The ending in particular:

The task of the university in our digitally mediated world is more vast than collecting, commenting, and editing, and there are many other ways to conduct data analysis or learn how to navigate information online. But reading and writing are now unremitting. In earlier generations, small groups of people wrote letters, constantly. This is, in fact, a topic of study among humanities scholars. In our time, everyone is constantly reading and writing—through email, Facebook, TikTok, X, Instagram, and so on. We are caught up in a semiotic exchange. Media literacy is a learning outcome in many schools. Universities have a unique responsibility and capacity for teaching the kinds of thinking that will deepen and transform widely accessible information.

One of the new tasks for the humanities, specifically, is to revise and recast our traditions of scholarship for this new context. If you’ll forgive the pun, we should take a page from the humanists. We need to design new protocols to engage our students’ insatiable desire to read and write in these new environments so they will learn how to reflect and search for new knowledge. The challenge is speed. The current reading pace is fast—even though the time it takes a person to read a whole text might be quite long because they’re constantly jumping to other windows, following chains of connection away from the original text.

The kind of reading and thinking and writing that scholars pursue takes time. Perhaps, in part, what university education needs to do is slow reading and writing down. We now have rapid access to sources—which means we have more time for thinking and questioning. But having more time for reflection, rereading, revising, and rewriting is in tension with current views on efficiency and productivity. Going slowly might yield greater long-term benefits. Fostering habits of reflection, exploration, and discernment that lead to more valuable comments—this is a task for the university.