A couple of weeks ago, I learned that Marcel Cornis-Pop passed away at the age of 79. I had heard a while before this that he had been ill for some time.
Marcel, who often spelled his last name Cornis-Pope, I think because that’s closer to how it was pronounced in Romanian, was a long-time faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University who came to VCU in 1988, the same year I began work on my MFA in fiction writing. Back in the day, he was quite the influence and mentor.
Our paths actually overlapped before VCU, sort of. Marcel, along with his wife (I believe his children were born in the U.S.), came to America from Romania, first to the University of Northern Iowa in my hometown of Cedar Falls. I have a good friend who took a class or two from him while he was at UNI on Fulbright Scholar appointment. At the time, Romania was a Soviet satellite and one of the most repressive and brutal regimes in the Eastern Bloc, led by Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena. I don’t know if Marcel was ever imprisoned or threatened per se, but I do remember him talking about how he was involved in the underground publishing and distribution of books published by famous American authors. So I was always under the impression that, really, he had to leave Romania.
Marcel was my introduction to critical theory, I believe in my first semester at VCU. I don’t remember a lot of the details, but there are two things about that seminar that stand out for me still. First, Marcel was not all that interested in “covering” every theory and topic he had on his syllabus if the natural progression of the course took things in a different direction. Someone told me (it might have been my friend at UNI) that they had a class with him where Marcel and his students abandoned most of the planned readings and spent the entire semester analyzing the Henry James short story/novella “The Figure in the Carpet.” Second, the one school of thought/critical theory that he was not at all interested in teaching or entertaining in any serious way (at least way back when) was Marxism, probably for obvious reasons.
As an undergraduate English major at the University of Iowa in the mid-1980s, I had no direct exposure to literary/critical theory in any of my classes. I think that was fairly common then. I knew a couple of different people from Iowa who went off to PhD programs in English after undergrad and then bailed out early when they figured out that at the graduate level, it was no longer about reading and “appreciating” literature. I found the theory all quite fascinating, in no small part because of how Marcel introduced it to his students.
I took an independent study with Marcel, I think in my second year. I remember meeting with him about what this independent study would be about. I suggested a couple of different authors he rejected, and then I mentioned that I had read Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as an undergraduate, and I think I had also by that point read V. on my own. That piqued his interest. I said, “I am kind of interested to try to read Gravity’s Rainbow,” but…” and before I could even get out the rest of my sentence, that Gravity’s Rainbow might be way too much of a project to take on, Marcel said, “That, do that. I’ll do an independent study with you about Gravity’s Rainbow.”
That was the most intense self-study experience in close reading that I have ever had. For those unfamiliar: Gravity’s Rainbow is a 760-page novel that is perhaps best compared to books like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in that the complexity of it all is intentionally baffling. Sometimes it would take me a couple of days to read five or six pages of it, and without the help of the excellent book by Steven Weisenburger, A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel,I’m not sure I would have made it through. So an intense reading experience, and I did finish the book, though I don’t know if I could tell you now anything about what it was “about.” As I recall, I wrote an essay that focused on the trajectory of the V2 rocket; the book begins with the line “A screaming comes across the sky,” and it ends on the last page in a section called “Descent,” where “it was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death.”
Mostly though, I remember Marcel for various pieces of advice about academia at the time. I asked him his thoughts on whether or not I should go into a PhD program and what kind of program, something more like literary studies, or something like this new thing I was exposed to at VCU called “composition and rhetoric.” The main thing he advised, something I tell students now when they ask about graduate school, is to go as quickly as possible because there is no point in being a graduate student any longer than necessary. I perhaps took that to an extreme in my PhD (I finished in 3 years), but I still think he was right about that.
Marcel went on to a long and illustrious career at VCU: he was chair of the department in the early 2000s, was one of the founders of a PhD program in Media, Art, and Text, and I believe at one point he was a dean as well. I never thought about it when I knew him way back when (our paths crossed a couple of times after I left Richmond in 1993, at the MLA convention and only briefly), but he too was more or less at the beginning of his academic career in the US when we met.
Paul Bloom had a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education at the end of September that asked the question “Why Aren’t Professors Braver?” I was able to access it via archive.is, so if you, like me, like to read CHE once in a while but you don’t want to spend a stupid amount of money for a subscription…. This commentary is closely based on a post on Bloom’s Substack, “Why are so few professors troublemakers?”
Bloom is a psychology professor, formerly at Yale and presently at the University of Toronto, and, among other works, is the author of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion and also The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. I don’t know if his books make him “brave” or a “troublemaker” and everything I know about Bloom comes from this op-ed and whatever I could glean from a quick Google Search, but I get the impression that he is perhaps best known for making controversial and counter-intuitive arguments. And I don’t know a lot about the different schools of thought within the study of psychology, but Bloom is a rational psychologist, which “emphasizes philosophy, logic, and deductive reason as sources of insight into the principles that underlie the mind and that make experience possible.” That might explain why he’s “against” empathy.
It is an odd essay. For starters, there’s his fuzzy description of bravery. Referring to a study of faculty in psychology about taboo subjects and self-censorship, Bloom seems to be saying bravery means being “bold” enough to speak out, to be willing to discuss (in public, in classrooms, in scholarship) some of the “taboo” positions psychology professors avoid– for example, “transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” The other trait of the brave professor is to be a “troublemaker,” and his only example in this essay is Noam Chomsky. That sets the bar mighty high, both in terms of academic achievements and taking bold (and sometimes taboo and occasionally kind of crazy) political stances.
Rather than being brave, Bloom believes faculty are timid and mostly go-along to get-along. Why do faculty do this? According to Chomsky (as quoted by Bloom), it is because we all have been trained into conformity by rigorous educational and professional training which enabled us to get these positions in the first place. “Most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they’ve been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years.”
Bloom disagrees. “The explanation I like better,” he writes, “has to do with the nature of academe and the importance of not pissing people off” because of the potential career costs of offending our colleagues and because none of us wants to be disliked. So instead of “pissing people off,” we do things like sign political petitions we don’t agree with, don’t express an opinion on Israel-Gaza, hide our conservative views or other non-conforming opinions. Basically, keep your head down and do your work.
Of course, neither of them consider the possibility that faculty try not to piss people off because they don’t want to be rude and because at the end of the day, being a professor is a lot more similar to any other white collar job where one of the understood but unspoken qualifications is “plays well with others.” But I digress…
I don’t think Chomsky is exactly right, but there is no question that all faculty, regardless of discipline, spend years jumping through A LOT of hoops to get one of these jobs and then more hoops to get tenure. Plus a lot of faculty (though far from all) were the kind of students who begged for the gold stars and extra homework and who loved schooling so much they never left. That does create a “one of us” cult religion rule follower club feel to the profession, no question.
But Bloom is wrong, I think mainly because pissing people off is counterproductive and not brave. To me, bravery is the willingness to make a personal sacrifice for a greater good. Firefighters, police officers, military personnel are all easy and obvious examples, as are protesters who are at risk of being tear-gassed or arrested or worse. Refusing to sign a political petition I disagree with or being a troublemaker is not even close to being brave, and this is especially true for tenured faculty and even more especially true for tenured faculty at a university with a strong union located in a blueish/purple state.
I have been blogging here for decades, and while I suppose some people think I’m a troublemaking asshole, that’s not why I do it. I write here because I am looking for an audience, and also because every once in a while, a post will lead to something else, like my work a decade ago about MOOCs or some other publication. But none of this takes much bravery, especially at this stage of my career.
The same was true for Chomsky. Bloom implies Chomsky’s past arrests were a result of his outspoken politics, but as far as I can tell, he got arrested a couple of times in the late 60s/early 70s at protests against the Viet Nam war. I suspect a healthy percentage of college faculty around at that time also spent a few hours in jail for protesting the war, not to mention students back then. No, Chomsky spent about 50 years as a tenured professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the world and also as one of the most cited scholars ever. Maybe that counts as “troublemaking,” but being that successful is not brave.
And why should faculty be “brave,” anyway? Bloom wonders the same thing, briefly:
I really don’t know if professors are more timid than real-estate agents, accountants, nurses, and so on. If I’m right, our timidity arises from a fact about our profession — the career cost of offending even a small proportion of the people who are in power. But maybe this is also true for other jobs. If so, it’s a more general problem. Something is lost if real-estate agents, say, feel that they will be punished if they express their views on Israel-Gaza.
I sensed that the politics of the real-estate agent my wife and I hired last year to sell our previous house were generally similar to ours, though of course he never brought up his feelings about the Israel-Gaza war. That would have been quite odd. Similarly, especially when it comes to teaching, I think my students understand I’m a liberal college professor, but my specific beliefs about the taboo topics Bloom brought up earlier, about MAGA, about Palestine, etc., rarely come up. That’s partly because I don’t think it’s good teaching to dwell too much on my own political beliefs, but mostly because of the nature of the classes I teach. It’s a lot harder to avoid politics in fields like women’s studies, African-American studies, political science, a lot of literary fields, and so forth.
Anyway, Bloom argues that professors are different from real-estate agents or whatever because we are in the “truth business” and, with tenure, “we can’t be fired, no matter what we say and who we piss off.” Well, as we’ve seen recently with faculty all over the country being fired for posting something bad about the Charlie Kirk shooting, that’s not necessarily true. In fact, according to The Guardian, somewhere around 40 academics have been dismissed or punished in the U.S. for something they said about Kirk. Most of these punishments happened to faculty in states where they were already going after academic freedom, places like Texas, Florida, Indiana, and South Dakota. The academics who got in trouble– some of them tenured, some not– were trying to piss people off with social media posts claiming Kirk was a Nazi and a racist, that they were glad he was dead, and so forth.
I certainly do not think any of these people should have been disciplined or fired, and I also suspect that once these cases get to the courts, most of those fired will get their jobs back. That said, perhaps this is a case where how and when someone says something matters just as much as what they say. I wrote a post about Kirk and his killer in which I discussed how Kirk reminded me a lot of some of the guys I met in high school and college debate who were into it just for the chance to argue with others about anything, and how his shooter, Tyler Robinson, reminded me of some of the young men I see in college classes who have been radicalized by a weird underground world of internet/game/meme culture that is neither left or right wing in any conventional sense. I began that post with the completely uncontroversial opinion that no one deserves to be gunned down in cold blood on a college campus or anywhere else, including Kirk. I didn’t call Kirk a Nazi or a racist or a sexist; rather, I just shared a video clip of him doing what he did on college campuses and suggested readers make their own conclusions.
Now, that post (like 98% of the things I post here) didn’t find much of an audience– so far, it’s received less than 40 views here and about that many on Substack– but I also quite purposefully wrote that in a way as to not piss people off. Maybe Bloom thought that I should have been a lot more direct in calling out Kirk as an up and coming proto-fascist/Christian Nationalist leader dangerous to the future of American democracy. I didn’t do that because I was trying to make my points while still being professional and civil, and I am very aware how anything anyone posts anywhere online lives on well past the moment. Maybe that doesn’t make me brave, but it isn’t timid. Faculty who are timid don’t say anything.
I meant to post about this quite a while ago, but I got busy getting ready for the beginning of the semester, and then of course I got busy actually teaching, and then whammo, we’re starting the fifth week of the semester already. Flyin’ time.
I’m teaching a “special topics” class this semester called “Writing, Rhetoric, and AI,” and it’s a 400/500 level class– that is, both undergraduate (22) and graduate (3) students. The actual course is in Canvas and thus behind a firewall, but there is a website at rwai.stevendkrause.com. The website name– Rhetoric, Writing, and AI– should be Writing, Rhetoric, and AI, but it’s too complicated to change now. It’s the type of typo/error I was always looking for when working on MOOC stuff. Massive Open Online Courses? Massive Online Open Courses? Anyway…
The website is mainly for one of the three major projects for the class, the AI News & Updates Collaborative Annotated Bibliography Website and Report. I landed on using WordPress and running it on the server space where I’ve hosted this blog forever because it seemed like the least bad option. I wanted a space/platform where students could submit entries and I could approve and organize them, and I wanted it to be public. I thought about Substack, but I think that would have required all of my students to sign up for Substack, and while I like it, I didn’t want to force it on anyone. (I suggested a link to something on Substack to a friend/colleague of mine in the field, and this person said they wouldn’t have anything to do with that platform because of the “Nazi problem).”
So the body/”blog-like” part of that site is where students’ entries are published. I have the Syllabus and assignments on the page “Course Documents.” There are three major assignments for everyone and an additional assignment for the graduate students. The first essay project is a reflection essay based on a series of AI writing “experiments” we’re trying out. Then there’s that already mentioned annotated bibliography assignment, and finally a research essay project assignment.
We’re also doing plenty of reading and discussing of the readings, which I list here— at least so far. Because this is a class that is new and a crazily fast-moving target, I thought I’d plan the first part of the class first and then adjust for the second part of the semester, depending on what students are interested in researching/talking about. I know we’re going to talk about the environmental issues with AI, but beyond that, I’ll have to see what students think.
For the first half of the semester, we have mostly been reading/discussing AI and writing fairly directly– comp/rhet, pedagogy, creative writing, tech writing (and AI in the workplace), and so forth. It’s all been a mix of MSM, websites, along with a handful of academic articles.
The graduate students also need complete a book review project where they will each make a short video about a book they read about AI, and then also lead a discussion about their book.
I think things are going reasonably well, though one of the challenges of teaching online is sensing “the vibe,” if you will. Everyone seems friendly enough and engaged, so that is a good thing. I am surprised about two things with this group so far. First, most of these students “hate” AI– at least so far and before this course. That squares with my experiences in introducing AI things into a class called “Digital Writing” last fall, where almost all of them were “against” AI, especially when it came to writing. But I thought a course explicitly about AI’s connections to writing would attract more “pro” AI students than it (apparently) has.
Second, most of them have little experience with AI. Some have even said that this class was the first time they ever used AI at all. Now, maybe some of these students are kinda/sorta underestimating their experiences with AI; after all, there’s good evidence that most students who use AI don’t want to admit it, and also good evidence that the vast majority of students use AI at least occasionally.
Then again, these are almost all English major types. My first year writing classes are almost always composed entirely of students from majors not in the humanities. A lot of these students are not crazy about AI either, but that is definitely less true for the ones majoring in anything STEM or business-related.
Anyway, so far/so good– and it looks like I’m on the schedule to teach this course again next term. Probably. Stay tuned….
I don’t know if the world needs my “thoughts” about Charlie Kirk and the young man who has admitted to the murder, Tyler Robinson. But not knowing a lot has never stopped me from blogging/posting about something before, so…
Before I go any further, let me be crystal clear about two key points.
First, I am against anyone getting shot for speaking on a college campus– or just being anywhere. Cold-blooded murder is bad. I know, a bold position. Kirk didn’t deserve to be shot any more than the two high school kids in Colorado who were shot on the same day. Kirk did not deserve to die, just as the hundreds/thousands of people who are killed every year by confused young men like Robinson, and like the shooter at that high school in Colorado.
Second, I think the reason why the reaction from MAGA world and conservative media is so strong and emotional is because in those worlds, Kirk was a huge presence and friend. TPUSA was instrumental in Trump winning votes among college-aged men, and Kirk raised A LOT of money for Republican causes. He seemed to know every Republican member of Congress, but beyond that, Kirk was friends with lots of people on Fox News and in the right-wing podcasting world, of Don Jr., JD, and many others in that circle. By all accounts, Kirk was incredibly charismatic and personable. I’ve read or heard multiple accounts of people who knew him saying things like “I didn’t agree with him about anything, but I always felt like he listened to me and cared about me.” Obviously, I’m hoping this does not become a full-blown McCarthyist-like effort to “punish what (Trump and his advisers) alleged was a left-wing network that funds and incites violence,” and I don’t support Kirk’s politics in any possible way. But I understand why Kirk’s millions of social media followers are upset.
Obama gave a very good speech the other day where he spoke in part about the Kirk shooting and the dangers of political violence in this country, and the importance of not letting political disagreements turn into shootings. Here’s a quote from The Guardian’s story about this:
While he believed that Kirk’s ideas “were wrong”, Obama said that “doesn’t negate the fact that what happened was a tragedy and that I mourn for him and his family”. Denouncing political violence and mourning its victims “doesn’t mean we can’t have a debate about the ideas” that Kirk promoted, he added.
Exactly. So, with that out of the way:
I didn’t pay much attention to Kirk before he was gunned down, and obviously, we’re all still learning more about Robinson. But as I’m learning a lot more about both of these guys, I’m beginning to recognize both of the Kirk and Robinson “types” in other men I’ve met and known.
I have a better handle on the Kirk type because he reminds me a lot of guys I knew from debate. I was active in debate throughout high school, I dabbled in it a bit as a competitor in college, and I did a fair amount of coaching and judging of high school debate as a college student. Debate was for me (and for everyone I knew who was involved in it) my “sport,” and it was just as much about competing and winning as football or wrestling or gymnastics or any other sport you can think of. I went with my team to tournaments all over Iowa and the Midwest, where dozens of different schools competed for championships, trophies, and bragging rights. Just like football, there were some schools that had powerhouse debate programs, teams that would win most of the time. (FWIW, I did not go to such a school, and I was a pretty mediocre debater, too).
Debate teaches participants how to take any position and to “win” the argument, regardless of what that debater actually believes. In the style of debate I did, each team of two people would take the affirmative side of a resolution one round and the negative side the next. I’m simplifying this, but that meant that in one round, you might passionately argue that gun control was bad, and then, in the next round, passionately argue that gun control was good. It didn’t matter if you believed one position or another because it was all part of the game. In other words, competitive debate is not some kind of Platonic dialogue that leads to a philosophical truth any more or any less than the outcome of a football game conveys a “truth”. 1
Naturally, debate attracted people interested in arguing for fun and as a thought experiment, and also people interested in public speaking, research, politics, and so forth. It is no wonder that a lot of famous people in politics and the media had experience in competitive debate. Most of the debate kids I knew had (like me) left-leaning political beliefs, but I also knew staunch Reagan conservatives as well. A lot of these folks were great guys– fun to hang around with, smart, charming, great speakers– who treated their politics as part of the sport. Kirk would have fit right in with this group.
But debate– the academic kind, but also the Platonic kind as well– has rules, and it is more than only an argument. For one thing, you need evidence to support your points, and that required hours in the library researching.2 Being good at arguing was not enough.
There has been a lot of praise heaped on Kirk for his “debate skills” and willingness to engage with anyone anywhere and on any topic, notably on college campuses. But as far as I can tell, what Kirk was good at was not the kind of debate I did in school (because he doesn’t use evidence to make his points), nor was he good at a more idealistic/truth-seeking Platonic debate/dialogue (because there is no mutual exchange trying to learn some truth). Rather, Kirk was good at arguing with people. Or maybe more accurately, at people.
YouTube is awash with videos of Kirk doing his “ask me anything” bit on college campuses and in podcasts, but here’s a simple example of what I mean:
It’s entertaining, Kirk has his moments of charm and wit (well, if you overlook his sexist ideas about dating and his berating of most of the people who step up to the microphone), and he’s very quick on his feet. But this is just a trick. It is arguing, and being willing and able to argue about anything regardless of how you feel about it. Given that Kirk’s goal with the Professor Watchlist website was to intimidate and silence academic freedom, it’s hard for me to believe that Kirk was always that sincere about these performances being an “exchange of ideas.”
Now, while I feel like I knew some Kirk types in debate and also in college politics, I feel like I know less about his (alleged/presumed) killer. But I do recognize the type in some of my late teen/early 20-something male students. Like Robinson– and also the guy who shot a couple of high school kids on the same day as Kirk’s murder in Colorado, the shooter behind the killing/injuring of Minnesota legislators, the guy who fire-bombed Josh Shapiro’s house in Pennsylvania, on and on and so forth–these are men who have been sucked into a baffling mix of shady internet discussion groups, Discord/gaming communities, the “manosphere,” crypto or other get rich schemes, conspiracy theory sites, fringe political and extremist group sites, etc.
I’ve never had a student about whom I thought, “hey, this guy could be a shooter,” and I’ve never felt like I needed to refer one of these students to the support services at EMU as someone who needed “help.” But some of the young men in my classes, sitting in the back of the room in first year composition with baseball hats pulled down over their foreheads and staring at some kind of screen, some of these young men espouse some of the sort of strange theories and confusing politics that are an emerging story about Robinson, and I think these students inhabit some of the same kinds of online spaces as Robinson. The Robinson type represents the most extreme version of the crisis among young men I’ve been reading about for the last year or so, and 99.99% of these confused young men are not dangerous. But the problem iof troubled and struggling young men in this country is real.
Kirk’s supporters in MAGA world are convinced Robinson and similar shooters are motivated by dangerous leftist ideologies. Kirk’s critics and many on the left argue that political violence in this country is mostly coming from right wing ideologues. My gut feeling is Robinson and his type aren’t motivated by left/right Democrat/Republican politics as we commonly understand them, but more by a messy stew of contradictory political views, internet memes and popular culture, gaming, and just overall “confusion,” for lack of a better way of putting it.
I have a hard time articulating the details of why I feel this way. Fortunately, I saw on the PBS News Hour an extremely helpful interview with Ryan Broderick, the primary writer of Garbage Day, which is “a Webby Award-winning newsletter about the internet and it comes out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.” He writes about all kinds of online culture, and man, he goes deep in places– a really interesting Substack site/newsletter. In this interview, Broderick explains in compelling detail what he sees as the likely meanings of the engravings Robinson made on the bullets that killed Kirk and that were recovered at the scene. Here’s an interview Broderick did with PBS News Hour on September 16 (the clip starts with the interview, which is about 10 minutes long, though this links to the entire episode).
If you are interested in the much longer and detailed version, I’d recommend the post on Garbage Day, “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme.” Again, Broderick goes deep and with compelling documentation, explaining different internet/game/meme culture connections invoked by the evidence Robinson left behind with the shooter at a New Zealand mosque in 2019, Luigi Mangione, and other similarly confused shooters. The detail defies summary, but if you want the very short/”what’s the point” argument, I’d say Broderick sums it up well in the concluding paragraph:
We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory. Another consequence of how thoroughly the internet has flattened pop culture, politics, and real-life violence. All of it now is just another meme you can participate in to go viral. Made even more confusing by a new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.
I think this is spot on: I don’t think these shooters were radicalized by leftist professors,3 and they aren’t especially motivated by right-wing politics either. I think Broderick is right that the online culture inspiring (if not creating) shooters like Robinson defies our normal polarized sense of left and right.
In that Guardian article I mentioned earlier, Obama said “we” (as in all of us, I think) want to identify a clear enemy, and “We’re going to suggest that somehow that enemy was at fault, and we are then going to use that as a rationale for trying to silence discussion around who we are as a country and what direction we should go … And that’s a mistake as well.”
Trump and the Republicans are making this mistake right now, though going after “liberal extremists” who disagree with Trump is also a move consistent with the other steps toward authoritarian rule he has taken (and with no resistance from other Republicans). But folks on the left are just as polarized. If the victim of this recent shooting had been a prominent left-wing activist, I guarantee Democrats would be sifting through clues to try to prove the shooter’s right-wing political motivations.
But make no mistake, our conventional assumptions about right/left or red/blue politics in this country are not going to answer the question of these shooters’ motivations, and it is not going to prevent the next shooting from one of these types of troubled young men. As a society, we should be striving for a way to save these young men from being consumed by this culture and turned into killers.
Unfortunately, there is no way Trump or anyone else in DC will do this, and as a result, more politicians, school children, and just innocent people minding their own business are going to be killed. That is a sad and frightening reality of our times.
I should note that my experiences in competitive debate are almost entirely limited to the 1980s– obviously, a long time ago. I don’t follow it anymore, but as I understand it, a lot of the strategies and approaches have changed in recent years. I think it’s still seen by participants as being more about a competition deciding winners and losers and less an actual exchange between people who hold different views, but I could be wrong about that. ↩︎
In fact, I think the main skill I took away from debate was actually not “public speaking” at all. Rather, it was my introduction to how to do library research, how to find quotes to support you points, and how to keep track of/cite all of that evidence. ↩︎
I wish I could indoctrinate students into left-leaning politics, but are you kidding? I can barely get them to read the syllabus. ↩︎
I think I first read someone bring up the “blue-book solution” for AI cheating shortly after ChatGPT exploded in fall 2022, but as I recall it, it was a joke. “Ha ha, now that AI can write as well as students, we’ll have to make them write by hand and while we’re watching. Ha ha!” My standard comment on social media to posts/articles about going back to handwritten and timed writing in the name of stopping cheating was “why not make them use a stone and chisel?” Ha ha.
Well, here we are three years in, and now blue-books really are a “solution” to AI. According to the Wall Street Journal,sales are up– way up. Earlier in August, Katie Day Good had an op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam,” and then at the end of August, Clay Shirky had an op-ed in The New York Times called “Students Hate Them. Universities Need Them. The Only Real Solution to the A.I. Cheating Crisis.” Both of these pieces make (mostly) serious arguments that the only way we can deal with/fight against AI cheating– a “crisis,” apparently– is to go back to the way we used to do these things. Way back.
Jeez.
Katie Day Good teaches at Calvin University in Grand Rapids and is “a media historian and cultural scholar of emerging technologies in education and everyday life.” A lot of her current work seems to be about “cultural movements to disconnect from digital technology and take a ‘digital sabbath,'” so maybe this return to handwriting is kind of in her research/scholarship lane.
But Shirky?!? Here’s a guy who became famous as a new media evangelist, who, in the book Here Comes Everybody, enthusiastically writes about crowd-sourcing everything and the joys of a world where content is both consumed and produced by users. His by-line describes his current job as “a vice provost at N.Y.U.” where he helps “faculty members and students adapt to digital tools.” This is the guy who is suggesting a return to blue-books and oral exams?!?
Jeez again.
Before I get more into the specifics of Good’s and Shirky’s essays, I want to bring up three “bigger picture” problems with blue-books and similar calls to return to the 19th century, problems that don’t come up in either one of these essays. First, blue-books, along with oral exams and other face to face assessments, obviously won’t work for an online class, especially ones that are asynchronous. And roughly speaking, a little over half of all college students take at least one class online, and about a quarter of all college students only take classes online. So what is an online teacher to do, collect blue-books by snail mail?
Second, timed writing like this is bad pedagogy, and people in writing studies have known this forever. No one is an especially good writer when they are being timed and watched, not to mention with no opportunity for things like feedback from peers or revision. I think these exercises are more like filling out a form than writing, and honestly, a better solution is some kind short answer/multiple-choice exam.
Third, and my apologies for offending anyone who thinks that blue-books might be a good idea, this is just fucking lazy. Good and Shirky are suggesting it’s just too much work for a teacher to change the assignment in some way where it is either not effective to use AI or that leans into AI in specific and useful ways. Shirky dismisses doing this work thusly: “We cannot simply redesign our assignments to prevent lazy A.I. use. (We’ve tried.)” It’s just too hard to do anything differently! Instead, Good and Shirky are saying we should travel back in time and just keep pretending that there is no other possible way to change how we do things.
I saw a version of this same logic at the beginning of my career in the early 1990s when word processing and internet technologies were emerging. There were similar efforts then to restrict student access to things like spelling and grammar checkers, or banning students from using online sources. Teachers– especially English teachers, I think– do not like to change how they teach, even when what and how they teach is altered by technology. As a result, teachers often follow the lazier solution, which is to ban the technology. Thus blue-books.
Both Good and Shirky begin the same way all of these AI freak-out essays begin: we can’t trust students at all and every one of them cheats on everything, especially now that it is so easy with AI. Good writes the new capabilities of AI made her rethink the “take-home essays” she used to assign in favor of blue book exams, presumably (in part) because of the possibility of cheating. Shirky begins with a vague story about a philosophy professor he met with who said he simply could not get “several” of his students to stop cheating with AI.
“Take-home essays” (I think she means what I’d call a take-home essay exam) have always required teachers to trust that their students won’t cheat. After all, when the student is working “at home,” there is nothing to stop that student from getting help from others and the internet, or even to get someone else to complete the assignment for them. I don’t know if Good was ever concerned about her students cheating on their take-homes before AI (she doesn’t seem to have been worried), but she started using blue books based merely on the possibility of cheating with AI.
As for Shirky’s philosophy professor colleague: I don’t know what several of them used AI to cheat means (are we talking half the class? three students? what?), but to me, the solution is obvious: fail them. I am going to assume (perhaps wrongly) that this hypothetical professor Shirky cites has a policy that does not allow students to use AI, and I’m also going to assume that the professor explained this policy and the consequences of using AI, which (again, just guessing) was failure. So, what exactly is the problem? If it’s that easy for the professor to catch students cheating, why not just enforce your policy and fail those students?
My own approach has been to be very up-front with students about what I think is and isn’t cheating with AI (and the short version is it is cheating if the writer directly copies/pastes AI output into something that the writer said they wrote). If I think a student is cheating with AI– which, for me, is based on my admittedly not perfect sense of what a particular student’s writing “sounds like,” and the document history of their Google Doc— I talk to them about it. In the last year and a half or so, I have had a lot more students cheating than I did before AI, meaning I’ve had to have a lot more of those uncomfortable conversations with cheating students. I give them another chance to do the assignment right and almost all of them managed to turn things around and pass the class just fine. I had a couple of repeat cheaters last year and I failed them on the spot.
In a post on Substack where she was explaining why she’s using AI detection software, Anna Mills described a confrontation she had with a student who adamantly denied he cheated with AI even though Mills is almost certain he did. After all, students also know AI is difficult to detect. I get it, and it can be hard to prove AI cheating. I’m sure I’ve had students who have managed to get away with some AI that I would have counted as cheating had I known. But every time I have had that “I think you cheated” conversation with a student, be it with AI or old-fashioned plagiarism, that student has confessed, often in tears.
As I’ve said many MANY times before:
Most students do not want to cheat.
Students cheat when they are failing and they are desperate.
Students who cheat are not criminal masterminds and are easily caught.
All that said, it does depend on what exactly counts as cheating, and I don’t think it is cheating if students use AI as part of their process.
Good views this return to handwritten essays as a “balm for my tech-weary soul.” She goes on:
My students’ handwritten essays brim with their humanity. Each page conveys personality, craft, voice, and a “realness” that feels increasingly scarce in our screen-saturated, algorithmically-distorted information environment. As such, handwriting accomplishes something greater now than ever before in education: It restores a sense of trust to the student-teacher relationship that has been shaken by AI.
In the next paragraph, she also brings up some of the other beliefs in handwriting’s “authenticity,” that handwriting helps people make better connections in the brain than typing, that it results in better notes, etc. Well, right before Covid struck, I was researching laptop/cellphone bans in f2f classes and requiring students to take notes by hand. Long story short, the studies I’ve seen about comparing laptop notes with handwritten notes in classrooms– mostly quantitative/experimental methodologies coming out of Education/Psychology– strike me as flawed for all kinds of different reasons. And the claims about handwriting as a tool for judging one’s “authenticity” and identity and the like have been debunked by many researchers– I would recommend in particular the very readable and well-researched book by Tamara Thorton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. I also have my own baggage as someone with terrible handwriting, who remembers failing handwriting in the fourth grade, and also as someone who has typed everything I could type since I was in high school.
So for me, the idea that handwriting is “better” and that it is both possible and reasonable to make judgements about the writer based on their handwriting, that more of one’s humanity is revealed through handwriting– that’s all bullshit.
Shirky doesn’t seem to think that handwriting has the same kind of “Magic” that Good sees in her students’ writing, and he admits that a lot of students and faculty are skeptical of this change. But in the name of rigor and a “more relational model of higher education,” we must return to the way things were done, and he then proceeds to cherry-pick different speech and writing assignments all the way back to the 1300s. In the process, I think he indirectly describes a lot of the pedagogy common to small discussion classes like first year writing: requiring students to meet during office hours, entering into “Socratic dialogue or simple Q&A” with the class, and so forth.
“There is the problem of scale,” with old techniques like oral exams, Shirky admits. “With some lecture classes in the hundreds of students, in-class conversation is a nonstarter.” Well, wait a minute: maybe the past practices we need to return to are smaller classes. Perhaps one of the reasons why I am not that worried about AI cheating is that I feel like I actually do most of these things in the classes I teach now. My students end up doing a lot of writing— discussion posts to readings, scaffolded essays part of the research project, and drafts of work in progress— along with plenty of discussing as well.
So what if every class were no more than 25 students? That wouldn’t be logistically possible, and it wouldn’t be a complete solution to AI cheating either, of course. But it’s a start, and we’ve also known for a very long time that lecturing is also a terrible pedagogy.
I will say this: both end on a vaguely positive note, even if their optimism about the future does not strike me as particularly realistic. Good takes a lot of pleasure in this return to the past, connecting us back to Plato and education as “not a process of pouring knowledge into an empty soul, but as a ‘turning around’ of the soul in the direction of beauty and truth.” She sure seems to think that those blue-books and handwriting can accomplish a lot!
And after spending the rest of his op-ed saying there’s nothing to be done about AI except return to “technology free” classrooms, Shirky ends by predicting higher education will adapt. “Despite frequent pronouncements that college is doomed because students can now get an education from free online courses or TV or radio or the printing press, those revolutions never flattened us. Nor will A.I.” We’ll see. I want to believe Shirky is right, but….
367 days ago, I posted about my new school year resolutions and plans, something I’ve been doing fairly regularly (though not every year) forever. I can see this year’s resolutions are a sequel.
This is not to say that the “vibe” this school year is similar, at least I don’t think so. For one thing, I had some hope that Harris was going to win. But also, it’s a year later. Last November, Annette turned 60, and I will turn 60 in March 2026. When you turn 60, the company that handles our 401K-like retirement plan for folks in higher education and the like, TIAA, gets very excited and insists on meeting. I don’t think either of us are planning on retiring earlier than 65 (and probably 67), but just the fact that we met with the retirement plan people means it’s getting closer.
Plus, there’s the whole Trumpian-Fascistic government’s attack on higher education and anything involving DEI shitshow going on. As I wrote back in March, the nice thing about being at a place like EMU is we’re kind of “under the radar,” so to speak, and, unlike the big-time schools Trump is going after, we don’t get much money from the federal government. But the stink of it all still hangs in the air, and there are plenty of other worrying things happening at EMU. Rumor has it enrollment is down even more than administration has admitted. Rumor has it that buy-out offers to faculty might be getting better.
These things (combined with a summer where I travelled a lot and where I didn’t do too much school work) do make one think about exit strategies. That seems at odds with a resolution to do/improve in the coming year. But here we are.
So, how do this year’s resolutions match up with last year’s?
The first item was to wade deeper into AI in My Teaching–Much Deeper, and I did that. My first year writing classes research theme was “your career goals and AI,” and in fall 2024, I taught a class called “Digital Writing” where two of the assignments were all about AI. I thought it went okay to pretty good.
This semester, I’m back with the same themes in first year writing, and I think it’s more relevant than ever. As I said to my 121 students today, when I was their age in the mid-1980’s, there was this new thing called the “internet” that was starting to get some attention. But I don’t think a lot of folks my age now had any sense then how much of our lives would be altered by this weird internet thing. AI feels very much like that now, though more accelerated. I think my students got the comparison.
The other class I’m teaching is an advanced undergraduate/graduate level “special topics” course called Rhetoric, Writing, and AI. It’s an online class (taught behind a firewall in Canvas), and the website is mainly for one of the assignments where my students (and probably me too) will be building collaboratively an annotated bibliography of interesting “items” about AI to share– articles, websites, videos, podcasts, whatever. But I’ve also included copies of the assignments and links (so far) to the readings. I will probably be writing another post soon, specifically about this class.
Second was totry to be at least a little more “involved.” I think I’m going to pass on that for this coming year, though I remain the department rep on the “college advisory committee.” That group meets for 90 minutes a pop twice a month, so I think that’s enough.
The third thing was to put together my next (maybe last?) sabbatical/research release project proposal, and that was one of my bigger disappointments from last year. My proposal was about the connection between the discourse around AI now resembles a lot of the discourse around the introduction of computers and the internet in the 80s and 90s among writing instructors. I thought the idea I had was a good one, and I still think that’s true. Alas, I got turned down. But this is another year, and I still think this (or something like it) would be a good project. Some rewording and rethinking, try try try again, and all that.
The fourth item/resolution was to keep figuring out Substack, and compared to where I was last year this time, I feel like I’m further along. Back then, I was trying to shift all of my blogging-type writing to Substack. The reason why I moved back (and I’m now doing both) is that I don’t think the audiences are the same. I’m still trying to figure out Substack, and I’m still trying to figure out who/what to read over there.
Last but not least, keep losing weight with Zepbound. That’s kind of a “not good/not bad” news thing. I started taking Zepbound in January 2024, and by August 2024, I had lost about 35 pounds. Since August 2024, I’ve lost around 6 or 7 more pounds. For me, that’s “not good” because I would have liked to have lost more weight by now. On the other hand, it’s “not bad” because I’ve at least lost some weight and I haven’t gained it back.
So I guess I could add to this resolution to try to mix in a lot more “diet and exercise,” along with Zepbound. My ultimate goal would be to lose another 15-20 pounds because, based on the extremely problematic BMI scale, that would give me a score that is just on the edge of being merely “overweight.” That’s “not good” because I am terrible at dieting, and I also suppose it’s not entirely “good” that I’d have to lose a lot more than 20 pounds to be in the “normal” range on the BMI scale. But it’s also “not bad” because the main reason why I went on this stuff in the first place was to be healthier, and relative to where I was, I think that’s worked out well.
Annette and I went on a month-long trip through Europe to celebrate our 31st anniversary, from late May to late June. “Where’d you go?” you ask? Well:
We started in Denmark, visiting friends in Roskilde and touring around Copenhagen (including the Christiania neighborhood) and going to the Hans Christian Andersen museum. Then to Berlin, which was the first stop on our honeymoon way back when. Berlin included fancy food, wandering about, some modern art, the Stasi Museum, some theater (a show about David Bowie in Berlin), and generally soaking in the history of life in what was behind the iron curtain, like going to a museum about what life was like in East Germany. Then we went to three other places from the honeymoon: Meissen, Dresden (which is the big city of the region), and then Prague for a few days.
In Paris, we stayed at a hotel as part of the cruise for two nights and then for five nights at an apartment that we had stayed in the last time we were there, a dozen years ago. We went to a great No Kings Day protest organized by an expat group in Paris, the restored Notre Dame (amazing), Sacre-Coeur, and the Orsay, and we also took a bus trip out to Monet’s House in Giverny. We were going to the Catacombs, but it was closed because of a museum worker’s strike (more on that in a moment), so we went to the Picasso Museum. And we wandered around and gawked at a lot of stuff all along the way.
We also did a fair amount of what I’d describe as just “hanging out” while in Paris, both in the apartment and out eating or having a coffee or a cocktail. I had a list of food and cafe places to visit, but in the end, we didn’t go to any of them. Other than one recommendation from people who owned the apartment (Wepler), we just ate at places that looked good and that had seating, pretty much all bistros. Plus we ate dinner in the apartment three of the five nights we were at the apartment, a nice break from eating restaurant food for most of the previous three weeks.
That’s the recap; here are some random thoughts:
I posted a lot of pictures along the way on Instagram (and thus also Facebook), and I have mixed feelings about this. It feels overly performative in a way, a kind of “hey, look at me!” attention-getting move. On the other hand, I always enjoy seeing other people’s travel pictures, and people have said nice things to me about my pictures. We went to a big family thing the weekend after we got back, my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary in Door County, and I caught up with a bunch of relatives I only (sorta/kinda) keep in touch with on Facebook. They all came up to me at some point at this party and told me it looked like a great trip.
This was the longest trip I’ve ever been on (I think), and Annette and I travel quite a bit. We went on an epic transatlantic cruise with stops in London and Reykjavik in 2017 that was 21 days, and I think our honeymoon was also about three weeks. A month felt like a long time, and I was ready to go home when we did (Annette said she could have stayed longer).
All of Europe is a trip hazard, with cobblestones everywhere and nothing level. And my God, the stairs, THE STAIRS! I’m kidding (sort of), and I suppose it’s kind of hard to make these 500 year old buildings more accessible. I am also pretty sure the code in Europe is a lot less strict than the ADA is here. Then again, a whole lot of Americans might be better off health-wise if they had to climb some stairs once in a while.
I would give our packing efforts a “B” because we overpacked, but we kind of had to overpack. The forecast for the first 10 or so days of the trip had highs in the 60s, and then highs in the 90s by the time we got to Paris. Also, we knew that for the second and third week of the trip we wouldn’t have access to a washing machine. Still, there was stuff I packed that I never wore, and that’s a mistake.
We also had three different kinds of trips, each of which has different optimal packing strategies. The first part of the trip was kind of a “Rick Steves” style of travel: three or four different stops in about 15 days, almost always traveling by train. That’s the part of the trip where we were really overpacked, especially when we had to be quick to switch trains or when we had to haul our stuff up the stairs. The second part of the trip, a cruise, calls for a whole different packing strategy: bring as much stuff as you want because you barely have to handle your luggage yourself at all. The same is true with guided tours, though you do have to pack everything up every couple of days to move on to the next place. The third part of the trip, staying at a rented apartment (or a vacation home/cottage), is still a different packing strategy. It’s similar to a cruise in that you unpack and then only repack when you leave, but it also depends on the place. Most of the places we rent nowadays have a washing machine, making it easy to travel light. But if you’re going to stay in the same place for a week, well, why? When we rent a place “up north” or wherever in the US and we’re driving, I usually pack a box of kitchen supplies– some basic condiments/seasonings, a decent knife, etc. I could have used some of those things on this trip.
I never felt that the Europeans or Canadians we met were angry at us for being Americans, though we do not give off “MAGA” vibes. The few Trumpy-types on the river cruise kept to themselves, and we saw some things that suggested the rise of the far right, especially in what had been East Germany. But every person we actually talked to basically said it must suck to be an American now, they all hated Trump, and they were worried about the US. I felt a sympathetic and welcoming vibe I wasn’t expecting.
I’ve been on a few ocean cruises and I would (probably) go on another one of those, but I don’t think the river cruise was my cup of tea. It just wasn’t quite what I was expecting, I guess. You know the Viking commercials you see where the riverboat pulls up to a dock right in the heart of some charming city, allowing the passengers to explore at their own pace? This was not like that at all. Almost every stop required us to take a tour to see anything, on their schedule and always involving a bus ride. In contrast, ocean cruises make it easy for passengers to visit ports of call on their own. Plus the median age for passengers had to be mid-70s. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Speaking of age: the main advantage of traveling when you’re young– like when we were on our honeymoon– is, well, youth. You are stronger, faster, can get by on a lot less sleep, stuff like that. I don’t know if this is automatically a trait of youth, but when I was in my late 20s, I was a lot more willing to stay in some less-than-comfy places. On our honeymoon, we stayed in a lot of “room for rent” kind of arrangements, some of them quite memorable for the wrong reasons. The advantage of traveling when you’re old (but not so old you can’t carry a bag, hustle up stairs, etc.) is money. I don’t think I would describe our trip as “luxurious” or “fancy,” but we also didn’t have to share a bathroom with any of the other people in the house.
There were A LOT of tourists in the touristy spots, especially in Prague and Paris. When we went to the castle and cathedral in Prague, we were surrounded by middle school/high school student tour groups– probably on the same kind of bus trip that our kid took (when he was that age many years ago) to D.C. and Gettysburg, a pretty common right of passage around here. And groups of Asian tourists, other Americans, and a lot of European tour groups too. We were in Paris when staff at the Louvre went on strike, and the same union was on strike at the catacombs and for the same reason: too many tourists. Rick Steves had an interesting article/blog post about this, one where he also basically says, “hey, it’s not my kind of trips that are the problem,” but of course, it kind of is.
At the same time, we found a lot of not so touristy places that were great: Roskilde with its cathedral and Viking Museum, basically all of Berlin, the Lobkowicz Palace and the Decorative Arts museum in Prague, and the Picasso museum in Paris, where were able to just sit and study a wall of portraits completely uninterrupted for about 10 minutes. So it is possible to avoid the crowds; you just have to visit some of the places not on everyone’s bucket list.
And then there’s the expat question, something we have been talking about lately. Part of that has been motivated by current events, of course. More realistically, it might be something we try out in retirement, which is somewhere between 5 and 10 years away, depending on both money and our shifting moods about work and (gestures at the world broadly). Living abroad for a few years at the beginning of retirement might be a good idea. Still, I think this trip has convinced me I am not ready for that, at least not quite yet. As Twain might put it, I hate my government currently, but I still love my country. I would miss all of my ‘merican things and stuff, not to mention friends and family. Everyone pretty much everywhere speaks English well enough for someone like me to live anywhere and to get by. But I think it’d be lonely living in a country where the conversations all around me (people, but also signage, newspapers, TV shows, billboards, etc.) were happening in a language I did not understand. It’d probably be easier for me to move someplace where people spoke English.
That said, if I were to move to one of the places we visited on this trip– or more realistically, if I were to go someplace we visited on this trip to stay for a few weeks or months– it’d probably be Berlin. There’s lots to see and do there– it’s about the size of metro DC– but it also seemed less of a destination than Paris or Prague, also kind of true of DC. And of course, also like DC, Berlin is the capital. It wasn’t cheap, but it also seemed reasonably affordable. We’re already talking about our next big trip, so who knows?
Interestingly enough, Hsu’s essay, as published in the July 7 & 14, 2025 print version of the magazine, has the nondescriptive title “The End of the Essay.” I think that says a lot about the differences between the two publishing formats– online and clickable versus on paper, just like it was 100 years ago. Neither headline is right because Hsu is not writing about college writing assignments “ending,” let alone being destroyed. Rather, this is more about how AI is challenging the college experience, including the essay assignment, and about the anxieties of both teachers and students around these changes. I think a more accurate title might be “AI is Changing and Complicating College Writing and Learning Itself,” but that’s not exactly a clickable link, is it?
I think it’s a really good read because it taps into the anxieties that both teachers and students have about AI and its role in college (especially in writing classes) without characterizing students as constant cheaters and teachers as all hopelessly out of touch and unwilling to change. And I think it also highlights the problem of an overemphasis on the technology of education at the expense of actually trying to learn something.
Hsu is an English professor at Bard College and the author of Stay True, which won the Pulitzer for Memoir in 2022, and he’s been a writer for The New Yorker since 2017. He’s a talented and accessible writer, plus he has also “been there” as someone who has had to deal with AI in his own teaching. Though it is worth mentioning that he realizes that the teaching situation he has at Bard, where “a student is more likely to hand in a big paper a year late (as recently happened) than to take a dishonorable shortcut,” might be a little different from those of us teaching at less elite institutions. He interviews several students on their experiences in using AI in classes, some of which are pretty straight-up cheating, but a lot of which is not– or probably not. One of the students he interviewed used AI more or less like Google as a search tool, and others talked about how they used AI more as a study tool in ways I try to teach in my classes.
Hsu also talks to faculty, some who are returning to handwritten blue books for exams, including the University of Virginia media studies scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan: “Maybe we go all the way back to 450 B.C.” (For what it’s worth: blue books are a bad idea, and I think Elizabeth Wardle articulates why in an excellent op-ed in The Cincinnati Enquirer called Students aren’t cheating because they have AI, but because colleges are broken,” a commentary that is similar to Hsu’s, but with a more accurate title). But he also talks to Dan Melzer, the director of the first-year writing program at the University of California, Davis, about what pretty much everyone in my field has advocated for the last 50 years, teach writing as a process. He talks about the many problems of higher education nowadays– the costs, the constant assessments, the shifting perceived values of different majors and higher education itself.
The only thing I wish is that there was citation for the various studies Hsu notes. Though perhaps that will be part of what I will ask students to do when I assign this in the fall, to track down Hsu’s evidence. I’m (probably) going to be assigning this in the fall in my classes, and not just because my classes this fall are going to be about AI.1 Actually, I think everyone who teaches in college– and that is especially true in fields like mine– needs to have “the AI talk” with their students.
I’ve informally polled my students over the last couple of years and asked, “How many of your professors in your other classes have said anything about AI?” A few students told me they were actively using AI in their courses, and there was more of that last year than the year before. A few students told me that their professors have forbidden them to use AI. When I asked those students if they thought their professors could actually tell if they were using AI or not, they generally shrugged. But in most cases, certainly more than half of my students said their professor didn’t say anything about AI at all.
By “the talk,” I’m thinking about sex rather than the conversation Black American parents have with their children about racism. But really, I mean talking with someone about something potentially embarrassing and uncomfortable for everyone, not unlike telling a student that they failed.
I can understand why a lot (most?) professors do not want to have the AI talk. It makes us vunerable. Most professors don’t feel like they know enough about AI, they don’t want to look like idiots or as hopelessly out of touch, and also because AI is scary. I also think that a lot of professors think that refusing and ignoring is enough: that is, just tell your students don’t use AI because it’s bad, m’kay?
Again, that’s what I like so much about Hsu’s essay. It’s a good starter for “the AI talk.”
I’m teaching an advanced special topics class called “Writing, Rhetoric, and AI,” and the two sections of first year writing I’m teaching this fall will have “your career goals and AI” as the research topic. ↩︎
I’m kind of surprised, but I am still coming across essays and Substack posts and such where teachers/professors are freaking out about AI. ChatGPT came out in November 2024, more than two and a half years ago. I would have thought folks would have moved on from these “writing assignments are dead” kinds of pieces by now, but no–throw a brick out a window and you’ll hit one. Here’s a good recent example: “The Death of the Student Essay– and the Future of Cognition” by Brian Klaas. The title is the gist of it– I’ll come back to Klaas’ essay later.
It’s not that these “the death of the assigned paper and now I’m going to make my students chisel everything into stone” eulogies are entirely wrong. As I’ve been saying for a few years now, AI means teachers who used to merely assign writing with no attention to process can’t do that anymore. AI means teachers need to adjust their approach to education. It doesn’t mean that all of a sudden everyone will stop learning.
And before I go any further, I kind of think what I’m writing about here is Captain Obvious wisdom, but here it goes:
Here’s what I mean:
Learning is about gaining knowledge and skills, and humans do this in lots of different ways— play, practice, observation, experiences, trial and error. We learn things from others and the world around us, and while learning is often frustrating, I think learning is pleasurable and fulfilling. All of us start learning right after we’re born— how to get attention, to crawl, to roll, to walk, etc.— through help from our parents of course, but also on our own.
Some things we learn through exposure to the world around us; for example, speech. Of course, parents and others around babies try to help the process along (“say da-da!”), but mostly, babies and toddlers learn how to speak by picking up on how the humans around them are speaking. And as anyone who has parented or spent time around a chatty pre-schooler knows, sometimes it can be challenging to get them to stop talking.
On the other hand, some things we need to be taught how to do by others— not necessarily teachers per se, but other people who know how to do whatever it is we’re trying to learn. Reading and writing are good examples of this, which is one of the ways literacy is different from speech (or, as Walter Ong might have put it, orality). This is one of the reasons why, up until a few hundred years ago, the vast majority of people were illiterate.
Except Tarzan. This is a bit a of tangent, but bear with me:
Edgar Rice Burrough’s famous novel Tarzan of the Apes is an extraordinarily interesting, odd, offensive novel, and most of the adaptations of the book gloss over its over-the-top fantasy and weirdness. At the beginning of the book, Tarzan’s parents are put ashore in Africa after a mutiny on their ship, and his father builds a cabin stocked with the goods Tarzan’s parents were traveling with, including a lot of books. The parents are killed by “apes” (which are somehow different than gorillas, but that’s a different story) and the baby that becomes Tarzan is raised by them.
When he is around 10, Tarzan stumbles across the cabin with its books, and, long story short, he teaches himself to read. He does this by staring at the the marks on the pages of a children’s book, letters that looked like little bugs next to a picture of a strange ape that looked like him, and he figured out those little bugs were b-o-y. ”And so he progressed very, very slowly, for it was a hard and laborious task which he had set himself without knowing it—a task which might seem to you or me impossible—learning to read without having the slightest knowledge of letters or written language, or the faintest idea that such things existed.” Basically, Burroughs is saying “yeah, I know, I know, but just go with it.”
In contrast, education is a technology. To quote from my book, education is the “formal schooling apparatus that enables the delivery of various kinds of evaluations, certificates, and degrees through a recognized, organized, and hierarchical bureaucracy. It’s a technology characterized by specific roles for participants (e.g., students, teachers, professors, principals, deans) and where students are generally divided into groups based on both age and ability.” This is an argument I belabor in some detail— you can read more about it here with the right JSTOR access— but I’m sure anyone reading this has had first-hand experience with what I’m talking about.
Learning and education are a Venn diagram: when schooling goes well, education facilitates learning, and successful learners are rewarded by their educational experiences with degrees and certifications. But sometimes schooling does not go well. For whatever reason, some students, especially in courses like first-year writing, just do not want to be there. That was the case for me in a lot of high school and college classes. Sometimes, it was because of bad teaching, but more often than not, it was my lack of interest in the subject, or the fact that it was a subject I was (and am still) not very good at– anything having to do with math or foreign languages, for example. Whatever the reason though, I knew I had to push through and do the course in order to move on toward finishing the degree.1
Everyone involved in education gets frustrated by the bureaucracies and rules of it, especially when the system that is education gets in the way of learning. For example, even professors in business colleges are annoyed by students who are not there to learn anything but to just get the credential and the job. Students are often annoyed at their professors who don’t seem to know how to help them learn because they are just so bad, and everyone is annoyed with all of the other curricular hoops, paperwork, and constant grading. And that’s because learning is the fun part, and the important part!
But here’s the thing: the occupational, monetary, class, and cultural values of academic credentials– that is, the degree as a commodity– are only possible with the technology of education. It is why students and their families (our “customers”) are willing to pay universities so much money. As I wrote in my book, “Students would probably not enroll in courses or at universities where they didn’t feel they were learning anything, but they certainly would not pay for those courses if there was no credit toward a degree associated with them.”
Educators, and I like to think most students as well, are attracted to the university because they enjoy learning and place a high value on learning for the sake of learning: that is, the humanness of it all. But look, I don’t know anyone who is a teacher or a professor who does this work just for the love of it. This is a job, and if I didn’t get paid, I wouldn’t be doing it. Besides, there is a lot of value in education’s certifications and degrees in all of our day-to-day lives. I find it reassuring that the engineers who designed the car I drive (not to mention the roads and bridges I drive on) have degrees that certify a level of expertise. I am glad my dentist went to dental school, that my doctor went to medical school, and so on.
So, to circle back to how this connects with AI in general and with Brian Klaas’ essay in particular: I think the vast majority of the “AI and the end of student writing” essays I have read (including this one) are incorrect in at least two ways. The first way, which I have been writing about for a while now and which I mentioned at the beginning of this post, is about the distinction between assigning writing as a product and teaching writing as a process. Like most teachers, Klaas does not seem to have a series of assignments, peer reviews, opportunities to revise, etc.; he’s assigning a term paper and hoping students write something that demonstrates they understood the content of the class. Klaas writes “Previously,” meaning before AI, “there was a tight coupling between essay quality and underlying knowledge assembled with careful intelligence. The end goal (the final draft) was a good proxy for the actual point of the exercise (evaluating critical thinking). That’s no longer true.” By quality, I think Klaas means grammatical correctness, and I don’t think that has ever been the primary indicator of a student’s critical thinking. Yes, the students who write the best essays also tend to write in grammatically correct prose, but that’s a pretty low bar. And don’t even get me started on the complexities scholars in my field could unpack in Klaas’ claim about the “coupling” between “quality” and “intelligence.”
Klaas also doesn’t seem that interested in doing the extra work of teaching writing either. He writes:
More than once, a student quite clearly used ChatGPT, but to try to cover their tracks, they peppered citations for course readings—completely at random—throughout the text. For example, after a claim about an event in 2024 in Bangladesh, there was a citation for a book written ten years earlier—about the Arab Spring. “Rather impressive time machine they must have had,” I commented.
After a career working to develop expertise, countless hours teaching, and my best attempts to instill a love of learning in young minds, I had been reduced to the citation police.
I’m sure Klaas is correct and this student was cheating, but I’ve got some bad news for him: if you want students to use proper citation style, you have to teach it. And, as I’ve written about before, teaching citation is even more important with AI for a variety of reasons, including the fact that AI makes up citations like this all the time.
But again, Klaas doesn’t want to teach writing anyway; “Next year, my courses will be assessed with in-person exams.” Well, if Klaas was assigning writing so students could write essays that are like answers to questions in an exam, maybe he should have just given an exam in the first place.
This leads me back to my Captain Obvious Observation: learning and education are not the same thing. Yes, any of us can use AI as a crutch to skip our innate needs and desires to learn, but AI’s real impact is how it disrupts the technologies and apparatuses of education. Klaas says as much, ultimately. He points out that AI probably means “universities will need to find ways to certify that grades are the byproduct of carefully designed systems to ensure that assessments were produced by students.” And in passing, he writes “We must not fall into the trap of mistaking the outputs of writing (which are increasingly substitutable through technology) from the value of the cognitive process of writing (which hones mental development and cannot be substituted by a machine).”
Exactly. And I think we know how to do that.
First, we have to teach students about AI, and that’s especially true if we don’t want them to use it. For example, had Klaas explained to his students that AI makes up citations all the time, they might not have tried to cheat like that in the first place. It’s not enough to just say “don’t use it.”
Second, we need to lean more into learning, and we need to be more obvious in explaining to our students why this is important. Teachers need to do a better job of explaining to students and ourselves why we ask students to do things like write essays in the first place. It’s not just so teachers have something to assess as evidence of what grade that student deserves. That’s education. Rather, we have students write essays (or write code, do math problems, conduct mock experiments, etc.) because we’re hoping they might learn something.
Third, we need to change how we teach in ways that discourage relying too much on AI and encourage students to do the learning themselves. Unfortunately, this is a lot of work, and I think this is actually what Klaas and others lamenting the “death” of student writing are really complaining about. The “write a paper about such and such” assignments faculty have been relying on forever won’t work anymore. Though maybe that assignment you thought worked well before AI actually wasn’t that effective either?
“Moving on” did not necessarily mean finishing the course– I dropped several as an undergraduate to avoid a D or an F. Also, I was lucky and unlucky as an undergraduate when it came to my two weakest school subjects. For my degree in English back in the 1980s, I did not have to take any math courses at all. However, I was required to have four semesters of a foreign language. If I had had to take the math class that my EMU English majors have to take as part of general education, I’m not sure I would have made it. On the other hand, EMU students do not have to take a foreign language. I studied German, and I was terrible at it, which is why it took me about seven tries (including a summer school class) to pass the four semesters I needed. ↩︎
It’s a painting done around 1350 called “Henricus de Alemannia in Front of His Students” by Laurentius de Voltolina, depicting a lecture hall class at the University of Bologna. It’s one of those images that gets referenced once in a while about the ineffectiveness (or effectiveness) of the lecture as a teaching method, but I’m more interested now in thinking about how recognizable this scene still is to humans now.
I wrote about this picture a bit in my book More than a Moment, which is about the rise and fall of MOOCs (remember them? the good old days!) in higher education. The second chapter is called “MOOCs as a Continuation of Distance Education Technologies” and it’s about some key moments/technologies in distance ed: correspondence courses, radio and television courses, and the first wave of “traditional” online courses.
I began the chapter by talking about a couple of MOOC entrepreneur TED talks in the early 2010s, including one by Peter Norvig in 2012 called “The 100,000 Student Classroom.” It’s a talk about a class in Artificial Intelligence Norvig co-taught (along with his then Stanford colleague Sebastian Thrun, who went on to create the MOOC start-up Udacity) with about 200 f2f students where they also allowed anyone to “participate” as “students” “online” in the “course” for “free.”1 Like most of the early high-profile MOOC prophets/ profiteers, Norvig and Thrun seem to believe that they discovered online teaching, completely unaware that less prestigious universities and community colleges have been offering online classes for decades. But I digress.
Norvig opens his talk by showing this image to suggest that nothing in education has changed in the last 600+ years. There’s still the “sage on the stage” lecturer, there are textbooks, and students sitting in rows as the audience, some paying close attention, some gossiping with each other, some sleeping. That is, nothing has changed— until now! It gets a laugh from the crowd, and it’s typical of the sort of hook that is part of the genre of a successful TED talk.
In my book, I point out that there are a lot of details of the modern classroom that would be unimaginable in the 14th century, things like audio-visual equipment and laptop computers, not to mention things we don’t even think of as technology anymore— electric lighting, synthetic building materials, controlled heating and cooling, whiteboards and chalkboards, and so forth. In fact, as I go on to argue, the conventional f2f classroom of “today” (well, almost 10 years ago, but you get the idea) is so seamlessly connected to digital libraries, social media, and online learning platforms that line between f2f and online learning is fuzzy.
I still think that is mostly true, but the more I read about how AI is going to change education completely, re-seeing an image like this makes me wonder. Maybe the reason why we still recognize what is happening here is because this is what learning still looks like. In other words, what if the real reason why technology has not fundamentally changed learning is because this is just what it is?
Maybe it’s because I’m writing this now while traveling in Europe and I’ve seen a lot of old art depicting other things humans have done forever: worshiping, fighting, having sex, playing games, acting, singing, dancing. The details are different, and maybe it’s hard to recognize the weapon or the instrument or whatever, but we can still tell what’s going on because these are all things that humans have always done. Isn’t learning like this?
Don’t get me wrong— a lot of the details of how learning works have changed with technologies like literacy, correspondence, computer technology, online courses, and so on. But even an asynchronous online course is recognizable as being similar to this 1350 lecture hall course, or like a small group Socratic dialog, just one that takes place with writing down words that are somewhere between snail mail exchanges and synchronous discussions.2
I guess what I’m getting at is maybe images like this one demonstrate that the desire to learn new things is something ingrained in the species. Learning is like all of these other things that human animals just do.
So if we can remember that learning does not mean the same thing as “going to college or whatever to get a credential to get a job” and that we are still a social species of animal that cannot stop trying to learn new things, maybe AI won’t “change everything” in education. And honestly, if the sci-fi scenarios of Artificial General/Super Intelligence come to pass and the machines replace their human creators, we’ve got much bigger problems to worry about.
These are all scare quotes because none of these words mean the same thing in MOOCs as they mean in conventional courses. ↩︎
In fact, I’d suggest that what happens in online discussion forums and on social media are much more like what Socrates meant by dialogue in Phaederus than what he meant by the more problematic and unresponsive technology of writing. ↩︎
.jpg){kind=link}