brendan halpin

If you work in higher ed, you’ve probably seen this article floating around recently. I read it and discussed it with my students, and I have some thoughts.

First of all, you should always be suspicious when an older person (the author of this piece, Troy Jollimore, is 53, or 3 years younger than me, for those keeping score at home) starts with this “things used to be better” stuff. They’re probably viewing the past through the extremely distorted lens of nostalgia. So, you know, caveat lector.

Second point: it is, I suppose, an okay ideal to say that students should be in it for the love of learning and be squeezing every drop of knowledge out of every moment of their college careers, but even ignoring the not-fully-developed frontal cortex problem, this idea ignores a couple of important facts.

One is that it’s become very difficult to get a good paying job in the US (and, I presume, Canada, where this author lives) without a bachelor’s degree. In most workplaces, for most jobs, you are trained on the job, and your education is pretty irrelevant. Getting the piece of paper is just a hoop you have to jump through. So it is asking a lot to demand students not try to take shortcuts through the hoop-jumping experience. Many of our students are not in college because they necessarily want to be in college, but because they perceive it as necessary for their future employment prospects. So of course they’re going to take shortcuts.

Indeed, the author suggests that students shouldn’t think about career at all, but rather enjoy education for its own sake. I agree that this would be nice, but it ignores the reality that non-wealthy students are making the largest investment of their lives in their college education and facing ten years of crippling debt. It’s not crass to focus on how college prepares you for work under such circumstances; it’s logical. Students are showing us that they don’t believe our writing assignments are valuable in this context. Maybe we should listen.

Of course, Chat GPT didn’t create cheating on essays. All it’s done is democratize the process. Right now on pretty much every college campus, there is a rich person paying a non-rich person to write their essays. It’s easy to find such services online, but you don’t even need to do that. Most college campuses feature a mixture of students with high net worth and students who are high achievers. The former group has been getting the latter group to write essays for them probably since essays were first assigned. Now that everyone can afford to get their essays written for them, many more students are doing this.

This should be cause for some serious reflection. The feedback we’re getting from students is that they are not finding value in this kind of assignment. So perhaps it’s time to take that feedback into account and rethink our assignments. There is no mystical power in the academic writing assignment. Sure, it’s valuable to learn things and then make assertions supported by evidence. But academic essays are only one way to do this.

I have an old set of Shakespeare plays owned by a relative in the early 20th century. Macbeth has a handwritten note in the back that says, “Theme: tell how the witches wracked the ruin of Macbeth.” Folks, we’ve been giving these kinds of assignments, essentially unchanged, for over a hundred years. The world has changed around us, and we’re still giving assignments that would be recognizable to people who lived before rural electrification, not to mention the internet, television, and radio.

I certainly don’t believe that things that are old are necessarily bad (this would be paradoxical for a 56-year-old) but I also don’t believe that “we’ve always done it this way” is a valid reason to continue doing things. What’s weird is that higher education is built on the assumption that knowledge will be ever-expanding, and yet for some reason we seem to have exempted “knowledge of how to teach and assess students” from this.

There is now a tool that (at horrible environmental cost and with very bad ethics, which I do take seriously and personally given that I know my books have trained some of these things and nobody’s cut me a check) can create a convincing simulacrum of an essay that can be spruced up into a halfway decent essay with minimal effort. And rather than working on changing what we do, we’re churning out petulant think pieces about how things aren’t what they used to be.

But maybe things weren’t that great in the past either. Ask your alumni. They’ll tell you that academic writing is not particularly useful outside of academia. If you’re going to become a professor, you should absolutely master this format. But most of our students won’t become professors and will never write an academic-style paper for the entirety of their work life. So why are we privileging the needs of the few over the needs of the many?

We now have a free (for now) tool that can generate dull, verbose, personality-free writing. So instead of lamenting its existence, why don’t we reconfigure our assignments to center those things that a machine can’t reproduce—our students’ personalities and experiences? I’m a writing teacher and believe writing is valuable and should still be taught. But I don’t see much of what I value about writing in most academic writing. If there’s intellectual rigor in academic writing, it’s usually unavailable for the general reader, concealed in ridiculously complex prose and the unrelentingly dull personality-free voice of authority.

While I hate the AI hype bubble, I am actually excited by the prospect that AI may destroy the academic essay. Because as much as our students don’t want to write them, I don’t particularly want to read them either. Maybe this tool will allow us to throw off the shackles of dull writing assignments and work with our students on assignments that are not painful to write or read.