Category: Uncategorized

When I saw the headline title for the online version of Hua Hsu’s New Yorker essay “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?” I was ready to hate. Destroys college writing?!? Have these people not read my blog posts about this?? What the hell does this guy think he’s talking about?

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.”

1. 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. ↩︎

Here’s another freakout piece about AI, James D. Walsh’s New York Magazine piece “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College.”¹ The TLDR version is the headline. “Everyone” is cheating. No one wants to do the assignments. Cheaters are super-duper sophisticated. Teachers are helpless. Higher education is now irrelevant. Etc., etc.

Walsh frames his piece with the story of Chungin “Roy” Lee, a student recently kicked out of Columbia for using AI to do some rather sophisticated computer programming cheating, I believe both for some of his courses and for an internship interview. He has since launched a startup called Cluely, which claims to be an undetectable AI tool to help the user, well, cheat in virtually any situation, including while on dates and in interviews. Lee sees nothing wrong with this: Walsh quotes him as saying “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating.”

Walsh is tapping into the myth of the “mastermind” cheater, the student so brilliant they could do the work if they wanted to but prefer to cheat. In the real world, mastermind cheating does not exist, which is why Lee’s story has been retold in all kinds of places, including this New York Magazine article, and cheaters don’t usually raise over $5 million in VC start-up money with an app they created. Rather and 99.99999% of the time (and, in my 30+ years of teaching experience, 100% of the time), students who cheat are not very smart about it,² and the reason they cheat is they are failing the course and they are desperate to try anything to pass.

The cheaters Walsh talks to for this article (though also maybe not cheaters, as I will get to in a moment) all claim “everyone” is already using ChatGPT et al for all of their assignments, so what’s the big deal? I’ve seen surveys, like this one summarized by Campus Technology, that claim close to 90% of students “already use AI in their studies,” but that’s not what my students have told me, and it’s not really what the survey results are either. I think 90% of college students have tried AI, but that’s not the same as saying they regularly use AI. According to this survey, it’s more like 54% of students said they used AI “at least on a weekly basis,” and the percentages were even lower for using AI to do things like create a first draft of an essay.³

I could go on with the ways that I think Walsh is wrong, but for me this article raises a larger question that I think is at the heart of AI hand wringing and resistance: what, exactly, is “cheating” in a college class?

I think everyone would agree that if a student turns in work that they did not do themselves, that’s cheating. The most obvious example in a writing class is a student handing in a paper that someone else wrote. But I don’t think it is cheating for students to seek help on their writing assignments, and what counts as cheating aided by others can be fuzzy. Here are three relatively recent non-AI-related examples I’ve had to deal with:

• I teach a class called “Writing for the Web” in which (among other things) I require students to work through a series of still free tutorials on HTML and CSS on Codecademy, and I also require them to use WordPress to make a basic website. A lot of my students struggle with the technical aspects of these projects, and I always tell them to seek help from me, from each other, and from friends. Occasionally, a struggling student will get help from a more techno-savvy friend, and sometimes, the line between “getting help” and “getting someone else to do the work” gets crossed. That student perhaps welcomed and encouraged a little too much help from their friend, but the student still did most of the writing. Is this cheating?
• I had a first-year writing student who went to see a writing tutor (although not one in the EMU writing center) about one of the assignments. I always think it is a good idea for students to seek help and advice from others outside the class— friends and family, but also tutors available on campus or even someone they might pay. I insist students do all of their writing in Google Docs for a variety of reasons— mostly as a way for me to see their writing process and to help me when grading revisions, but also because it discourages AI cheating. When I looked at the version history and the document comments, I saw that there were large chunks of the document actually written by the tutor. Is this cheating?
• Also in first-year writing, I had a student who handed in an essay much more polished than the same student’s earlier work. I suspected the essay was written by someone else, so I called the student in for a conference. After I asked a few questions about some of the details in the essay, the student said, “Wait, you don’t think I wrote this, do you?” “No, I don’t, actually,” I said. The student said, “Well, I didn’t type it. What happened was I sat down with my mom and told her what the essay was supposed to be about, and then she wrote it all down for me.” Is this cheating?

I think the first example is kind of cheating, but because the extra help was more about coding and less about the writing, I didn’t penalize that student. The second example could count as cheating because someone other than the student did the work. But it’s hard to blame the student because the tutor broke one of the cardinal rules of tutoring: help, but never actually do the client’s/tutee’s work for them. The third example strikes me as clearly cheating, and every person I’ve told this story to believes that the student had to have known they were cheating. It’s probably true that the student was lying to me, but what if they really did think this was just getting help? Maybe Mom did this for their child all the way through high school.⁴

While I think other college writing teachers would mostly agree with the previous paragraph, there is not nearly that level of consensus about cheating and AI. Annette Vee has a good post here (in a newsletter sponsored by Norton, fwiw) about this and AI policies. Usefully, Vee shares several different policies, including language for banning AI.

My own policy is pretty much the same as Vee’s, which is also very similar to Nature’s AI policy for publications. First, you cannot use verbatim the writing from AI because “any attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, and AI tools cannot take such responsibility.” Second, if a writer does use AI as part of the process (brainstorming, researching, summarizing, proofreading, etc.), they need to explain how they used AI and in some detail. So now, when my students turn in an essay, they also need to include an “AI Use Statement” in which they explain what AI tools they used, what kinds of prompts, how they applied the results, and so forth. I think both my students and I are still trying to figure out how much detail these AI Use Statements need, but that’s a slightly different topic.⁵

Anyway, while I am okay with students getting help from AI in more or less the same way they might get help from another human, I think a lot of teachers (especially AI refusers) are not.

Take this example of what Walsh sees as AI cheating:

Whenever Wendy uses AI to write an essay (which is to say, whenever she writes an essay), she follows three steps. Step one: “I say, ‘I’m a first-year college student. I’m taking this English class.’” Otherwise, Wendy said, “it will give you a very advanced, very complicated writing style, and you don’t want that.” Step two: Wendy provides some background on the class she’s taking before copying and pasting her professor’s instructions into the chatbot. Step three: “Then I ask, ‘According to the prompt, can you please provide me an outline or an organization to give me a structure so that I can follow and write my essay?’ It then gives me an outline, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three.” Sometimes, Wendy asks for a bullet list of ideas to support or refute a given argument: “I have difficulty with organization, and this makes it really easy for me to follow.”

Once the chatbot had outlined Wendy’s essay, providing her with a list of topic sentences and bullet points of ideas, all she had to do was fill it in. Wendy delivered a tidy five-page paper at an acceptably tardy 10:17 a.m. When I asked her how she did on the assignment, she said she got a good grade. “I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

Now, I don’t think AI advice on outlining is especially helpful, and I don’t think any teacher should be asking for “tidy five-page papers.” If AI means teachers have to stop assigning writing as a product and to instead teach writing as a process, then I am all for it. But regardless of the usefulness of AI outline advice, does what Wendy did with AI count as cheating? Walsh seems to think it does, and a lot of AI refusers would see this as cheating as well.

If Wendy cut and pasted text directly from the AI and just dumped it into an essay, then yes, that’s cheating— though proving AI cheating like that isn’t easy.⁶ But let’s assume that she didn’t do that and she used this advice as another brainstorming technique. I do not think this counts as cheating, and the fact that Wendy probably has some professors who think this is cheating is what makes this so confusing for Wendy and every other student nowadays.

Eventually, educators will reach a consensus on what is and isn’t AI cheating, and while I’m obviously biased, I think the consensus will more or less line up with my thoughts. But because faculty can’t agree on this now, it is essential that we take the time to decide on an AI policy and to explain that policy as clearly as possible to our students. This is especially important for teachers who don’t want their students to use AI at all, which is why instead of “refusing” AI, educators ought to be “paying attention” to it.

1. The article is behind a firewall, but I had luck accessing it via 12ft.io ↩︎
2. Though I will admit that I may have had mastermind cheaters in the past who were so successful I never caught on…. ↩︎
3. The other issue about when/why students cheat— with AI or anything else— is it depends a lot on the grade level of the student. The vast majority of problems I’ve had with cheaters, generally and with AI in particular, have been with first year students in gen ed composition and rhetoric. I rarely have cheating problems in more advanced courses and with students who are juniors and seniors. ↩︎
4. Ultimately, I made this student rewrite their essay on their own. As I recall, the student ended up failing the course because they didn’t turn in a number of assignments and missed too many classes, which is a pretty typical profile of the kind of student who resorts to cheating. ↩︎
5. I think for all of my students last year, I was the only teacher who had an AI policy like this. As a result, the genre of an “AI Use Statement” was obviously unfamiliar, and their responses were all over the map. So one of the things on my “to do” list for preparing to teach in the fall is to develop some better models and better language about how much detail to include. ↩︎
6. As I’ve already mentioned, this is one of the reasons why I use Google Docs: I can look at the document’s “Version History” and see how they put their essays together. Between looking at that and just reading the essay, I can usually spot something suspicious. When I think the student is cheating with AI (and even though I spend a lot of time explaining to students what I think is acceptable and unacceptable AI use, this still happened several times last school year in first year writing), I talk to the student and tell them why I think it’s AI. So far, they’ve all confessed. I let them redo the assignment without AI, and I tell them if they do it again, they’ll fail the class. That too happened last school year, but only once. ↩︎

I just read a piece Lee C. Bollinger wrote for The Atlantic titled “Universities Deserve Special Standing” (free link article!). It’s long and it gets into the weeds about universities and the First Amendment. Bollinger was President of Columbia University from 2002 to 2023, but I’ve also heard of him because he was once a local as President of the University of Michigan from 1996 to 2002.

Bollinger, who is a lawyer and a First Amendment scholar, argues that universities, similar to “the press,” depend upon and are protected by the First Amendment to do their work, and the work of both universities and the press is what makes democracy possible in the first place. Here’s a long quote that I think gets Bollinger’s main point across:

So, here is my thesis: American universities are rooted in the bedrock of human nature and the foundations of our constitutional democracy. They are every bit as vital to our society as the political branches of government or quasi-official institutions such as the press (often even referred to as the “fourth branch” of government). Universities, as institutions, are the embodiment of the basic rationale of the First Amendment, which affirms our nation’s commitment to a never-ending search for truth.

In some ways, universities are a version of the press: They make a deep inquiry into public issues and are always on call to serve as a check on the government. But if their deadlines are far longer, the scope of their work and remit in pursuing truth reach to everywhere that knowledge is or may yet be. Their role in society touches the full panoply of human discovery, never limited by what may be newsworthy at a given moment. And, as many have noted in today’s debate over federal funding, the results of academic research and discovery have benefited society in more obviously utilitarian ways, including curing disease, cracking the atom, and creating the technologies that have powered our economic dynamism and enhanced our quality of life.

I agree with this. Certainly, there have been a lot of times when universities have failed at embodying the values of free speech and the search for truth or enhancing everyone’s quality of life– and the press has failed their “fourth estate” check on the government role often enough as well. But the principle Bollinger is trying to make here is completely true.

The problem here though is the “they” Bollinger is talking about are people like him, university faculty and administrators, and particularly those who are tenured. He’s at best only talking about everyone else on university campuses– students, and also the staff and the legions of non-tenure-track instructors who make these places run– indirectly. He’s talking about academic elites.

I suppose I’m one of the “theys” Bollinger is describing because I am a tenured professor at a university. Though besides being at a “third tier” university, I also have always felt that the institution that best protects my rights to teach, to write, and to say what I want without fear of losing my job is not tenure or “the university” as an institution. Rather, it’s the union and the faculty contract.

In any event, arguing to anyone outside of the professoriate that universities (or university professors) are “special” and should be able to say or do anything without ever having to worry about losing their jobs in the name of the “search for truth” does not go over well. Believe me, I’ve offered a version of Bolliger’s argument to my extended family at Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings over the years, and they are skeptical at best. And these people are not unfamiliar with higher education: everyone in my family has some kind of college degree, and Annette and I are not the only ones who went to graduate school.

Besides, if you want to convince normal people that universities deserve a special place in our society, making the comparison to “the press,” which the general public also distrusts nowadays, might not be the best strategy.

Like Bollinger, I have spent my professional life in academia, so I’m biased. But I do think universities as institutions are important to everyone, including those who never step on campus. For starters, there is the all that scientific research: the federal government pays research universities (via grants) to study things that will eventually lead to new cures and discoveries. That accounts for almost all of the money Trump (really, Musk) are taking away from universities.

More directly, large research universities (which usually have medical schools) also run large hospitals and health care systems, and these are the institutions that often treat the most complicated and expensive problems– organ transplants, the most aggressive forms of cancer, and so forth. University-run healthcare systems are the largest employer in several states, and universities themselves are the largest employer in several more, including Hawaii, California, New York, and Maryland. (By the way, Walmart is the largest employer in the U.S.). And of course, just about every employer I can think of around here is indirectly dependent on universities. I mean, without the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor would not exist.

There’s also the indirect community-building functioning of universities that goes beyond the “college town.” Take sports, for example. I’m reluctant to bring this up because I think EMU would be better off if we didn’t waste as much money as we do on trying to compete in the top division of football. Plus college sports have gotten very weird in the age of Name, Image, and Likeness deals and the transfer portal system. But it’s hard to deny the fandom around college sports, especially living in the shadow of U of M.

And of course, the main way that everyone benefits from universities is we offer college degrees. Elite universities (like the ones that have been in the news and/or the target of Trump’s revenge) don’t really do this that well because they are so selective– and they need to be selective because so many people apply. This year, 115,000 first-year and transfer students applied to Michigan, and obviously, they can only admit a small percentage of those folks.

But the reality is that only the famous universities that everyone has heard of are this difficult to attend. Most universities, including the one where I work, admit almost everyone who applies. We give everyone who otherwise couldn’t get into an elite university the chance to earn a college degree. That doesn’t always work out because a lot of the students we admit don’t finish. But I also know the degrees our graduates earn ultimately improve their lives and futures, and our graduates.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I understand Bollinger’s point, and he’s not wrong. But academics like us need to try to convince everyone else that they have something to gain from universities as well.

I turned in grades Friday and thus wrapped up the 2024-25 school year. I have a few miscellaneous things I’ll have to do in the next few months, but I’m not planning on doing too much work stuff (other than posts like this) until late July/early August when I’ll have to get busy prepping for the fall. Of course, it’s difficult for me to just turn off the work part of my brain, and I’ve been reflecting on teaching the last couple of days: what I’ll do differently next time, what worked well, which assignments/readings need to be altered or retired, and also what I learned from my students. That was especially true with my sections of first-year writing this year.

This past year, the topic in my first-year writing courses was “Your Future Career and AI.” It was part of a lot of “leaning in” to AI for me this year. As I wrote back in December, we read and talked about how AI might be useful in some parts of the writing process, but also about AI’s limitations, especially when it comes to the key goals of the class. AI is not good at researching (especially researching anything academic/behind a library’s firewall), it cannot effectively or correctly quote/paraphrase/cite that research in an essay in MLA style, and AI cannot tell students what to think.

In other words, by paying attention to AI (rather than resisting, refusing, or wishing AI away), I think my students learned that ChatGPT is more than just a cheating device, and I think I learned a lot about how to tweak/redesign my first year writing class to make AI cheating less of a problem. Again, more details in my post “Six Things I Learned After a Semester of Lots of AI,” but I think what it boils down to is teach writing as a process.

But I also learned a lot from my students’ research about the impact of AI on all sorts of careers and industries beyond my own. So the other day, when I read this fuzzy little article by Jack Kelly on the Forbes website, “The Jobs That Will Fall First as AI Takes Over The Workplace,” I thought that seems about right, at least based on what my students were telling me with their research.

Now, two caveats on what I’ve learned from my freshmen: first, they’re freshmen (mostly– I had a few stray sophomores and juniors in there too), and thus these are inexperienced and incomplete researchers. Second, one of the many interesting (and stressful and fun) things about short and long-term projections of the future of Artificial Intelligence (both generative AI, which is basically where we are now, and artificial general intelligence or artificial superintelligence, which is where the AI is as “smart” or “smarter” than humans) is no one knows.

That said, I learned a lot. In a nutshell: while it’s likely that everything will eventually be impacted by AI (just as everything was affected by one of the more recent general-purpose technologies, the internet), I don’t think AI will transform education as much as a lot of educators fear. Though like I just said, every prediction about the future of AI has about the same chance of being right as being wrong.

For starters, all of my students were able to find plenty of research about “x” career and AI. No one came up empty. Predictably, my students interested in fields like engineering, accounting, finance, business, law, logistics, computer science, and so on had no problems finding articles in both MSM and academic publications. But I was surprised to see the success everyone had, including students with career ambitions in nursing, physical therapy, sports training, interior design, criminology, gaming, graphics, aviation, elementary school teaching, fine art, music, social work. I worried about the students who wanted to research AI and careers in hotel and restaurant management, theatre, dance, and dermatology; they all found plenty of resources. The one student who came closest to stumping the topic was a young man researching AI and professional baseball pitching. But yeah, there were some articles about that too.

Second, the fields/careers that will probably be impacted by AI the most (and this is already happening) involve working and dealing with A LOT of complex data, and ones that involve a lot of repetitive tasks which nonetheless take expertise. Think of something like accounting, finance, basic data analysis. None of my students researched this, but as that Forbes article mentioned, AI is also already reshaping careers like customer service, data processing, and simple bookkeeping.

None of my students wrote much about how AI will replace humans in “X” careers, though some of them did include some research on that for careers like nursing and hospitality. Perhaps my students were researching too selectively or too optimistically; after all, they were projecting their futures with their research and none of them wanted AI to put them out of a career before they even finished college. But most of what my students wrote about was how AI will assist but not replace professionals in careers like engineering and aviation. And as one of my aviation students pointed out, AI in various forms has been a part of being a pilot for a long time now. (I was tempted to include here a link to the autopilot scene from the movie Airplane!). Something similar was true in a lot of fields, including graphic design and journalism.

For a lot of careers, AI’s impact is likely to be more indirect. I heard this analogy while listening to this six-part podcast from The Atlantic: AI is probably not going to have a lot of impact on how a toothpaste factory makes and puts toothpaste into tubes, but it will change the way that company handles accounting, human resources, maybe distribution and advertising, and so forth. I think there are a lot of careers like that.

I only had a few students researching careers in education– which is surprising because EMU comes out of the Normal School tradition, and we certainly used to have a lot more K -12 education majors than we do now. The two students who come to mind right now were researching elementary education and art education, and both of those students argued AI can help but not replace teachers or the curriculum for lots of different reasons. This squares with what I’ve read elsewhere and in this short Forbes article as well: jobs in “teaching, especially in nuanced fields like philosophy or early education” and other jobs that “rely on emotional intelligence and adaptability, which AI struggles to replicate,” are less likely to be replaced by AI anytime too soon.

Don’t get me wrong: besides the fact that no one knows what is going to happen with AI in the next few years (that’s what makes predicting the future of AI so much fun because quite literally anything might be true!), AI already has impacted and altered how we teach and learn things. As I discussed in my CCCCs talk, the introduction of personal computers and the internet also changed how we practice and teach writing. As I’ve written about a lot here lately, if the goal of a writing class is to have students to use AI as an aid (or not at all) in their learning and process, then teachers need to teach differently than they did before the rise of AI. And of course teachers (and everyone else) are going to have to keep adapting as AI keeps evolving.

But when I wonder about the current and near future threats to my career of choice, higher education, I think about falling enrollments, declining funding from the state, the insane Trump/Musk cuts to research institutions, deporting international students, axing DEI initiatives and other programs meant to help at risk students, and the growing distrust of expertise and science. I don’t think about professors being replaced or made irrelevant because of AI.

Switching from stevendkrause.com to here for “blogging”

This is my first post on Substack that didn’t originate at stevendkrause.com, which is where I’ve been blogging (I think people still call it that?) since 2003. So I’m a newbie here, but this ain’t my first rodeo.

To back up:

I started back in the late 1990s when weblogs were this whole new thing. It’s a format that has always appealed to me, I suppose because it merges two things I’m really interested in: writing (as a practice, a study, a profession, etc.) and emerging medias/technologies. I’ve kept a journal off and on since I was a kid, I was an English major in college, and I studied creative writing in an MFA program back in the days when I had aspirations of being the next famous novelist. I went on to a PhD in the field Composition and Rhetoric, and since 1998, I’ve been a professor at Eastern Michigan University. I mostly teach writing courses, everything from “freshman comp” to courses to MA students about how to teach writing.

I’ve also always been keen on computer stuff. I am old enough to have started writing in college with a typewriter only to switch to a computer. In my case, that was a Mac 512K with no hard drive, just floppies. I got a “real job” for a couple years after I finished my MFA and before I went on for my PhD mainly because I knew how to use PageMaker, the desktop publishing software of its day. I like gadgets (Apple fan boy forever), not to mention all things internet. I’m not a programmer or an expert about how computers (and the Internet, AI, etc.) actually work, but I’ve always been interested in how we use this technology. Plus most of my scholarship has to do with the connections between writing practices and pedagogies with technology.

Twenty-some-odd years ago, the majority of my blog posts were like social media posts, mostly links and brief commentary. When social media platforms came along, those “micro-blog” posts” ended up on Facebook (and at one point Twitter). But for longer pieces (like this, for example), I continue to write on my blog, about a post every month or so.

In academia, there has/had been debate about the value of public writing like this. Back in the day, there were a lot of articles in places like the Chronicle of Higher Education telling grad students and the untenured it’s a bad idea to have a blog because you might end up writing something that could ruin your career. As my mother-in-law who grew up behind the Iron Curtain said about life in communist East Germany, the tallest sunflowers are the ones that get their heads cut off first.

My experience has been the opposite: just about every success I’ve had as a scholar has been connected to blogging. This is not to say I can claim to have been all that successful as a scholar in my field (as a friend and former colleague likes to put it, “famous academic” is an oxymoron), but I’ve done okay. My scholarship about blogging (in the early days) lead to my first sabbatical project and some work on using blogs as a teaching tool. My blogging about MOOCs lead to an edited collection of essays, a bunch of cool speaking/conference gigs, and my single authored book on MOOCs. And in more recent years, my blogging about AI has lead to a couple of invited speaking opportunities, and who knows what’s next.

Plus it’s kind of a compulsion for me, like keeping a journal. I tried to give that up a few years ago, thinking that the daily 15-45 minutes doing that could be used doing more productive things. I couldn’t stop.

So, why the switch to Substack?

I started checking it out/noodling around with it a few months ago because it seemed to be what all the cool kids were using. I’m not planning on charging any money to read my rants, but I do like the idea that it is something a user can easily do. I can take or leave the email/newsletter feature here, personally. On the one hand, I still spend a lot of time in email and I do sometimes read the things I get from Substack subscriptions. I can see why a lot of Substack users push these newsletters, especially if they’re trying to convert free subscriptions into paid ones. On the other hand, I often delete those emails unopened. I really like the ease of the Substack interface for writing/publishing, though I have nothing at all against writing/publishing with WordPress. I’ll still keep that for my “official” homepage.

The main reason I’m switching to Substack (for now— who knows how long this will last) is the community and connections possible. Back in the old old days, bloggers had “blogrolls,” links to other bloggers. Back in the not as old days, I used Feedly and other RSS Feed readers to follow different blogs. Most of those writers stopped posting a while ago, which I suppose is inevitable.

But Substack (this is for anyone who is just reading this and not actually interacting with it on the platform itself) strikes me as an opportunity to reconnect with that kind of community again. The interface is much more like Facebook or Instagram in that there’s a “feed” of both Substackers (what do you call these people?) I follow and about things I’m interested in. You can share or “restack” posts from others in your feed, also like the old days of blogging and social media now. I like that.

Writing on Substack or blogging on my own WordPress site is still mostly screaming into the void. At least 90% of the 2,600+ posts I wrote on my blog have never been read by anyone but me. But besides the fact that the value of writing like this is as much about the process as it is about reaching an audience, every once in a while, I’ll write something that makes that connection with readers. That’s what I’m hoping for here.

Anyway, thanks for coming by, and as be sure to smash that subscribe button (or whatever it is they say nowadays).

Last year was, in a lot of ways, A LOT. I was originally going to make this just a post about only “life” stuff, but I decided to make some mentions to work stuff/AI stuff too. And it is one of those posts no one other than me is going to probably read, but whatever.

Okay, let’s see:

The AI stuff for me actually began in late 2022 when I was teaching a class where I included an AI assignment and I wrote a blog post called “AI Can Save Writing by Killing ‘The College Essay.'” That post got (what is for me) a lot of hits, over 4,000 since this time last year. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the reason why I keep blogging (at least once in a while) is that when a blog post hits like this, it gets my writing into circulation with an interested audience better than anything I do. Real scholarly publications don’t even come close.  Most of my blog posts remain mostly unread– and most of the scholarly things I’ve published or presented are in the same boat. But every once in a while, one hits like this one.

I didn’t blog at all in January– though I posted a lot of links to stuff I had been reading about AI– and I was busy getting what were three different courses prepped and running. I taught our MA research methods class using Johnny Saldaña’s The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers as the main text, in part because at this stage, I was also still trying to figure out how to code and analyze the hundreds of pages of transcripts from faculty interviews about their experiences teaching online during Covid. I think the book was overkill for both my students and my purposes as a researcher, to be honest. I taught a 300-level research writing course that where I decided to use Try This: Research Methods for Writers by Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Derek Mueller, and Kate Pantelidies. It’s an interesting textbook which focuses mostly on primary research (rather than secondary– aka, look stuff up in the library and online). I thought that class was so-so as well, not because of the book (which I would definitely use again, and I hope I get the chance to teach this class again, maybe next year) but because of some of the things I did or didn’t do in the class.

And for my section of first year writing, I did something I haven’t done since I was an MFA student: I actually assigned a book, a real (not a text) book for students to read. I have no objections to the program textbook; I just wanted to try something I haven’t done in a long long time. I had students read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention– and How to Think Deeply Again, and I also assigned parts of my own textbook and a number of essays from Writing Spaces. I wrote a bit about this as a part of this post from last May; basically, students did their research projects about something that Hari talked about in his book. It’s the kind of thing I can get away with after teaching this for most of my life and I don’t need to rely on the textbook, if that makes sense. I did the same thing for my section of first year writing this past fall, and I’m planning on doing it again (times three, and probably for the last time) this coming term. Setting aside the specifics of Hari’s book, I do think there is something to be said for assigning a mainstream non-fiction trade book like this. It sets the theme of the research students will be doing (I never allow students to do research about whatever they want for a ton of different reasons), and it also provides an example of how to use a variety of different kinds of research to make an argument. More on a lot of this later, I’m sure.

Nothing too exciting that I can remember about last January or most of February– just weather, snow and ice respectively. The end of February/beginning of March though was a lot more interesting with our trip to Los Angeles. I think both Annette and I were kind of prepared to not like it much, but I got to say we had a really good time. Yeah, it’s a lot of driving around and WAY too expensive, but I get why people want to live out there. Highlights included the TMZ tour, watching a taping of Jeopardy!, and a couple nights at The Comedy Store (it wasn’t part of the plan, but we stayed at a hotel across the street– lots of fun). Not so much a highlight was an extra day and a half trapped at a hotel by LAX because of bad weather in Detroit.

We had a fun birthday/birthmonth for me dinner at Freya in Detroit in late March, the semester wrapped up, and I had the chance to talk to folks at Hope College about AI stuff in late April. As I blogged about then, that’s a prime example as to why I still blog: someone at Hope read that blog post I wrote back in December 2023, liked it, and invited me to do a talk, which was pretty cool. They would have done it over Zoom, but I actually wanted to make a little trip out of it; Annette came along and we did a little Holland tourism including taking a picture of a windmill.

May brought a good crop of asparagus, and June was the beginning of a fair amount of travel for both of us. We went “up north,” as they say, at a rental on Big Glen Lake. Did some hiking around, ate some fancy food, and saw a good friend rocking out– a pretty typical stay for us up there.  We came home after a week, and a few days later, Annette went out to a conference in Seattle. A couple days after she got back I went to the Computers and Writing Conference at UC Davis– a good conference, I thought. And then, about a week after that, Annette and I went on a Gate 1 tour that went from Dubrovnik, Montenegro, Split, Piltvice Lakes National Park, a bit of Opatija, the Postojna Caves, the super pretty tourist town Bled (which featured some silly dancing on the second night), the capitol of Slovenia, Ljubljana, a brief but nice stop in Trieste, and then Venice: one day with Gate 1 and two more on our own. It was a great trip–though super-busy, and super hot: quite literally, our trip through southern Europe corresponded with the hottest weather ever recorded on Earth– at least up until that point.

Oh yeah, we came home with Covid, too! I am positive we caught it while actually on the tour bus. There was a couple we chatted with a couple times and such who were both feeling like shit– a bad cold, maybe a flu, they thought– but I know I was sick before I got on the plane for back home. I think Annette was too, but it hit her a little later. We were (and are again! just got a booster back in October or so) all vaxxed up, so I like to think that helped it all be not that big of a deal. Actually, I know many MANY more people who had Covid this last year than I did during the worst of the pandemic.

More summer came, we had visits from both my parents and Annette’s, I made a somewhat impromptu road trip to Iowa in late August to get together with “the originals”– that is, just my parents and sisters without all the spouses and kids, and then the school year started up. As I blogged about in September, this is the first time I can remember since entering my PhD program that I did not have some kind of “scholarly project” cooking up in one stage or another. I’m not really working on anything right now (though I did have a couple of different things come out last year, in addition to my talk at CWCON). The break has been good, though I have a feeling I’m going start doing at least a bit more research/scholarship about teaching with AI this coming year.

I got a chance to give another AI and teaching talk (or lead a discussion/workshop, depending on what you want to call it), this time via Zoom and as part of a faculty development event at Washtenaw Community College. I blogged about that too, and my sense from this event was that most faculty have figured out how to deal with AI. Funny what a difference a year makes with this.

Also for the first time ever, EMU had a “Fall Break” in October. A lot of universities have started doing this actually, I think as a result of a lot more attention on college campuses post-covid in helping students with a little “self-care.” So we went to New York, met up with Will, hung around with our old friend Annette Saddik, saw Sweeney Todd, met up with Troy and Lisa, and generally spent way too much money on fun things.

Oh yeah, in October, we put down money on a new house– a brand-new house that’s being built right now in a subdivision in Pittsfield Township sort of between where we are now and Saline. On the one hand, this might look like a surprising turn of events. We had talked about moving before and also about moving into a condo or something for a while.  But a couple years ago, I would have never guessed we would be building a new house that pretty much looks like all the other new houses in new a suburban development (it was a cornfield two years ago) kind of on the outskirts of things. On the other hand, once we started really thinking about it, this started making sense. We like our house and neighborhood A LOT, but there’s a number of things (mostly minor) that need to be fixed or upgraded around here, and there are other things we want (like a bigger kitchen and a more “open concept” living room/dining room area) that we can’t do here. And say what you want about a cookie-cutter house, this place has the layout and the newness we want. Plus the way the housing market is around here nowadays, there just isn’t much on the market. So new house it is. Stay tuned on that one.

Anyway, one of the things we’re really going to miss around here when we move, for sure, including Halloween— not expecting any trick or treaters in the new sub.  Once again, my side of the family did a combined Thanksgiving/Christmas thing (which did include some cookie decorating), and of course a lot of family fun stuff. The semester wrapped, the school year ended, and (more or less), here we are.

Like I said a lot.

There are two different but related stories about higher ed and Covid-19 right now, both of which speak to the stark differences within the hierarchy of universities and online teaching. And spoiler alert: students and faculty elite universities do not like online courses one little bit.

I think this article sums it up for the lawsuits being filed by some students against their universities: From ABC News, “College students clamor for tuition refunds after coronavirus shutters campuses.” The complaints basically boil down to two things: demanding refunds for fees paid on things students can no longer use (dorms, meal plans, lab fees, etc.); demanding their money back for tuition for classes that were forced to go online. It is worth noting these are class action lawsuits being ginned up by some law firms who appear to specialize in these kinds of class action things.

Then there are the calls from university presidents to get back to campus. There was Purdue President Mitch Daniel’s plans for getting Purdue back on campus in the fall, which (as reported in USA Today here) includes a vague goal of separating folks based on age, with the goal of “keeping the university’s younger population separate from older demographic groups that are more at risk from the virus. ‘Literally, our students pose a far greater danger to others than the virus poses to them,’ he wrote.” Also this weekend is an op-ed in the New York Times “College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It,” by Christina Paxson. Paxson is the President of Brown University and an economist by training. Among other things, she wrote:

As amazing as videoconferencing technology has become, students face financial, practical and psychological barriers as they try to learn remotely. This is especially true for lower-income students who may not have reliable internet access or private spaces in which to study. If they can’t come back to campus, some students may choose — or be forced by circumstances — to forgo starting college or delay completing their degrees.

First off, I think students certainly ought to get a refund for housing, meal plans, lab fees, and all of those things– and I think most universities are doing something like that. But with tuition, we start to get into a more murky territory.

Granted, a class that shifted into the online lifeboat to finish the term is not the same as it would have been if it had stayed face to face all year. But if the goal was to complete the courses and thus grant students credit for their course work so they could continue to make progress on their degrees or to graduate, there weren’t a lot of other alternatives. In fact, it seems to me a very fair response from universities to these lawsuits would be something along the lines of “Here’s a refund for your tuition, but you aren’t going to get any credit for those courses.” Somehow I don’t think that’s what these students and their lawyers have in mind.

As far as Daniels and Paxson go: I think everyone is hoping that universities open in the fall, though as I’ve heard repeatedly from various talking head experts on cable news, the virus is driving the timeline and no one knows what the conditions will be in September. If we’re still in a world where we’re supposed to stay 6 feet apart, wear masks, and generally distance ourselves from each other, then the re-opening is going to be partial at best. And the idea that we can separate younger students from older faculty (will faculty be teaching behind a plexiglass barrier? will they be zooming in to classrooms filled with students?) is kind of goofy.

But I think these complaints and plans really highlight three long-standing realities in higher education in this country right now.

First, students/faculty/presidents/etc. at elite universities have very different assumptions about what “the college experience” means, at least compared to the rest of us. For elite universities and/or colleges and universities that cater to upper-middle-class and above 18-22 year olds, taking classes is just not what it’s all about. Don’t get me wrong, the quality of academics at elite institutions is extremely high and that’s still the main reason why these students attend these schools. But it’s also a whole lifestyle of dorms or near campus apartments, sporting events, frats and sororities and clubs, parties, beautiful buildings and campuses, etc.

We have all of those things at EMU too, and for a lot of the students we have in that 18-22 year old demographic, those things are important. But most of our students come from the sort of backgrounds where they do not assume all these things are that necessary, at least not compared to the students at the University of Michigan just across town. Frankly, a lot of our students are a lot more involved in the campus life in Ann Arbor than they are at EMU.

Most of my students– some of the 18-22 year olds, almost all of the older students– don’t have time for these extras because they are working. And I don’t mean “working” the way a lot of the students at UM work, with a part-time job to make some beer money and maybe help out with the expenses mostly being covered by the parents. No, I mean working to pay for living: rent, cars, mortgages, kids, etc.

Look, I get it. I was exactly like these elite university students when I was in college at the University of Iowa, and my wife was more or less a student like this at Virginia Tech. Our son was one of these students at the University of Michigan. If online classes were a thing in my day, I might have taken one– and I did actually take a correspondence course to earn enough credits to graduate, a story I tell in my book More Than a Moment.  For all of us, our undergraduate days were important life-shaping times because of the whole “college life” experience. But this is not the only way to go to college, and to suggest otherwise is a good example of unchecked or unnoticed privilege.

This leads to my second point: elite universities don’t like online classes because they are not the college experience (see above) and they still believe online classes are for poor people. That quote from Paxson is disingenuous because she must certainly know the students most likely to take online courses are indeed lower-income students. Why? Because students with less money and more grown-up obligations come to places like EMU, or they attend a completely online university, maybe even one of the mega-universities (Southern New Hampshire, for example) that have been doing high quality online education for years and years.

And online education works. We’ve done research on this for years. In general, the data suggests any college course which a) is routinely taught in a large lecture hall format or taught as a small (less than 40, but ideally about 20) group discussion; b) is primarily based on reading, discussion, writing, quizzes, and tests, and c) does not involve any special equipment (e.g., a chemistry lab, a kiln, a potter’s wheel, a welding torch, etc.) or that requires hands-on practice (e.g., medical procedures, cosmetology or barbering, engine repair, etc.) can be taught online just as effectively as it can be taught face to face. I do realize there are a lot of important college courses that fall into the “c” category of things and can’t be offered exclusively online. I do not think I’d be comfortable undergoing surgery by a physician who trained exclusively online. But thought-out and carefully planned online courses work in the majority of subjects and college classrooms.

Plus most college students– certainly those who attend community colleges and regional universities like EMU– have been taking classes online for a long time. Roughly speaking, almost a third of U.S. college students have taken at least one online course. About 15-20% of college students are taking courses exclusively online, and these online courses and programs are no longer just the products of sketchy for-profits.

But the perception is still there, particularly among the elites, that online courses are for “not real” and/or for poor people. It reminds me a bit of what was going in in the realm of MOOCs a few years ago: all these elite universities were developing these MOOCs they were hoping to somehow monetize by getting students to pay for credit to transfer to another college. But these same institutions were very clear that they would not accept MOOC credit for their students: that is, the University of Michigan is completely fine with students from say EMU paying for their MOOCs and then having that class count as transfer credit, but there was no way UM was going to accept MOOC credit, even when the MOOC was developed and taught by the same faculty teaching the face to face version of the UM course.

Last but not least, Higher Education is going to need a bigger bail-out and some kind of government intervention to change the funding model. This is an issue I am certain Daniels, Paxson, and (at least some of the) students suing would probably agree about. Costs in higher education have been driven up for decades for lots of reasons, but what that means now is so-called public universities have the same business model as private universities. EMU is in the same boat as Brown because most of our revenue comes from tuition, and, as Paxson put it, the loss in tuition revenue this fall, “…only a part of which might be recouped through online courses, would be catastrophic, especially for the many institutions that were in precarious financial positions before the pandemic. It’s not a question of whether institutions will be forced to permanently close, it’s how many.”

And in the medium to long term, I think we need to get to a place where public universities receive most of their funding from the government, and we need to really get over the idea that higher education is defined by the “college experience” of the elites and flagships. The feds and the states (and ultimately tax payers) are going to have to step up and fund higher education so that tuition can be reduced.

But more funding from government will (and should) come with restrictions on how that money is spent, and a lot of the money we waste in higher education in this country– sports, luxurious dorms and recreation facilities, and so forth– are what the elites and flagships out there see as part of the college experience. And that is a problem for the Browns and Purdues of the world: why would a student pay whatever it costs to go to Brown to take online classes (even temporarily) if that student could take a similar online class from a regional university or community college for significantly less money?

I’m preparing syllabi for the fall term (we don’t start until after Labor Day, happily), and I’m mulling over including the section after the break, “What do grades mean?” This isn’t coming from any specific exigence– not even my less than great course evaluations– so much as it is coming from what I guess I feel like an increasing need on my part to be as transparent as possible to my students about various things.

Most of this text is based on stuff I have sometimes included on syllabi for first year writing, the place where I’ve seen the greatest discrepancy between what does and doesn’t constitute a certain grade. I think a lot of this text is plagiarised borrowed from several other places. And I should point out that I’m not convinced that including this language will make a whole lot of difference in terms of students complaining (or not) about their grades. But it’s a try.

Continue reading “Here’s what I think grades mean; what do you think?”