Sure, it gets lost and crumpled, and it kills vast swaths of forest with each year’s batch of senior theses. Sure, it costs money to print things and money to buy notebooks. And God knows we don’t need to spend any more on textbooks than we already do. But I'm hesitant to abandon the age-old tradition of chopping plants into thin sheets and scratching out symbols on them. After all, there are some distinct disadvantages to abandoning everyone’s favorite (or least favorite) bleached tree product.