaker 1: So then if not writing, and you address this in
your piece, what are some of the, how am I
going to put this, higher cultivations of thought?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, again, I'm in a philosophy department, so your
listeners are going to be able to detect that pretty
readily that You know, I value a kind of Socratic
conversation in my seminar. What that means is that I
might come into the seminar with a few minutes of
material to frame the discussion and a few questions that
I want the students to think about. But I want
them to think about them live. I want them to
participate right there and then. Of course, my classroom has
a no screens policy. So there are no laptops. There's
no iPads, no phones out. I just want people together
to talking about hard issues that demand of them that
they step up. Nobody hides. I mean, I tell students
that if I call on them, they can take a
pass and say that they'll return to the discussion in
a moment, but nobody hides. We're having a conversation together,
and that kind of Socratic dialogue, that kind of debate,
the possibility for an oral presentation or an oral exam,
as I mentioned a moment ago, the possibility of bringing
students together and holding them to task and the responsibility
of their minds, of developing their minds. That suite of
possibilities is exciting to me, not least of all because
it answers to this moment. This moment is one where
college professors are surveilling their students by having them turn
in work where every keystroke is recorded so that they
didn't cheat. You know, college professors want their students to
do in-class assignments now so they can supervise them, right? Like,
you know, make sure I can see your hands during
this assignment so you're not checking your phone, right? College
professors are asking for rooms that are insulated from the internet,
no Wi-Fi in this room so that they can have...
Students work on some assignment. And this just seems to me, right,
this kind of surveillance, this kind of anxiety over the
authenticity of intellectual labor, it seems to me to deteriorate
what we're trying to do in the academy. And there
are other ways to get at that goal that I
think we all share.
Speaker 1: You're teeing up a conversation I want to have in
just a couple of minutes here, this notion of AI
as an existential threat to writing as we now know it.
Before I get to that, though, let me just tell
you a quick story here. I am now, what, 24,
25 books in in my own writing career. And I
suspect book two, three, and four and forward might never
have been written if I didn't get the response that
I got to the first book. And by response, I
don't mean it became a New York Times bestseller, although
I've had some since then. I'm talking about this. I
recall vividly, as if it were yesterday, Um, when I
wrote my very first book, the response I got from people,
because I was a published author. Oh my God, he's
an author. He's written a book. He's written a book.
Now I'm on TV and radio every day doing what
I do, you know, tried to have an impact, but
it was only when I wrote a book, they said,
oh my God, he's an author. And I, again, I
remember the response and how that made me feel. And
so here comes book two, three, four, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera. Which leads me to ask whether or not,
here's the question, is writing inherently elitist?
Speaker 2: Oh, wow. Okay. I love the question. I didn't see
that part of it coming. Mostly I wanted to say
that your work as a writer, your work as a
public intellectual, it has changed people's minds and views and views.
No doubt you're right that writing those first books and
having them be tangible. You're like, buy it at the bookstore.
And I mentioned my mother earlier. That's the kind of
thing that would move my mother for sure. And to
your question of whether writing is elitist, I'll say this.
I'm not sure that it's intrinsically elitist. I think we
have an obligation to... We educators have an obligation to
bring people to their best voice and to their best insight.
And writing is the most traditional, the most familiar, and yeah,
probably the most prestigious way of expression. And bringing students
to the point where they can publish a book or
publish an article is going to remain, I think, a
feather in anyone's cap. But I guess I worry that
holding people, holding all students to this one particular cognitive expression, writing,
that strikes me as missing an opportunity to do even
better by our pedagogical goals. Again, I think about the
students who, I think about that student who were it
not for the oral exam or were it not for
an opportunity to come to my office, knock on my
office door and say, Professor, I'm thinking these thoughts. I
haven't quite been able to write them down in the
way that gets me the A from you, I'm afraid.
But I'm thinking these thoughts. I'm thinking about that student
and thinking about the power that they take on as
they talk through their ideas and change their mind and
change their mind back. And if we don't reach out
to those students, then... maybe we're turning writing into this
filter that we don't intend it to be.
Speaker 1: I get it. And I appreciate the response. I'm looking
at my clock. I've got about three or four minutes
left here. And I'm enjoying this dialogue immensely, courtesy of
Joe Cruz, chair of the philosophy department and the program
on cognitive science at Williams College. So let me talk
about the AI right quick here. You write about this
again in your essay. I'm a college professor. Writing isn't
as important as we think. So here's the point, whether
it is as important as we think or not, what
is the threat of AI to writing as we now
know it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, there's the first layer of that question, which
is many, many professors are worried that students who are
under pressure from their other classes, students who who have
a lot of responsibilities that they're trying to juggle, students
who are just trying to get by, just get through,
given everything that we assign to them. Professors are worried
that shortcuts are going to be taken and that AI
tools are built to entice you into using their formulations, right?
Built to keep you going back to the AI tools.
for more and more insight and help if it's really insight.
But we don't know that, right? And so the first
layer of your question is, look, people are worried about
the inauthenticity of work at the college level and, of course,
even earlier. But I think the second layer of your
question is, what are we trying to do? We need
to ask ourselves, what are we trying to do when
we write? We're trying to find the best formulation of
our best thoughts one after another. And it takes memory
and it takes tenacity. It takes dedication. It takes revisiting
those thoughts and willingness to take back a little bit
and give some more. And if that effort is given
over to an AI tool, I think there's every chance that,
and the empirical literature, I think will bear this out.
There's every chance that young people will stop being able
to think carefully, to think critically, to engage in the
conversation that we need in our democracy. And so the,
you know, cheating is one thing and we can deal
with that, you know, in the ways that we've always
dealt with cheating at the university, but the real danger
is a kind of atrophy, a replacement of our capacity
for thought.
Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
Speaker 2: Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: It makes perfect sense. I wish I had time to
unpack that. I was just saying to some friends the
other day that while I rely on AI to help
me do certain things and running this, uh, Radio programming
running my business, the station that we run here in LA, KBLA.
I'm concerned, and I force myself sometimes to not use
AI to help me do certain things because I don't
want to. my skill set, whatever it might be, to atrophy.
And so I resonate with that comment in more ways
than you can imagine. I have not even done justice
to this article. We sort of scratched the surface. Let
me invite you to read it for yourself. It's at
the New York Times. You can find it. I'm a
college professor. Writing isn't as important as we think. Again,
check it out for yourself. And let me close, Professor Cruz,
by saying that your work and your witness, I can
hear it in this one conversation, your work and witness,
and I do mean it as a witness, is a
tribute to your precious mother who you raised earlier in
this conversation. It's been my great honor to have had
you on the program. Thank you for your time and
your insight, sir.
Speaker 2: Such a pleasure for me. Thank you, Tavis.
Speaker 1: More of Tavis Smiley when we come forward.