No Glass on the Table

Students came back to Columbia College this September with printed books and pens. In Literature Humanities, phones stayed in bags. Laptops stayed home or shut inside backpacks. Some of the paperbacks were already creased. You could hear pages turn. For the length of each seminar, the only networked machine in the room was the human being across the table. The same rule now governs every section of Contemporary Civilization, the sophomore course that asks twenty-odd students at a time to argue about Plato and Du Bois face to face.

Continue reading → No Glass on the Table