Dr. Cal Newport

And that takes a lot of concentration.

I mean I wrote this article once that got me a little bit of trouble.

Not trouble but mild trouble.

But it was called The Chronicle of Higher Education.

And the title they gave it was Email Making Professors Stupid, which wasn't my title.

You basically called every one of your colleagues stupid because we all check email.

The dean at the time did call me in for lunch.

But actually he was – here's the thing.

He was like, hey, this is real.

I agree with this.

But what I was arguing actually in that article essentially was what do we do at a university?

Partially what we're supposed to be doing is trying to teach what the life of the mind is and how that works.

And we've kind of forgotten that.

So we should maybe think about like at universities, we need to be explicitly not just teaching how to think, but also modeling the life of the mind at the highest level.

And so this idea that we just allow the professoriate to be drowned and

emails and tasks and be as distracted.

You know, it's the main war that every research professor has is how do I fight the admin overload until I become famous enough to get an assistant, right?

Like this is the big problem.

And I was making this proposal of universities should be these citadels of concentration.

I said, if you want to get the best academics in the world to university, just tell them, here's at the top of our contract, you will not be assigned an email address.