Inspired by The Ghost Professor by Craig Miller
We innovate, automate, build, and connect at a faster rate than any other generation in history. But as The Ghost Professor says, the question that plagues each era is not where we are going, but what we lost while getting there.
In Craig Miller’s fantastical and introspective novel, Dr. Gordon “Gordie” Kingman, a statistician, educator, and accidental time traveler, travels across the 20th and 21st centuries, watching America evolve from typewriters to touchscreens. He is amazed by the niceties of contemporary life: instant messaging, boundless information, devices that think more quickly than humans ever could. But as he travels between decades, Gordie starts to see something disturbing. Each step forward appears to sacrifice meaning for expediency, wisdom for velocity.
When he returns to the 1960s for the first time, Gordie discovers a world full of music, argument, and the curiosity of human beings. People argue passionately in cafés, teachers spark in classrooms, and art is alive and defiant. Forward to 2025, and the same kind of spirit is less easily found. Arguments occur in comment threads, teaching is done to white screens, and the mind sharpened by thought is now numbed by distraction. As Gordie wryly observes, “We have become experts at processing data, but amateurs at understanding it.”
That is the paradox of progress: every technology designed to save us time somehow ends up taking it from us. We are immersed in intelligent devices, but they tend to make us feel dumber, outsourcing our memory, focus, and imagination to machines that know us better than we know ourselves. The cult of “productivity” has now become the new religion, and busyness its most admired virtue.
Gordie’s academic career is a microcosm of this contemporary affliction. What was once a place of discovery and guidance, higher education becomes a metrics-obsessed, evaluation-driven, efficiency-worshipping system. Professors are “content deliverers.” Students are statistics. Discovery is substituted by pressure to perform. In one of the most moving realizations of the novel, Gordie refers to himself as a “Ghost Professor,” there but invisible, lecturing to glow screens instead of flesh-and-blood faces.
But Miller’s message is not mocking. Underneath the wit and history, The Ghost Professor issues a cheerful challenge: to rethink progress not in terms of speed, but depth. Genuine intelligence, Gordie discovers, is less about access to information; it is about what we do with it. The tools we invent are neutral; it is the values we place upon them that lead them to illuminate or enslave us.
So are we wiser or merely busier? Maybe both, but without the other, it is empty. Growth only counts when it is for human development, not when it detracts from it. Reflecting in the twilight of his career, Gordie considers, “Maybe being smart is not knowing everything, it is remembering what is worth knowing.”
In a time when the noise of progress can drown out its meaning, The Ghost Professor encourages us to stop, look away from our screens, and raise the simplest, most provocative question of all: What, precisely, are we rushing toward?
