English Departments and English Majors Ruin the World Again, This Time with AI!

Also, technology has proven that Jane Austen sucks.

Anyone who has worked in higher education for five minutes can tell you this bedrock truth: the humanities, especially English programs and their students, are to blame for everything. Just how useless are they? Why is their uselessness such a drag on my awesomeness? Who is to blame for gender-based curriculum? English departments. Who watches movies all the time? English departments. Who reads troublesome books that get thrown in dumpsters in Florida? English departments. (I say this as a practicing English professor.)

And who is to blame for “Colleges’” unsure footing about the ever-present ChatGPT AI Oh My God disruptovation machine? Writing and English programs. Of course.

Don’t believe me? Ian Bogost’s “Colleges Still Don’t Have a Plan for Cheating” is all the proof you need. (The article is likely behind a paywall; The Atlantic is fancy.) Before moving forward, I should say I like Ian Bogost’s writing, a lot. Still, I hope his writing this piece causes a beaver to dam up his inbox (wait, that would be good, right?)

The first sleight of hand, which anyone working in English departments knows, is claiming that an article is about “colleges” and universities and then only mentioning the disarray that English and Writing folks are in while also taking pot shots at their interests. 

Here is the full list of specific people/programs referenced in Bogost’s article that are synonymous with the entirety of “college”:

• The director of Arizona State’s Writing programs. (Arizona State, always)

• Said director is, yes, an English Professor

• Said director works on a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (no National Institutes of Health awardees were interviewed)

• Said director is identified as a “new breed of faculty.” No specific examples of this new species and its colorful plumage, other than English instructors, are identified.

• The only specific assignments the piece refers to are “essays” and “writing.” These would include the essays one writes in calculus and electrical engineering courses, right? Little known fact: you can do math in ChatGPT! Hold on to your monocles and bowler hats!

• Bogost specifically asks how the 150 writing professors at ASU (Arizona State, always) are preparing for “year three” of “AI college.” Based on the examples provided, no other disciplines are affected.

• Bogost also spoke with a writing professor in Florida. Only writers and English professors are available. Everyone else is working.

• A Dean, of the Humanities, who has been fighting against cheating for years. (There are no other types of Deans.) The result? A new course where students play with AI! All the time! They ask AI to write things. This is, yes, a writing course.

• The author of a new book is interviewed. The author is quoted. He is a former English and Writing instructor at the university level. The author offers new assignment ideas for writing courses. We do not know what plans Psychology instructors have for their assignments. Reminder: the essay is about “colleges,” as a whole, having no plan.

• An entry-level course, entirely about AI, will be offered at Arizona State. (Arizona State, always). It is… an English course.

• And don’t worry for one second, there is the required chef’s kiss sendoff that must, absolutely must, minimize English and literature as a discipline. The essay’s final sentence reads, "“If you’re a lit professor and still asking for the major themes in Sense and Sensibility,” Robbins said, “then shame on you.” Yes, Jane Austen is a complete waste of time now that we have all the new good stuff.

Above, you have every specific example in the article. Eleven of them. All eleven refer to English, writing, or the humanities.

Here is a complete list of the general terms used, without examples connected to any majors, departments, schools, or area of study:

• “Colleges still don’t have a plan.” College must be synonymous with writing and English, which we will now refer to as “WE.”

• “A new breed of faculty.” None but WE faculty are mentioned.

• “The first year of AI college ended in ruin…and faculty were caught off guard.” No examples of STEM faculty are provided, only WE faculty.

• “ChatGPT arrived at a vulnerable moment on college campuses, when instructors were still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic.” Let’s beat the drum… only WE instructors exist on “college campuses.”

• The Writing Director laments, “As I look at ASU and other universities, there is now a desire for a coherent plan.” The only administrator referenced is a humanities dean. Arizona State (Arizona State, always) has 75,000 students and over 18,000 employees. It seems all of them work in English and Writing.

• “Teachers struggle to continue teaching.” No examples of teachers outside of WE are provided.

• “…schools may enact policies that push students and faculty to use the chosen generative-AI provider for their courses.” What schools? What students? What faculty? I have no idea outside of WE.

• “If college professors seem obsessed with student fraud, that’s because it’s widespread.” Ha! Not widespread beyond writing and English! What college professors? Is there, just maybe, one computer science faculty member concerned about ChatGPT writing code in mere seconds? How would we know? The mystery persists.

• There are more references to vague “instructors” and general “K-12 teachers.” Again, outside of WE, who?

• A professor at USC studies how educators use AI! Department and discipline are for this professor are not provided. Maybe this is to protect their non-WE status. Who would want to carry such shame?

You know who is specifically identified? Researchers and tech companies who often exist outside of the university. What is the effect? A deftly created dichotomy—one we are very used to by this point. Writing, English, and Humanities vs. Advancing technology. Put another way, it is the historical cliche of disciplinary resistance coded within a “current state of affairs” essay—those English and Humanities folks cannot deal with change. They have problems. Here are their complaints.

Who is the other half of this false dichotomy? Some examples from the piece:

• “Technologists”

• “Researchers at Georgia Tech” (No discipline given.)

• “A company called PowerNotes.”

• “Generative-AI providers.”

• “Writable” (a product)

• “Open AI”

This is scapegoating and it needs to stop. Are we really pretending that actual, whole universities aren’t pushing students into tech-sector professions that are experiencing mass layoffs? Is it possible that technological advances have adverse effects on technology-based professions?

Before sitting down to write this, I prompted ChatGPT to “write a python script that will generate a random number from 1 to 10.” The result:

Missing from the “colleges” and “universities” Bogost describes are, well, the entirety of the sciences, health professions, and anything that is not writing and English. Is anyone else curious as to why no one asks, “With ChatGPT, why would anyone major in computer science anymore? Let alone math? What’s the point?” Maybe people do ask. But it really is just too darn tempting to single out the old go-to, isn’t it? The English professor: the slimeball on film, the failed artist on the page, and the dizzy or incompetent in the coverage of higher education.

Geez, if not STEM or health fields, can we maybe shift the focus to those darn political science professors? I mean, who needs them? See today’s Washington Post piece, “Mayoral candidate vows to let VIC, an AI bot, run Wyoming’s capital city.” What exactly are those political science progams doing about this? People are cheating at government!

But this is dragging on. Let’s get to the heart of it. “Cheating” in relation to AI is a red herring. If you think this is the issue and one that “professors and instructors” need to spend their time on, then you are essentially asking people to not do their jobs. The job is HI, which is human intelligence. If higher education is about teaching consumer products, then there is no higher education. AI is ushering in an era of greater student responsibility, not teacher responsibility. Students, maybe now more than ever, will have to ask themselves: am I willing to do the work of learning and knowledge acquisition? If not, that is where accountability is to be found, not in whether English and writing teachers abandoned their posts to become full-time plagiarism sleuths.

Get the frame right. The issue is not “cheating vs. integrity.” What’s at stake is creation versus stagnation. In short, what do colleges and universities want their students to create and to make? How will they prepare them to do so, even when it involves AI? (Talk to art departments about this.) If you don’t want students to acquire knowledge and then make or create in the world—and this need not be objects, as policy is something we create, as are ideas and poems and theories and hypotheticals and comparisons, etc.—then what do we need education for at all? Any sensible person will give you a million answers to that softball of a question.

But again, none of this is new. We live in the age of content bustling with millions upon millions of creators. As phones/screens have put another projectile in our collective brains, we often hear that there is not enough content to keep up with demand. Either way, this is every industry and profession throughout history enacting the same tired morality play on the same tired stage. In this play, AI is just the new-fangled invention called the “automobile” that has come to push out all those old horses who, based on what I’ve read, keep all their stables in the good-old English departments. You’ll always know where to find us, and we’re glad to be of service.