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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 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.

1. 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. ↩︎
2. 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. ↩︎
3. I wish I could indoctrinate students into left-leaning politics, but are you kidding? I can barely get them to read the syllabus. ↩︎

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 to try 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.

Then it was time for the second leg of the trip, a Viking river cruise from Prague to Paris— though really, from Nuremberg to Trier because most of the first and last days were on a bus. Cool/pretty stops included Bamberg, Würzburg, Heidelberg, Mainz, along the Rhein and by a whole bunch of castles, Cochem, Bernkastel, and Trier. Then onto the bus from Trier to Paris, with a lovely stop at the Luxembourg American Cemetery (which means I was in one more country than I was expecting on this trip), Reims (capital of the champagne region of France which features a cathedral that looks a lot like the Notre Dame in Paris), and then, Paris.

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.
• Jim Gaffigan does have a point: we visited a lot of churches on this trip, and that’s not something we do back home.
• 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?

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).