The plea has become a familiar refrain in the halls of academia, a desperate message echoed by teachers, professors, and professional writers alike: Please, do not use artificial intelligence to write for you. It is a request born of frustration, a desire to preserve the sanctity of original thought in an era where a chatbot can generate a thousand-word essay in seconds. For Anne Lovering Rounds, a professor of English at Hostos Community College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY), this plea is more than just a sentiment; it is a policy. Like many of her colleagues across the country, Rounds has dutifully codified this prohibition into her syllabus, employing the legalistic, boilerplate language suggested by her institution. The mandate is clear: the use of generative AI tools, such as but not limited to ChatGPT, is strictly prohibited on all assignments and assessments.
However, as the novelty of these tools wears off and the reality of their presence in the classroom sets in, a deeper frustration has emerged. It is a weariness shared by educators who find themselves reading student work that claims to "delve" into assigned texts or that relies on formulaic rhetorical structures, such as arguing that a reading "isn’t X—it’s Y." These linguistic tics have become the telltale signs of machine-generated prose, a hollow mimicry of academic inquiry. Yet, for Rounds, the common arguments against using AI in the English classroom have begun to feel, in her own words, "cringe." She suggests that the current panic over AI is merely a symptom of a much larger, more systemic issue within the humanities. AI is not just creating a technological hurdle; it is forcing a pedagogical crisis that exposes an existing lack of clarity regarding what English courses are actually meant to achieve and how they are described to the public.
As generative AI shows no signs of slowing its integration into daily life, Rounds argues that this moment presents a unique opportunity to dismantle the professional and public conflation of three distinct skills: literary appreciation, knowledge of literary history, and the craft of essay writing. For decades, these three pillars have been treated as a single, inseparable unit within the English department, but Rounds contends that they are, in fact, entirely different disciplines. By separating them, educators might finally be able to address the "fuzziness" that has long plagued the field.
This lack of distinction is perhaps most evident in the very title of the course Rounds teaches—a requirement for nearly every student at her college: Literature and Composition. In the daily reality of the classroom, Rounds has found herself increasingly burdened by the weight of that "and." The title suggests a seamless integration of two complex tasks, but for students who are new to literary study, the cognitive load is immense. Asking a student to read a complex text for the first time, learn the nuances of literary devices, and then logically describe the effects of those devices in a structured written response is a monumental task. Rounds notes that a course more accurately titled "Literary Appreciation" or "Identifying Literary Techniques" would provide enough material to fill a semester on its own. Such a shift would allow students to understand, on a more granular level, exactly what skills they are expected to master.
