> I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes

Unimaginable to not have the lecture slides ahead of time so that I don't have to spend the whole time copying.

> Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.”

So what? Are you paying them or the other way around? Maybe your lectures aren't that interesting.

> The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

> One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us

You sound condescending and not very interesting. How much original thinking do you bring?

Taking a look at your blog, the vibes are off and I find most of the writing uninspired, borderline cringey. Also, is it important that you're a "tenured philosophy professor with an Ivy League PhD" or should your ideas stand on their own?

https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-old-m...

"While I am a lesser son of great sires, I am descended from kings." meh..

Do you think that Roderick Chisholm would have the same issues
with student engagement, and would he react in the same way you are?

It takes a special type of person to bring the ideas to life and not everyone is meant to be a lecturer/teacher. I would love to watch a few of your lectures so I can put myself in your students' shoes.

I spent a huge amount of college "in my goon cave" and absent from lectures. There are many reasons why students do this, and it's not your job to judge them. I didn't figure out what I was really interested in for basically the entirety of college. Once I figured it out, graduate school was the complete opposite experience.

imho the point of college is not to take in information, but to i) figure out what you're interested in and ii) make life-long friendship and connections. Information is widely available online for once you know what you're interested in.

Your attitude is like you're the keeper of secret knowledge and the kids need to attend your lectures and read your book in order to access it. Maybe the kids already figured out that you're not providing any more knowledge than they have access to outside of class, and if class is not engaging then bother attending?

A major problem in college is that you can't know ahead of time if the class/professor is going to be interesting, and the engaging advanced classes are locked behind required intro classes. Kind of like a RPG game where you can't know what the advanced skills are without tech-ing into the basic skills, except in real life you can't re-spec and make a new character as easily.

While you're probably right about the overall trend of intellectual curiosity, you might be part of the problem. We're not getting rid of phones and laptops.

Instead of trying to fight tech, one solution would be to allow any student to drop-in on any class in progress (in real-time and or accessing past class recordings) which would let them decide if they want to invest in the taking the boring beginner required classes.