This excerpt from Don DeLillo’s White Noise…

No, it’s from the Hartford Advocate, sent to UD by chris, a reader, and it’s an actual statement from an actual Trinity College student in which she notes that her efforts to focus on the murder of six million Jews are sometimes interrupted by previews of coming attractions.

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A history professor at Trinity says, “The laptop isolates you from your classmates. Your relationship in the class is no longer as part of a community.”

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The laptop works kind of like a burqa.

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Another Trinity professor also thinks laptops discourage discussion.

If you make a comment in class, you are very aware that others are paying attention to you. As a professor, I’ve accepted the fact that some people aren’t paying attention to me. But when a student takes a risk, it is important that they are taken seriously. If the other eyes are on a laptop, contributors are aware that people are not engaged with what they are saying.

It’s a subtle and important point. Let’s consider it more closely.

Offering comments in university classrooms takes a bit of nerve, because smart people in those rooms are taking what you say seriously.

But of course that’s exactly why you want to say things in a serious university classroom. The setting forces you to focus and reflect before you speak; the mere mental formulation of your idea or your objection or your question, the very preparation to speak, is a kind of education in honing your language, refining your point, thinking seriously.

Again, this is because you know that serious people are going to listen to you carefully and take what you say seriously.

These are people, after all, who have decided to spend weeks concentrating on the subject on which you are about to speak. Not only that, but in front of the room is a professor who has dedicated a good deal of her intellectual life to the same subject.

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The classroom theater is intense, highly lit. It is the supreme antithesis to Plato’s cave.

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It’s not a comfortable place to be, exposed out there in search of the truth. One reason the university has always been a profoundly idealized cultural location is that people instinctively respect the collective effort toward intellectual clarity and maturation.

You’re in the university classroom to be changed.

… For all the weighty material, [he] had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

… As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled.

Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reach across the aisle.

… But the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance. “For people who thought they were getting a doctrinal, rah-rah experience, it wasn’t that kind of class,” said D. Daniel Sokol, a former student who now teaches law at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

[He] chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change … [H]e liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones.

“I remember thinking, ‘You’re offending my liberal instincts,’ ” Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled…

Professor Obama, at the University of Chicago, relied on the fact that his students were engaged, willing to be unsettled, willing to risk responding to his provocations. … Why do you think Jose Bowen calls his movement the Teach Naked movement? At its best, in its essence, teaching has always been about exposure: Exposure of the thinking self, exposure of complex, contested truths.

Exposure over time, which is why a lot of PowerPoint use, with its Here it is, folks bullets, is bullshit. The classroom theater is narrative drama — You come back to that room again and again as, through slow and intense intellectual and social interaction, the deeper realities of the world reveal themselves.

Another Trinity professor gets it: “The kind of interactions that make a class dynamic get muted [with laptops]. Just keep typing, keep clicking, rather than … think on your feet or mull over an idea that a classmate or professor has just presented.”

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Does the classroom picture I’ve drawn describe every valuable and authentic university course? No. But it certainly describes the ideal of many university courses, no matter what the subject.

University courses are teaching you how to think about anything, not merely how to think about their particular subject matter. Professors are modeling the disciplined and unimpeded and active use of reason generally.

Listen to what the Trinity professors are trying to tell you.

“Sitting in a room with people to talk about ideas is a very precious experience. Once people graduate, they won’t necessarily have this experience on a daily basis.”