Oh man. As soon as I saw that Roose tweet, I was like, I need to say something productive to that dude! Opened a new tab and did so. Then resumed reading of this post. Thank you for doing what you do!
Great piece. I've actually become somewhat conspiratorial about pieces like the New York magazine one - I think they are exaggerating the scope of the problem, and and framing it in such a way where they don't want one to think there are possible solutions, that it's all an existential threat to everything we do - and, willingly or not, they are serving as fuel for the attack on higher ed right now. I'm at a community college and for our students, those who use it's 99% overwhelm, not understanding what's being asked of them, or being English-language learners who have been graded on correctness.(For them, chat gpt's superficial correctness is impressive making the advise to use and then improve it all the more stupid than it already is). But lots of them don't. And while there is no way to chat gpt-proof an assignment there are tons of ways to make its use less likely, and they're not all super difficult to do - lots of people going back to blue books which is fine!
Again, conspiracy minded of me, but I find it dark that we're being told to panic about this at the same time universities are cracking skulls and ruining lives for students who dare to protest genocide or use certain intellectual concepts in such a way that critiques our government or institutions. Lots of AI articles that pretend to bemoan the cheating are functionally equivalent to AI hype that makes the argument that what we do is worthless
I don't think it's a conspiracy, but I think you're on point in pulling these threads together as part of a larger cultural attitude shift where these different things are linked. The battle really is to communicate that this work is worth doing for many different reasons. These are things that have been lost or obscured over time, and I also think institutions themselves have lost their way on this front in many cases.
But that doesn't mean the larger project of education in communal and collaborative contexts is doomed or obsolete. I would argue it's the opposite in a world with AI.
Yeah I was half joking about "conspiracy" - obviously I don't think the officials dismantling the NEH and NEA are telling people to write these articles but I think they are being written with a finger to the wind in a panic mode that's unhelpful and serves the attacks on higher ed whether intentionally or not. I also couldn't agree with you more that we should listen to what students have to say about why they use AI rather than only react with anger and judgement, frustrating as that is. I also couldn't agree more about communal and collaborative being key to our way out of this.
John, thank you for caring so deeply about teaching and learning and working to find meaningful solutions to difficult challenges. I resigned a year after earning tenure and promotion at a research university largely because it was grim to think about spending the rest of my career battling administrators who didn't care about teaching as well as senior (by years, not by productivity) colleagues with retrograde opinions about students and learning. (Also because my wife and I did not want our choices about where to live to be dictated by the randomness of the academic job market.)
Teaching and learning centers, and the broader Scholarship of Teaching and Learning community, were my refuge along with the thoughtful, curious students who cared about more than just getting a good grade. I'm glad to hear you had a rejuvenating experience at UC.
Most of the teaching and learning folks sound exactly like what you're describing, successful as academics, but also longing for a different relationship with the academy. Honestly, it's inspiring and as I get to see many different offices operate, it does give me hope.
I think my experience is different from some teachers because I have spent close to 10 years working with youth in informal educational environments rather than classroom settings, but the number of essays from teachers decrying students using phones all the time and not learning basic skills makes me sad because it seems to be true for many students in regular classes.
My experience in after-school settings and mentorship roles has been very different. I know so many young people who love discussing different topics and learning new things. When you ask them deep questions, they don't always give deep responses, but they do think hard and work through their reasoning process. I also know many who enjoy writing as a personal release or hobby.
I definitely had students who used their phones too much in my after-school program, but I also had students who were interested in their own learning and improving. And, after a certain time, interested in sharing thoughts they had been keeping to themselves. I believe much of this had to do with the informal nature of the program. Even on days when we didn't do "fun" activities, youth had bought in to the program and were thinking for themselves without needing to consider grades.
Soon I plan to write a post about our over-reliance on external motivation and how that kills the internal motivation students often naturally come with, or can activate with practice.
I think there is something about "school" that works against the kind of engagement we wish for students. It's not impossible to overcome, but it has to be acknowledged and dealt with, something that's even more important now that this technology exists.
As your experience testifies, we can't expect miracles, students are humans like all of us, but when you give them an opportunity, they often step up and surprise even themselves.
Reading that piece this week, I immediately (1) started a timer for when we would see your reaction and response to it in writing and (2) wondered whether you were interviewed for it (wondering: resolved!).
The other absence in this piece, I feel, is how it pretty much leaves out the way adult educators—including professors in college—are using AI much more frequently (including in their classrooms). This feels like a "student hit piece" in how it leaves out the culpability for educators.
There's some nuance there, yes, but not much, and I continue to be astounded by the number of educators who are 100% okay with their own use of AI but punitively against student usage.
The piece fulfilled the journalistic imperative of the age, which is to draw attention, and I'm certain that it everything in the story is accurately rendered. But no story is the full story, and I think you hit on what's missing from the story. A journalist isn't required to tell the whole story, just a good and true story so I don't really have a beef on that front, but you wish that there were more stories out there so we could have a better discussion overall.
yeah the notion that a high percentage of students have ever used chat gpt is shocking leaves out the fact that lots of them are being told to, and lots of their universities are in paying partnerships with these places!
I’m not convinced Elon himself is not one, though he’s obviously not the product of AI. His genius seems vastly overstated to me, even before all the ketamine.
Deeply scary story but I was able to read the NYT article the next day on Ada Palmer's "pope class" and it restored my faith in humanity somewhat. ("Too Like The Lightning" was so good I may actually have voted for Ada Palmer for the Campbell/Astounding which she won. I have never made time to actually vote for this award having read all the nominees.)
(I am most haunted by a) the Chico State professor who said that the students are literally illiterate a') that the students clearly did not read the papers before turning them in) (A paper comparing the music scenes of New Orleans in the 1910s and Memphis in the 1950s would be very cool but not what was assigned)
Here, here. The breathlessness of the NY Mag piece (and don't forget the WSJ piece from back in March (There’s a Good Chance Your Kid Uses AI to Cheat) has fed into the narrative that all kids are using AI to cheat. Unfortunately it's much more complicated but there is enough truth to it to permit the headline and the article. As a 30 year HS educator, I don't see the ship turning around anytime soon to truly address the problem. The Wendy's will use AI to cheat so long as the educational model prizes product over process and I just don't see that changing in a meaningful way at most schools. And, even if it did, is there a place for AI in the writing process? Many people think so but it's an incredibly divisive issue.
I agree that we can’t turn the whole ship around in a short period of time, but what I hope to convey in this post and my books is that we have a strong idea of how to start tugging on the wheel. There’s no reason to delay that work.
Thanks for the shout out. I've really been enjoying and benefitting from More than Words. I plan to write a review at some point in the next couple months (after the school year ends and I take my wife on a vacation, most likely).
I agree that the transactional model of education is a deep part of the problem here (along with tech bros who introduce new, disruptive technology without thinking about the consequences and then take potshots on Twitter saying "change your stuff, then"). Part of the difficulty of solving that is living in a culture that transactionalizes everything. I suspect the only ways of pushing back on that will be offline, small, organic, and personal, because everything big and online tends ruthlessly towards that same transactionalism.
I'm delivering a virtual talk for a college tomorrow and wrestling with the dilemma of how to solves this. I think the only long term solution is to reduce the demand side of the equation so students, when they do turn to the technology, do so while maintaining their agency as learners, rather than outsourcing their thinking to something that can't think.
But achieving this requires us to recognize that we are working inside both institutions and larger cultures that do not necessarily privilege this. I think the change is almost certainly bottom-up, grassroots efforts along the lines of what you describe.
The good news is that a course can be small, organic, and personal, so I do believe there's pedagogical approaches that can help shift attitudes. But we also don't want to put the responsibility all on individual teachers, and we have to acknowledge the limits of what changing what happens inside individual classrooms can achieve against these larger forces.
I know I sent many students out well-armed for battle with writing practices that they could thoughtfully deploy, but this doesn't mean they're going to be able to hold on to these values in a world that has other priorities.
But as I said to Steve up thread, we know what we have to do. Your piece articulates the values that can and should animate the work. Having the will to do it probably isn't sufficient against the bigness of tech, but we have to work with what we have to start.
Well I really appreciate you continuing to wrestle with this publicly. I worry about the situation many of my students are in where they hear the transactional thing so frequently--even from their own parents, many of whom are hearing it from the CEOs, so like you say, it's coming top down--that even though a truly human picture of life seems nice the prospect of being "left behind" is so anxiety inducing they still go after the degree>job>money>pleasure model of life with the intention of maybe circling back on those genuine thoughts and feelings later. Like you say, though, ain't nothin' to it but to do it.
The parent messaging/anxiety is a huge factor, I think. When I have the opportunity to talk to parents I ask them what they want for their kids and they always, sensibly say something like, “to be happy.” I then ask what a happy life looks like and try to go from there. We’ve created a world where security seems scarce and it’s only getting worse.
I’d like to point something out and pose a question.
Most of the articles about AI and cheating, or the general laments about the “phone-dumb youth of today” Ive found on Substack have something in common: they’re usually written by someone with 30 years of tenure, 27 years at a particular university, or 19 years of teaching history.
In all the articles by working professionals I’ve come across, academia stands out as the one field where people often stay at the same job, doing the same thing for the same institution for decades. Burnout is real, and the rest of the world seems to have addressed it, at least in part, with a more fluid approach to employment.
So, is it really a good idea to have our collective future educated by individuals who appear more concerned with insulating themselves from the realities of a competitive job market-and who often admit to struggling with new technological paradigms?
I think there's some truth to this, but I also think the same way we should see students as individuals we should to the same for faculty. The idea that teaching in college would be better if the people doing it were more economically precarious is not grounded in the reality of my experience.
I labored without tenure for the entirety of my career and the conditions under which I worked had a direct, negative impact on what I was able to achieve with my students. Sure, there's some dead wood in the professorate and because of the nature of research universities there's some people in jobs that require them to teach who don't actually care all that much about teaching, but these are longstanding structural issues.
We have to get down to the root values we want our institutions to live by. At my Inside Higher Ed blog I've written 100's of thousands of words about the disconnect between university operations and the purported university mission. That is a far bigger part of what ails us as compared to the shortcomings of individual professors, IMO.
Agreed. I don’t want to come off as all educators here. My observation is anecdotal and based on the small number of professors who choose to present their opinions publicly, specifically on Substack.
I agree that financial insecurity rarely makes anyone better at their job, but I also know that “deadwood” especially when it comes with entitlement, fancied or real, can create log jams that are quite difficult to break through.
The greater systemic issues that seem prevalent in academia seem to arise from the conflict between the ideal of education and the unfortunate reality of social conditioning. The professors I hear lambasting Ai and modern youth mostly seem resentful that kids have figured out how to sidestep the hoops these professors have created for them to jump through, which in turn seems ironically to be exactly the education they need to succeed in a technological paradigm we can’t yet comprehend.
Perhaps Ai will help the passionate educators clear out the
Tangled deadwood jams of increasingly irrelevant tenured social conditioners and actually help device entangled students learn the skills that will be relevant to them.
We are the past, they are the future and that future is like nothing we’ve experienced, perhaps the students themselves are unwittingly showing us the path forward.
To your point, I think it’s key for students to be involved in these discussions. I try to explain why thinking through writing is such an important skill and help them develop their practices. If they have solid practices they’re likely to use the technology more thoughtfully, in ways I wouldn’t consider because my practice is largely fixed. I tell faculty in my talks to see students as their collaborators in figuring this stuff out.
What I don’t think I saw in your piece is the acknowledgment that college is transactional probably because it costs so much in the US that not many can afford to go heavily into debt merely to broaden their intellectual horizons (and I say this as someone who resolutely went to college to study something “useless”). We can’t fault students and parents for caring about the ROI when college is such a huge investment. Just wanted to add that angle.
This is very true. It's not something I wrote about here, but I've covered this many times in my higher ed writing and the fact is that it's entirely rational and understandable to look at an education through this lens of ROI. Institutions even encourage it in their marketing even while knowing that students are graduating with significant debt. The roots of this problem are multifaceted and deep.
Oh man. As soon as I saw that Roose tweet, I was like, I need to say something productive to that dude! Opened a new tab and did so. Then resumed reading of this post. Thank you for doing what you do!
Great piece. I've actually become somewhat conspiratorial about pieces like the New York magazine one - I think they are exaggerating the scope of the problem, and and framing it in such a way where they don't want one to think there are possible solutions, that it's all an existential threat to everything we do - and, willingly or not, they are serving as fuel for the attack on higher ed right now. I'm at a community college and for our students, those who use it's 99% overwhelm, not understanding what's being asked of them, or being English-language learners who have been graded on correctness.(For them, chat gpt's superficial correctness is impressive making the advise to use and then improve it all the more stupid than it already is). But lots of them don't. And while there is no way to chat gpt-proof an assignment there are tons of ways to make its use less likely, and they're not all super difficult to do - lots of people going back to blue books which is fine!
Again, conspiracy minded of me, but I find it dark that we're being told to panic about this at the same time universities are cracking skulls and ruining lives for students who dare to protest genocide or use certain intellectual concepts in such a way that critiques our government or institutions. Lots of AI articles that pretend to bemoan the cheating are functionally equivalent to AI hype that makes the argument that what we do is worthless
I don't think it's a conspiracy, but I think you're on point in pulling these threads together as part of a larger cultural attitude shift where these different things are linked. The battle really is to communicate that this work is worth doing for many different reasons. These are things that have been lost or obscured over time, and I also think institutions themselves have lost their way on this front in many cases.
But that doesn't mean the larger project of education in communal and collaborative contexts is doomed or obsolete. I would argue it's the opposite in a world with AI.
Yeah I was half joking about "conspiracy" - obviously I don't think the officials dismantling the NEH and NEA are telling people to write these articles but I think they are being written with a finger to the wind in a panic mode that's unhelpful and serves the attacks on higher ed whether intentionally or not. I also couldn't agree with you more that we should listen to what students have to say about why they use AI rather than only react with anger and judgement, frustrating as that is. I also couldn't agree more about communal and collaborative being key to our way out of this.
John, thank you for caring so deeply about teaching and learning and working to find meaningful solutions to difficult challenges. I resigned a year after earning tenure and promotion at a research university largely because it was grim to think about spending the rest of my career battling administrators who didn't care about teaching as well as senior (by years, not by productivity) colleagues with retrograde opinions about students and learning. (Also because my wife and I did not want our choices about where to live to be dictated by the randomness of the academic job market.)
Teaching and learning centers, and the broader Scholarship of Teaching and Learning community, were my refuge along with the thoughtful, curious students who cared about more than just getting a good grade. I'm glad to hear you had a rejuvenating experience at UC.
Most of the teaching and learning folks sound exactly like what you're describing, successful as academics, but also longing for a different relationship with the academy. Honestly, it's inspiring and as I get to see many different offices operate, it does give me hope.
I think my experience is different from some teachers because I have spent close to 10 years working with youth in informal educational environments rather than classroom settings, but the number of essays from teachers decrying students using phones all the time and not learning basic skills makes me sad because it seems to be true for many students in regular classes.
My experience in after-school settings and mentorship roles has been very different. I know so many young people who love discussing different topics and learning new things. When you ask them deep questions, they don't always give deep responses, but they do think hard and work through their reasoning process. I also know many who enjoy writing as a personal release or hobby.
I definitely had students who used their phones too much in my after-school program, but I also had students who were interested in their own learning and improving. And, after a certain time, interested in sharing thoughts they had been keeping to themselves. I believe much of this had to do with the informal nature of the program. Even on days when we didn't do "fun" activities, youth had bought in to the program and were thinking for themselves without needing to consider grades.
Soon I plan to write a post about our over-reliance on external motivation and how that kills the internal motivation students often naturally come with, or can activate with practice.
I think there is something about "school" that works against the kind of engagement we wish for students. It's not impossible to overcome, but it has to be acknowledged and dealt with, something that's even more important now that this technology exists.
As your experience testifies, we can't expect miracles, students are humans like all of us, but when you give them an opportunity, they often step up and surprise even themselves.
Reading that piece this week, I immediately (1) started a timer for when we would see your reaction and response to it in writing and (2) wondered whether you were interviewed for it (wondering: resolved!).
The other absence in this piece, I feel, is how it pretty much leaves out the way adult educators—including professors in college—are using AI much more frequently (including in their classrooms). This feels like a "student hit piece" in how it leaves out the culpability for educators.
There's some nuance there, yes, but not much, and I continue to be astounded by the number of educators who are 100% okay with their own use of AI but punitively against student usage.
The piece fulfilled the journalistic imperative of the age, which is to draw attention, and I'm certain that it everything in the story is accurately rendered. But no story is the full story, and I think you hit on what's missing from the story. A journalist isn't required to tell the whole story, just a good and true story so I don't really have a beef on that front, but you wish that there were more stories out there so we could have a better discussion overall.
yeah the notion that a high percentage of students have ever used chat gpt is shocking leaves out the fact that lots of them are being told to, and lots of their universities are in paying partnerships with these places!
Exactly, and often using it without a lot of support that helps them consider where they might be compromising their learning.
"Is Big Balls, the notorious member of Elon’s Doge Army not already a fully realized dumbshit?" I'm dead.
I’m not convinced Elon himself is not one, though he’s obviously not the product of AI. His genius seems vastly overstated to me, even before all the ketamine.
Nice turn of phrase, John:
"tools of syntax generation"
The passage about the clueless dumbshits made me laugh out loud. Thanks for that.
We should always mean what we say, but in this case I really, really meant it.
Deeply scary story but I was able to read the NYT article the next day on Ada Palmer's "pope class" and it restored my faith in humanity somewhat. ("Too Like The Lightning" was so good I may actually have voted for Ada Palmer for the Campbell/Astounding which she won. I have never made time to actually vote for this award having read all the nominees.)
(I am most haunted by a) the Chico State professor who said that the students are literally illiterate a') that the students clearly did not read the papers before turning them in) (A paper comparing the music scenes of New Orleans in the 1910s and Memphis in the 1950s would be very cool but not what was assigned)
(Could even move further up the Mississippi and put St. Louis into it although we have invented no musical styles)
Here, here. The breathlessness of the NY Mag piece (and don't forget the WSJ piece from back in March (There’s a Good Chance Your Kid Uses AI to Cheat) has fed into the narrative that all kids are using AI to cheat. Unfortunately it's much more complicated but there is enough truth to it to permit the headline and the article. As a 30 year HS educator, I don't see the ship turning around anytime soon to truly address the problem. The Wendy's will use AI to cheat so long as the educational model prizes product over process and I just don't see that changing in a meaningful way at most schools. And, even if it did, is there a place for AI in the writing process? Many people think so but it's an incredibly divisive issue.
I agree that we can’t turn the whole ship around in a short period of time, but what I hope to convey in this post and my books is that we have a strong idea of how to start tugging on the wheel. There’s no reason to delay that work.
And the motherfuckers aren't using me to cheat so i need to find work.
The fucking temp agency ghosts me.
https://open.substack.com/pub/marlowe1/p/the-witching-snakes-pt-29?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=sllf3
Thanks for the shout out. I've really been enjoying and benefitting from More than Words. I plan to write a review at some point in the next couple months (after the school year ends and I take my wife on a vacation, most likely).
I agree that the transactional model of education is a deep part of the problem here (along with tech bros who introduce new, disruptive technology without thinking about the consequences and then take potshots on Twitter saying "change your stuff, then"). Part of the difficulty of solving that is living in a culture that transactionalizes everything. I suspect the only ways of pushing back on that will be offline, small, organic, and personal, because everything big and online tends ruthlessly towards that same transactionalism.
I'm delivering a virtual talk for a college tomorrow and wrestling with the dilemma of how to solves this. I think the only long term solution is to reduce the demand side of the equation so students, when they do turn to the technology, do so while maintaining their agency as learners, rather than outsourcing their thinking to something that can't think.
But achieving this requires us to recognize that we are working inside both institutions and larger cultures that do not necessarily privilege this. I think the change is almost certainly bottom-up, grassroots efforts along the lines of what you describe.
The good news is that a course can be small, organic, and personal, so I do believe there's pedagogical approaches that can help shift attitudes. But we also don't want to put the responsibility all on individual teachers, and we have to acknowledge the limits of what changing what happens inside individual classrooms can achieve against these larger forces.
I know I sent many students out well-armed for battle with writing practices that they could thoughtfully deploy, but this doesn't mean they're going to be able to hold on to these values in a world that has other priorities.
But as I said to Steve up thread, we know what we have to do. Your piece articulates the values that can and should animate the work. Having the will to do it probably isn't sufficient against the bigness of tech, but we have to work with what we have to start.
Well I really appreciate you continuing to wrestle with this publicly. I worry about the situation many of my students are in where they hear the transactional thing so frequently--even from their own parents, many of whom are hearing it from the CEOs, so like you say, it's coming top down--that even though a truly human picture of life seems nice the prospect of being "left behind" is so anxiety inducing they still go after the degree>job>money>pleasure model of life with the intention of maybe circling back on those genuine thoughts and feelings later. Like you say, though, ain't nothin' to it but to do it.
The parent messaging/anxiety is a huge factor, I think. When I have the opportunity to talk to parents I ask them what they want for their kids and they always, sensibly say something like, “to be happy.” I then ask what a happy life looks like and try to go from there. We’ve created a world where security seems scarce and it’s only getting worse.
I’d like to point something out and pose a question.
Most of the articles about AI and cheating, or the general laments about the “phone-dumb youth of today” Ive found on Substack have something in common: they’re usually written by someone with 30 years of tenure, 27 years at a particular university, or 19 years of teaching history.
In all the articles by working professionals I’ve come across, academia stands out as the one field where people often stay at the same job, doing the same thing for the same institution for decades. Burnout is real, and the rest of the world seems to have addressed it, at least in part, with a more fluid approach to employment.
So, is it really a good idea to have our collective future educated by individuals who appear more concerned with insulating themselves from the realities of a competitive job market-and who often admit to struggling with new technological paradigms?
I think there's some truth to this, but I also think the same way we should see students as individuals we should to the same for faculty. The idea that teaching in college would be better if the people doing it were more economically precarious is not grounded in the reality of my experience.
I labored without tenure for the entirety of my career and the conditions under which I worked had a direct, negative impact on what I was able to achieve with my students. Sure, there's some dead wood in the professorate and because of the nature of research universities there's some people in jobs that require them to teach who don't actually care all that much about teaching, but these are longstanding structural issues.
We have to get down to the root values we want our institutions to live by. At my Inside Higher Ed blog I've written 100's of thousands of words about the disconnect between university operations and the purported university mission. That is a far bigger part of what ails us as compared to the shortcomings of individual professors, IMO.
Agreed. I don’t want to come off as all educators here. My observation is anecdotal and based on the small number of professors who choose to present their opinions publicly, specifically on Substack.
I agree that financial insecurity rarely makes anyone better at their job, but I also know that “deadwood” especially when it comes with entitlement, fancied or real, can create log jams that are quite difficult to break through.
The greater systemic issues that seem prevalent in academia seem to arise from the conflict between the ideal of education and the unfortunate reality of social conditioning. The professors I hear lambasting Ai and modern youth mostly seem resentful that kids have figured out how to sidestep the hoops these professors have created for them to jump through, which in turn seems ironically to be exactly the education they need to succeed in a technological paradigm we can’t yet comprehend.
Perhaps Ai will help the passionate educators clear out the
Tangled deadwood jams of increasingly irrelevant tenured social conditioners and actually help device entangled students learn the skills that will be relevant to them.
We are the past, they are the future and that future is like nothing we’ve experienced, perhaps the students themselves are unwittingly showing us the path forward.
To your point, I think it’s key for students to be involved in these discussions. I try to explain why thinking through writing is such an important skill and help them develop their practices. If they have solid practices they’re likely to use the technology more thoughtfully, in ways I wouldn’t consider because my practice is largely fixed. I tell faculty in my talks to see students as their collaborators in figuring this stuff out.
"This is a fight worth winning." I couldn't agree more.
What happens when they get jobs and can’t think very well? AI won’t bail them out every time.
What I don’t think I saw in your piece is the acknowledgment that college is transactional probably because it costs so much in the US that not many can afford to go heavily into debt merely to broaden their intellectual horizons (and I say this as someone who resolutely went to college to study something “useless”). We can’t fault students and parents for caring about the ROI when college is such a huge investment. Just wanted to add that angle.
This is very true. It's not something I wrote about here, but I've covered this many times in my higher ed writing and the fact is that it's entirely rational and understandable to look at an education through this lens of ROI. Institutions even encourage it in their marketing even while knowing that students are graduating with significant debt. The roots of this problem are multifaceted and deep.