On a professor’s case against writing, the written replies beneath it, and what Socrates actually objected to
Socrates said written words couldn’t answer questions. Under an essay repeating his complaint, readers answered by the hundreds, and the author answered them. Now there is a machine that answers anything, and Socrates had another objection it doesn’t meet.
On September 29 The New York Times published a guest essay by Joe Cruz, who chairs the philosophy department at Williams College, under the headline “I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think.” Halfway through, he turns to Plato. In the Phaedrus, Cruz writes, Socrates holds that writing “cannot speak, answer questions or come to its own defense.” Perhaps, Cruz suggests, Socrates was right, and we think best by speaking, answering and defending our ideas in person.
Beneath the essay, readers wrote back. By the next day the thread held about 1,200 comments. They asked him questions. They answered each other. They pressed him on his evidence, on the size of his seminar, on the research he had linked. And the author answered, in writing. His first reply began with a thread he “didn’t have room to pursue in the essay.”
None of this proves Socrates wrong, and it doesn’t prove Cruz wrong either. His case rests on an oral exam, and the thread says nothing about oral exams. But it raises a question the essay never asks. If writing can answer back, what was Socrates objecting to? And what do we have now, when there is a machine that will answer anything put to it, at once, in writing?
I
What Socrates Said
Late in the Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story set in Egypt. The god Theuth, inventor of letters among much else, brings his arts to the king, Thamus, and praises writing above the rest: it will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memories. The king isn’t persuaded. “The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence,” he answers. Those who learn from it “will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” They will be tiresome company, “having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Socrates then adds his own complaint, and it’s the one Cruz borrows. Writing is like painting. Its figures look alive, “and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.” Once written down, words “are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them,” and when they’re attacked, “they cannot protect or defend themselves.”
So there are three objections, not one. Written words stay silent when questioned. They drift away from their author to any reader at all. And they give their students the look of knowledge without the substance. Cruz’s essay rests on the first. The other two go unmentioned.
A paper can’t be asked a follow-up question, and a student sitting in front of an examiner can. That is Cruz’s real evidence: a forty-five-minute oral exam, pressing on claims each student had put in writing with a machine’s help. It’s a better test of understanding than the finished paper was. The retort that came back most often, that he made his argument against writing in writing, is cheap. Plato wrote the Phaedrus, and Cruz grants that writing has a lasting job: it “summarizes and compresses our thoughts.” He is also right, and unusually candid for a professor, about why universities love the essay. It can be carried home, read in pieces, graded in batches and cited if a grade is disputed. None of that has much to do with thinking. His history holds up as well. The idea that we discover what we think by writing it does trace to James Britton, who put it forward in 1980. One commenter disputes his description of a study he links, which could not be checked here.
II
The Half That Did Worse
Cruz’s most striking result is that “at least half of the class was more agile” in the oral exam than on the page. The reply that drew the most recommendations, from a reader signing as M Bk in Brooklyn (555 when the thread was captured), turned the sentence over: “that means half wasn’t.” The arithmetic is exact. If at least half the class did better aloud, as many as half did not. Some of those students, the reply went on, think better with the time and solitude that writing affords, and for others an oral argument can be its own kind of refuge, a way to avoid the slow sorting a page demands.
Readers in the thread described themselves. Some said they were shy. Some said they can’t compose aloud at all but write well. Some described conditions that make speaking on demand harder than writing. And a reader signing as KWP, in Arizona, retired from teaching at a large state university where junior and senior courses often ran past a hundred students, said that however much he encouraged discussion, some students never spoke, and writing short papers was “the only way I could hear their voices.” A seminar isn’t made fair simply by being spoken. It rewards whoever finds speech easiest in a room, and that isn’t the same group as whoever thinks best.
It’s worth noticing where that testimony was given. The readers who said they can’t think aloud on demand said so in a medium that let them take their time, and they were heard in it by more people than any seminar holds. A reader who would have sat silent through a discussion could write two careful sentences, reread them and post them, and find them recommended by strangers. The thread wasn’t a seminar, and nothing in it proves how any of those readers would have fared in Cruz’s room. But the quiet half didn’t have to be imagined. It described itself, at length and in its own words, in the one form of answering the op-ed proposed to set aside.
The professions that rely most on spoken examination have had to deal with this. In 1975 R. M. Harden and three colleagues described a new format for testing medical students, the objective structured clinical examination. It was designed, they wrote, “to avoid many of the disadvantages of the traditional clinical examination,” and to be “more objective.” That paper concerns clinical exams in medicine, not seminars in philosophy, and it shouldn’t be made to say more. It does show that a field built on spoken examination found reasons to structure it.
There’s another way to read Cruz’s result, and it takes his evidence more seriously than his conclusion does. His students didn’t arrive at the oral exam empty-handed. Each had already produced a written argument, with whatever help his guidelines allowed, and had turned it in to be examined. Cruz reads their fluency aloud as proof that writing was never where the thinking was. It could just as well be proof of the opposite: that the paper, however it was made, gave each student something definite to defend, and the exam measured how well they had come to know it. A student who has fixed a claim on a page, seen it in order and been told it will be pressed walks in with a map. The oral exam may be testing what the writing built. Nothing in one semester’s results can decide between the two readings, and Cruz doesn’t claim they can. The second asks nothing of him except that the forty-five minutes be credited to the paper as well as to the talk.
Cruz’s evidence is one class, last semester, at Williams. He says as much himself: there will be challenges of scale, and not every institution can adapt. The question his half raises isn’t whether the oral exam works for the students who shone in it. It’s what happens to the ones who didn’t, when the page, the one place they could be heard, is the thing being set aside.
III
The Thesis That Improved
Cruz’s first reply in the thread went further than his essay had. Writing, he wrote, “is itself a technology for cognitive offloading.” It lets us keep memory, attention and concentration out in the world rather than in our heads, which is enormously useful but may mean we exercise some capacities less. He suspected that “ease of assessment is a major driver” of the humanities’ reliance on it. Then he asked a question the op-ed hadn’t: “What kinds of thinking should we be willing to offload,” and which do we want students to keep practicing for themselves?
That’s a better question than the one his essay asks. “Writing isn’t as important as we think” invites an argument about ranking, speech against the page. His reply’s question is about trade-offs, and it applies as much to the machine as to the pen. It’s also the question his readers took hardest. Several objected that writing doesn’t offload thought at all, it builds it. The objection has a well-known ancestor in Walter Ong’s 1986 essay, whose title makes a stronger claim still: “Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” One reader brought it into the thread. Another, signing as gnowxela, in New York, put it in a sentence of his own: “Text gives complex abstract webs of ideas visible manipulable form.”
Cruz answered him. Our cognitive technologies, he wrote, are likely to have both expected and unanticipated consequences. And he agreed: writing is “no small thing,” and may be “on the short list of profound ways” we have increased our ability to handle abstraction. What he’d meant, he said, was that other paths run alongside it and deserve a reckoning.
Set his headline beside that sentence. In the op-ed, writing isn’t as important as we think. A few hours of written questioning later, it’s on the short list of the most profound tools the species has for thinking in abstractions, and the argument has become one about what else should be practiced alongside it. That’s a thesis getting better under questioning, which is exactly what Cruz says conversation is for. He deserves full credit for it. He read the objections, answered them in his own name, and gave ground where the ground was theirs. His reply was itself a second pass: the argument of the op-ed, read back as if someone else had written it, and answered. It is the thing he asks his students to give up, done well and in public. Most authors of guest essays do none of these things. But the conversation that improved his argument was conducted in writing. It could be reread before it was answered, and quoted back at the writer. It could wait for his reply without losing a word, and it’s still there for anyone to check what he conceded.
The page has failures of its own, and the thread had them too. Once a quotation starts to travel, nobody is present to vouch for it, and the replies that arrive early and sound sure gather the recommendations that decide what later readers see first.
IV
The Second Pass
Cruz’s proposal deserves to be stated in his terms. He wants a university in which ideas are expressed in real time, and thought unfolds as debate, oral defense or group discussion. He asks for courage on both sides: from faculty, to demand “active, participatory mastery,” and from students, to “abandon the safe recursion of revision.”
That phrase is where his argument and this essay part most sharply. In Cruz’s account, revision is a refuge: the second pass lets a student hide behind a polished page. What he wants instead is thought that happens once, in the room, under pressure. There’s a real gain in that. A student who can’t revise can’t pretend, and the examiner sees the mind at work rather than its best draft.
But the second pass is also where a thinker finds out that the first was wrong. Revision is the one moment a writer is asked to read what she has made as if someone else had made it, and to answer it. It’s slower than debate and less exciting than defense, and nobody is watching. It is also, whatever else it is, a form of taking something back.
V
The Partner Who Recants
The chatbot answers. Ask it a question and it doesn’t keep a solemn silence. It will answer for as long as you keep asking. On Socrates’ first objection, the one Cruz relied on, the machine passes. The third objection is harder. Thamus warned of students who “will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.” A fluent answer isn’t knowledge. On a bad day, that describes a student who performs well in an oral exam as much as it describes a machine. A reader signing as Alain, a physician who teaches residents in Manizales, Colombia, put the difficulty in one sentence: “an AI that tends to agree with its user is not a Socratic partner.”
The Phaedrus shows what a Socratic partner does, and it isn’t simply disagreeing. Phaedrus arrives in love with a speech by Lysias arguing that a boy should favor a man who doesn’t love him over one who does. Pressed to do better, Socrates takes the same side and makes a speech of his own. He covers his head to do it: “I will veil my face and gallop through the discourse as fast as I can, for if I see you I shall feel ashamed.” When he finishes, Phaedrus wants the other half, a matching speech on the advantages of the non-lover: “I thought that you were only half-way.” Socrates declines, says there has been enough of both, and gets up to cross the river home. Then comes the moment the dialogue turns on. “As I was about to cross the stream the usual sign was given to me,—that sign which always forbids, but never bids.” He turns back and calls what he has just said foolish, “to a certain extent, impious.” Then he recants: “I will be wiser than either Stesichorus or Homer, in that I am going to make my recantation.”
Nobody argued him out of it. His listener wanted more of the same. The check came after the work was done, when he was already on his way home, and it came from inside him, unasked. That’s the answer the thread couldn’t give Cruz and the machine doesn’t give anyone. It’s often absent in a student with a deadline too. It’s the answer a mind gives to itself against what it has just produced. A machine that replies is new. A machine that could stop itself at the stream would be something else again. Whether one can be built, and whether any student would choose the one that did, the dialogue doesn’t say.
⁂
Joe Cruz’s guest essay, “I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think,” appeared in The New York Times on 29 September 2026; his replies are quoted as he published them in the comments beneath it. The comment thread was captured on 30 September 2026, and the comment total and recommendation counts given here are as they stood then. Readers who commented are identified only by the handle and place they gave, quoted briefly and only for their own arguments; no one is quoted in order to be corrected. One reader disputes Cruz’s description of a study his essay links; the study could not be recovered for checking. Plato’s Phaedrus is quoted in Benjamin Jowett’s translation, and every quotation from it was confirmed in at least two online texts of that translation (Monadnock, the University of Northern Iowa’s reading text, williamwolff.org and Plato in Depth). R. M. Harden, M. Stevenson, W. W. Downie and G. M. Wilson, “Assessment of clinical competence using objective structured examination,” British Medical Journal (22 February 1975), is quoted from its abstract via PubMed Central. Walter J. Ong’s “Writing Is a Technology that Restructures Thought” was published in 1986; James Britton’s “Shaping at the Point of Utterance” in 1980. The header and interior images were generated with Gemini for this essay; neither is a historical illustration or depicts any real person. Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary editing by Claude Opus 5; copy editing by Gemini.