Clichés abound in response to any new technology, but on the topic of large language models and generative artificial intelligence, bumper-sticker thinking has reached new lows (or perhaps been elevated to a kind of art form). Consider just some of the platitudes surrounding AI and higher education:
The first three are headlines. The fourth comes from an effort to “train nurses in AI competency.” The last belongs to the Borg, a species of imperial cyborgs on Star Trek — but it might as well be the AI mantra for pundits, professors, and campus administrators.
As with clichés in general, few of the AI ones are wholly false. It’s true that old assignments have to be rejiggered. Online education does need to be reconceived. In particular, the assessment of assignments and the teaching of writing are once again fresh pedagogical challenges.
Yet the sensibility behind the despairing headlines and assertive pronouncements runs much deeper than the undeniable change wrought by AI. Instead, they chart a path from a supposedly long-standing denial to final, exhausted acceptance. They do so by confessing — and sometimes commanding — a compulsory acquiescence to what we are told is self-evident reality. The machines finally won, they seem to say. The robots are the victors, and the very least the liberal arts can do is negotiate terms of surrender.
I want to suggest another approach. I like to call it “Luddite pedagogy,” but it’s not a retreat to purity or denial, much less “turning back” the proverbial clock. It’s a reclaiming of faculty agency, built on the refusal to accept that technology has rendered our role moot.
Like any teacher worth his salt, I should illustrate these claims with concrete examples. I’m a professor at a small private liberal-arts university in West Texas. I teach courses in theology and ethics to undergraduates as part of our general-education curriculum. When students register for my courses and arrive on the first day, here’s what they discover:
- No screens are permitted in my classroom. That means no laptops, no tablets, no phones. If it’s an upper-level course, I don’t use a screen as a part of my teaching, either. I use a simple whiteboard; my students take notes with pen and paper (and if you’re wondering whether I accommodate disability requests, I do; more on this below).
- Students are expected to purchase or rent physical books. More to the point, they are expected to read them. Even in elective courses, I assign at least five books — to be read in their entirety — along with hundreds of additional pages, supplied by printed copies or PDFs. One of the primary aims of all my courses is to teach students how to read, and how to learn to think through reading. It goes without saying that they cannot be taught these things without, well, reading.
- There are no take-home writing assignments and no Word documents to submit by a certain deadline online or in printed form. It was already too easy to plagiarize before AI came along. Now the temptation is so great it takes heroic effort to resist. In that respect I agree with most other teachers of writing that the once-standard assignments are, in the face of Sam Altman and all his pomp, officially null and void.
- I give weekly or random quizzes — administered physically, not digitally! — on the assigned reading. This keeps students on their toes. Sure, they might turn to Claude or DeepResearch to generate a detailed summary of the ninth book from Saint Augustine’s Confessions. But CliffsNotes already did that. Besides, why not just read Augustine instead of an algorithm’s restatement of him? (Answering that rhetorical question, by the way, is my responsibility as the teacher. It’s on me to show students why it’s worth it to do the reading, given that they have the choice.)
- Students do in-class handwritten assignments. In January, on her micro blog, Sara Hendren, a disability-studies and -design scholar, wrote, “Off to purchase blue books for my students’ quiz like it’s 1993.” Exactly! The “old ways” called for by changing technologies aren’t medieval; they’re within living memory of millennials.
- Finally, I don’t record my lectures, set up Zoom for absent students, or even use a learning-management system (LMS).
The last point is the one that tends to shock friends and colleagues in higher ed. How do your students find out their grades? How do you communicate with them? Do they rise up in violent rebellion?
On the contrary. Although I’ve had, over the years, a handful of mild objections to my classroom tech principles, my students rarely if ever complain. They don’t negotiate or beg for relief. A few years back, they even voted me Teacher of the Year. Far from coming at me with pitchforks, in fact, a majority of my students thank me for my “strict” rules. Why? Because they’re well aware of the effects the ambient techno-pedagogical infrastructure produces in them.
Take an online grade sheet. It’s perpetually accessible and constantly changing, with every update generating an automatic notification to a student’s phone. That doesn’t relieve anxiety — it exacerbates it. As for the classroom itself, my students know and hate that they can’t concentrate in a typical screen-populated course. They are distracted by their own phone or laptop, and even when they find the will to turn it off, their eyes drift to a classmate’s device.
Put it this way: If we set out to design an environment that would undermine educational success — to interfere with listening, thinking, and conversing, and disrupt sustained focus and rapt attention — we would invent the contemporary college classroom. Why must we accept it as given?
In the words of Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-born philosopher and critical theorist: “Schools of higher education … are no longer places of high leisure,” where rest, silence, and contemplation make the discipline of deep learning both possible and pleasurable. Instead, universities “have become places of production, factories of human capital. They pursue professional training rather than formative education. Formative education is not a means to an end but an end in itself.”
Fine words, you might reply, albeit wistful and even nostalgic. Yet words cast a vision, and it is precisely vision that we need to navigate the coming years in higher ed.
Perhaps your worries are more practical: You’re wondering about exceptions to my ostensibly draconian policies. Yes, I allow students with disabilities to use screens within limits. Yes, not every course or subject in college is devoted to difficult texts and the art of interpreting them. Yes, there are professors who positively love to incorporate digital technology into their teaching and experiment with AI in the classroom, and find joy and success in doing so.
I wish such professors well. My point here is not that everyone else ought to teach like me, a one-size-fits-all approach. Cookie-cutter instruction is the very problem at hand. My point, rather, is that your own version of Luddite pedagogy is a viable alternative. It’s your experience, training, and judgment that count, not some vague cultural mood of irresistible necessity. Within yourself, you already have all the permission you need — in those cases, at least, where administrators have not rescinded the freedom necessary to teach well.
At a minimum, we should all agree that the decision is not Silicon Valley’s to make. A professor’s pedagogy should not be dictated by what the critic Audrey Watters calls the snake oil of “ed tech.” Pedagogy is about fitting teaching to purpose. If the ed-tech companies shaking down our institutions’ already-tight budgets don’t help professors accomplish our purposes, then there is simply no imperative to use them, much less pay for them.
Teachers, in short, don’t have to do the latest technology’s bidding. The siren song of tech is always the same: the sweet sound of inevitability. I’ll admit that “it” may be inevitable in general, but not in my classroom, and not in yours. Teachers still have agency. Students still need to learn — how to read, how to write, how to think, how to be still and give their attention to what deserves and repays it.
For nearly a century, we’ve been told that machines will liberate us from the drudgery of teaching. So far, every prophecy has proven wrong. Even if the latest predictions are right about society, they don’t have to be right about education.
