Joe Cruz is the chairman of the philosophy department at Williams College, a private liberal arts school in Massachusetts (tuition $76,000, housing $9,830, meal plan $9,490, value minimal). In late September, Cruz wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that we are “mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought.” The evidence for this is, Cruz claims, “thin at best.” The notion that writing is the best way of developing thought is, he thinks, a “fairly recent idea,” dating to the “teach-across-the-curriculum movement” of the 1970s. Instead, we should speak to one another.

There are times when the fish passes us the 12-gauge as it climbs into the barrel. Before we blast Cruz in the fins, we should acknowledge that, historically speaking, he has a point. It is a point that Socrates made when reciting an Egyptian myth about the origins of “the letters.” The bird-god Theuth tells Thamos, the demigod king of Thebes, that literacy is “an elixir of memory and wisdom.” Thamos replies that it creates “forgetfulness” by slackening the memory and false wisdom, because the “ignorant” will read “without instruction.”