The Review

When I interviewed for a job at The Chronicle back in 2018, Liz McMillen, then head editor, asked me whether I still planned on doing any college teaching. I said no; I didn’t like teaching very much, I claimed; in fact it was my least favorite part of the academic career, and I wouldn’t miss it at all. This wasn’t really true. I actually quite liked teaching. But I figured it was the right answer, since I was trying to convince Liz and her colleagues that I was serious about wanting to switch careers — that I was happy to say goodbye to the classroom for good.

That was before ChatGPT, which sounds like it has made teaching, at least in humanistic fields in which essay writing is both a central skill and a primary tool of evaluation, vastly more irritating. If you want to make sure your students don’t use the magical crutch of AI, you may need to do what Corey Robin, in a powerful recent essay in our pages, says he plans to do this semester: “Instead of take-home essays, I’ll be requiring in-class writing, including midterms and finals.”

Robin is sharply aware of what will be lost. “I dread this decision,” he says, because it will cannibalize in-class discussion time and rob students of a unique cognitive and spiritual exercise: wrestling with an essay over a period of days or weeks, experiencing “the pleasure of self-knowledge and discovery, of seeing inchoate thoughts turn into clear ideas.” The chance to write essays is one of the best reasons to go to college. And now, overnight and with no consultation of any of those affected — all teachers and all students, now and in the future — this keystone of the liberal arts has been displaced.

A tweet from the writer John Ganz, occasioned by Robin’s essay, sums up my own feelings: “really glad i never have to go to school again i’ll tell you that much.” What ChatGPT does to students is even worse than what it’s done to professors. It diminishes their access to the special kind of living with texts that only writing can make happen. This is an injustice similar to the gutting of the humanities and foreign languages curriculum at West Virginia University. Entire worlds of knowledge and experience which colleges used to bequeath to new generations will disappear.

I feel certain that something along the lines of Robin’s strategy is the only thing that will reduce cheating on essays to an acceptable level. The temptation will simply be too strong. It remains to be seen how widely such tactics will be embraced, though. I asked several friends who teach college literature whether they were planning anything similar to Robin. They would add in-class exams, they said, but they had no plans to modify their take-home essay assignments yet. “The students will cheat,” as one said, “but I can’t stop them.”

The consequence of ChatGPT-4 in the short and medium term will be not chaos but nihilism. The entire edifice of paper writing and evaluation, and the learning that take-home essays are specially poised to foster, will become a meaningless game. Some conscientious students will work hard to write original papers, but their instructors will never be able to have much faith in them, and the students will know that. The suspicion of ubiquitous false coin will make everyone poor.

Let’s Talk Lawmaker Influence Over Curriculum

State lawmakers seem to want more say than ever over what students learn in public college classrooms. Join us on Thursday, September 14, at 12 noon ET, as our Emma Pettit and a panel of experts delves into this trend and how it affects teaching, academic governance, and campus climate.

Recommended

• “Democratic neoliberalism is best understood as a fantasy that was founded on earnest hopes — an economic worldview shaped by a remarkable naiveté about the very forces it attempted to harness.” In the New York Review of Books, Osita Nwanevu reviews Michael Kazin’s What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party and Lily Geismer’s Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality.
• “The political conflict that plays out in the media is not the negotiation of conflicting material interests and ideas about the common good, but a dramatized escalation of personal grievance and cultural antagonism.” In Commonweal, Alexander Stern on technocracy’s distortions of liberalism.
• “Caesar seems to have had quite intimate knowledge of Druidism, gained — at least in part — from his close friendship with a Druid named Diviciacus.” In Aeon, Miranda Aldhouse-Green on what we know about the Druids, and how we know it.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin