Email etc making professors less productive and less intelligent

[Extollager]

"Producing and organizing complex knowledge requires uninterrupted concentration — the more time you have to focus, the better the work you produce. Switching from Task A (say, preparing a course lecture) to Task B (say, responding to “urgent” emails) can significantly reduce your cognitive capacity — essentially making you artificially dumber. Professors are increasingly buffeted by a relentless tide of digital disruptions and onerous administrative demands. A classic sign of bureaucratic malaise is when efforts to keep an organization running begin to crowd out the work that the organization was formed to support in the first place. Higher education has fallen into this trap."

https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/is-email-making-professors-stupid

As a recently (2018) retired professor of English, I think there's some truth in this, but it's not alone in affecting university quality. The very strong pressure on administrators and professors to conform to identity politics &c also contributes to a decline in intellectual perspicacity -- which is a topic for discussion elsewhere. My point is that the email problem is only one factor involved in students getting less value for their time and money.

 

[Parson]

Thanks .... thought provoking .... I suspect that it sounds more true than it really is. "Deep thought" sounds to me a lot like Trump's "personal time" on his time sheet. Electronic mail is much easier to delete and/or ignore than people who drop into your office and rain trivial pursuits into your life; and the like.

 

[Danny McG]

This applies in other areas too.
A couple of years ago I had to physically transfer some high level radiation documents to a physics dept.
Three men who could have come directly from TBBT met me in an office with the big whiteboards covered in tech scrawl etc.

We chatted for a few minutes and I remarked how unusual there's no computer. I was shown a little cubby hole with one in ...this man said they took turns "most mornings" to skim each others emails and prioritize if needed.
They had a firewalled standalone computer for their main work .

He said they wasted far too much time otherwise, that was a policy they had set for themselves when they realised how much they were getting away from their real work

 

[hitmouse]

I get about 200 work emails per day, and these can easily stop me from doing anything else. I skim them and respond to the necessary between 8-9 am then switch it off for the day.