Monthly Archive: October 2026

Joe Cruz, Chair and Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Cognitive Science at Williams College, writes that “we think best by speaking, answering and defending our ideas.” He points out that good teachers rarely, if ever, read lecture notes verbatim. Instead, they speak extemporaneously, engage students in discussion and debate, and guide students to mastery through practice and feedback. But he misses several important points.

First, Cruz minimizes the challenge of implementing the practice he recommends: 45-minute oral exams of each student in a course. He admits “there will be challenges of scale,” but he teaches at a college where the total enrollment is about 2300. The two introductory courses for biology majors at UConn enroll over 600 students per semester. That’s 450 hours of oral examinations per semester. If you wanted to schedule all of those exams in final exam week, that’s 9 hours a day for 10 examiners. If the examiners were graduate assistants, it would take 22 1/2 of them. They can’t work more than 20 hours per week.¹

Second, Daniel Drezner argues more effectively than I can that “writing is pretty damn important.” If you need to be convinced of that, click through to read his post on Substack. Cruz admits that “writing remains an essential life skill, and we will continue to do it,” but he underestimates how important it is and how important practice is to doing it well.

Third, Cruz seems to miss the point about “writing is thinking.”² John Warner puts it much better than I do:

One of my mantras about writing is that writing is thinking. Writing is simultaneously the expression and the exploration of an idea1. As we write, we are trying to capture an idea on the page, but in the act of that attempted capture, it’s likely (and even desirable) that the idea will change.

Writing your ideas down forces you to struggle with them. You can’t write a clear sentence or paragraph unless you understand, really understand what you’re writing about.

Fourth, discussion and debate involving people who genuinely seek knowledge enhances understanding because both sides see in real time where the holes in their arguments are. But discussion and debate also favor those who are quick on their feet. A faulty argument produced quickly and expressed confidently often prevails over a sound argument produced later.³ I worry about the weight quick responses get in discussions and debates. Would you rather listen to someone who responds quickly but is wrong or someone who responds slowly but rarely makes a mistake?

1. Our graduate students are unionized, and the 20 hours per week of assistantship duties is mandated by the contract, but it is also consistent with longstanding practice based on the federal requirement that international graduate assistants work no more than 20 hours per week. ↩
2. I say “seems to miss” rather than “misses” because Cruz is obviously very smart. I find it difficult to believe that he doesn’t understand the point I’m about to make, but his op-ed provides no evidence that he understands it. ↩
3. Or a sound argument that isn’t produced at all because the debate has moved on before the person with the sound argument had a chance to express it. I won’t claim that all of my arguments are sound, but anyone who’s been in a graduate seminar with me knows that I am often silent. It’s partly because I want students to take the lead, but it’s also because I don’t think quickly. Unless the subject is something I am already intimately familiar with and have well-formed opinions on, I am not likely to have an observation worth sharing before the discussion has moved in a direction that makes my observation relevant. ↩