For years, a specific brand of desperate plea has echoed through the hallways of academia and the quiet corners of the digital world. It is a request made by teachers, professors, and professional writers alike, directed at a generation of students increasingly tempted by the convenience of automation: Please, for the sake of your education and your voice, do not use artificial intelligence to write for you. This sentiment, once a whisper of concern among early adopters of technology, has transformed into a deafening roar as generative AI tools like ChatGPT have become ubiquitous in the lives of modern learners.
Anne Lovering Rounds, a professor of English at Hostos Community College within the City University of New York (CUNY) system, is among those on the front lines of this technological shift. Like many of her colleagues across the country, she has felt compelled to codify this plea into the formal structure of her courses. Her syllabus now contains the dutifully included boilerplate language suggested by her institution, a legalistic disclaimer that has become standard in the post-2022 academic landscape: “The use of generative AI tools such as but not limited to ChatGPT is prohibited on all assignments and assessments in this course.”
However, behind the official prohibitions lies a deeper, more systemic frustration. Professor Rounds, along with a growing number of educators, is experiencing a profound weariness. It is the exhaustion of reading student submissions that claim to “delve” into assigned texts with a suspicious, robotic enthusiasm, or that consistently argue a thesis using the predictable, binary framing of “it isn’t X—it’s Y.” These linguistic fingerprints have become the tell-tale signs of a machine trying to mimic the nuance of human thought, often failing to capture anything beyond a surface-level imitation of academic rigor.
Yet, as Professor Rounds suggests, the common arguments against using AI in the English classroom—often rooted in appeals to "academic integrity" or the "soul of writing"—can often feel, in a word, cringe. The reality is that AI is not just a tool for cheating; it is a catalyst forcing a long-overdue pedagogical crisis. This crisis is not merely about how to detect plagiarism, but about a fundamental confusion regarding what English courses are meant to accomplish and how they are described to the public. As the development of AI shows no signs of slowing down, the academic community is being presented with a rare opportunity to dismantle the professional and public conflation of three distinct pillars: literary appreciation, knowledge of literary history, and the craft of essay writing.
In the traditional university model, these three areas of study are often treated as a single, monolithic entity. This blurring of lines is perhaps most evident in the very title of the course Professor Rounds teaches—a requirement for nearly every student at her college: Literature and Composition. This title, while traditional, masks a significant cognitive burden placed upon the student. The more time one spends in the classroom, the more apparent the “fuzziness” of that conjunction—the “and”—becomes.
For many students, particularly those at a community college who may be encountering higher-level literary study for the first time, the expectations are immense. They are asked to read complex texts, often for the first time in their lives, while simultaneously learning about the existence of sophisticated literary devices. Then, they are expected to logically describe the effects of these devices in structured, written responses. Professor Rounds argues that this is an overwhelming amount of material to synthesize in a single semester. A course more granularly titled "Literary Appreciation" or "Identifying Literary Techniques" would provide a clearer roadmap, allowing students to understand exactly what skills they are expected to master without the immediate pressure of high-stakes composition.
The disconnect becomes even clearer when examining the specific details that define literary study. Professor Rounds finds immense value in showing students the intricacies of the craft—explaining that while rhythm and rhyme are distinct, they often function in tandem; that meter is a far more complex architecture than a simple syllable count; and that the "line" itself is the defining feature of a lyric poem. These are the building blocks of literary literacy, yet they have almost nothing to do with the mechanics of composing a five-paragraph essay or a research paper.
By decoupling these skills, the anxiety surrounding AI might begin to dissipate. If a professor had the freedom to drill down into the technical details of a text without the constant looming requirement of "pages of deliverables," the incentive for students to turn to AI would be significantly reduced. Professor Rounds compares the current state of English education to a music class with impossible expectations: it is like asking a total novice to not only pass a "drop-the-needle" test on the entire canon of classical music after just fifteen weeks but also to learn how to play an instrument at an expert level simultaneously. It is, she suggests, a "crazy ask."
This debate arrives at a time when the value of the English major is being both questioned and romanticized in the public sphere. Recently, Frank Bruni, an opinion contributor for The New York Times, wrote a glowing defense of the humanities, rhapsodizing about the benefits of majoring in English. Bruni argued that by studying literature, students "better understand the seeds of creativity and how they’re made to flower." He described the experience as swimming in a "borderless sea of thoughts beautifully expressed," suggesting that the more a student immerses themselves in this sea, the more expert they will become at "shaping stories" and "persuading." He concluded that better communicators are inherently better off in any profession.
While Professor Rounds acknowledges the sentiment, she questions the vague definition of a "better communicator." In the modern world, does that mean being a more succinct sender of emails, a more entertaining presenter, or a more precise poet? The answer is no longer clear. More importantly, she argues that understanding the "seeds of creativity" is a fundamentally different cognitive task than "shaping stories" or producing formal written text. While an English department should certainly have the capacity to teach both, it may take much longer than a single fifteen-week semester to create a truly effective feedback loop between reading and writing.
In the meantime, she suggests looking back to classical models of education for inspiration. When Socrates engaged in his famous dialogues with his interlocutors, the goal was the pursuit of truth and the refinement of thought through verbal exchange. Crucially, his students were not required to produce a follow-up paper in MLA format to prove they had learned something. The dialogue itself was the evidence of learning.
If the English essay is to be saved from the encroaching influence of AI, Professor Rounds believes the first step is a radical admission: vivid, logical writing does not inherently need to be about literature, and reading literature does not need to be accompanied by a "writing tax." This "writing tax"—the idea that every encounter with a book must result in a formal essay—often serves to alienate students from the very texts they are supposed to be enjoying.
The solution may lie in a more honest and specialized approach to curriculum design. If the goal is for young people to learn the craft of the essay, the course should simply be called "Writing Essays." If the goal is for students to understand the cultural and historical significance of Shakespeare—to know, for instance, the source of the phrase "Out, damned spot"—there is more than enough material to fill a rigorous semester without requiring pages of essays by the final week. There are numerous ways to teach Shakespeare with depth and academic integrity that do not rely on the traditional term paper.
For those students who do wish to write sophisticated essays about literary texts, Professor Rounds argues that we must admit this requires a "sustained environment"—a level of focus and time that perhaps not every college can offer, and not every student necessarily wants to inhabit. To continue the current model of cramming intensive reading and intensive writing into every semester-limited course is, in her view, a lie. Labeling this hurried, overburdened approach as "humanity" does not make it so.
By acknowledging the distinct nature of these skills, English departments may find a way to thrive in the age of AI. Rather than fighting a losing battle against "delving" bots, educators could focus on creating spaces where students can appreciate literature for its own sake and learn to write with clarity and purpose, without one becoming a burdensome tax upon the other. The future of the humanities may depend not on doubling down on traditional requirements, but on the courage to separate them.
