Guest Opinion by Professor Earnest Gatekeep
I’ve been teaching Introduction to 18th Century Pastoral Poetry for twenty-seven years, and I have never been more heartbroken. Last semester, I caught another student using ChatGPT to write their essay on the thematic resonance of sheep imagery in obscure British verse.
Do they not understand? Someday—perhaps while waiting in line at the DMV or during a particularly long root canal—they might need to spontaneously recall the difference between Augustan and Romantic era shepherding metaphors. And they won’t be able to. Because they used AI.
“But Professor,” the student had the audacity to say, “I’m a mechanical engineering major. When will I ever need to analyze 18-stanza odes about rural livestock?”
The question itself reveals a tragic failure of imagination. What if, during a critical bridge inspection, she needs to soothe anxious city council members with an apt reference to Thomson’s “The Seasons”? What then? The bridge could collapse. People could die. All because she couldn’t distinguish between a pastoral elegy and a georgic without artificial intelligence.
My colleague in the Medieval Studies department shares my anguish. “These business majors are using AI to write papers about Beowulf,” he told me over artisanal coffee in the faculty lounge. “How will they pitch quarterly earnings reports if they can’t independently analyze kennings?”
Some say we’re being “out of touch.” That we should adapt our pedagogy. That perhaps making nursing students hand-write five-page papers on the symbolism in postmodern experimental fiction isn’t the most valuable use of their limited time before they start saving actual human lives.
These people are fools.
The real tragedy is that students are missing the authentic academic experience: spending 14 hours at 2 AM, fueled by energy drinks and existential dread, desperately trying to reach a word count by adding phrases like “throughout history” and “in today’s society.” This character-building suffering cannot be replicated by simply typing a prompt.
Where is the growth in asking an AI to complete a mandatory general education requirement that has no bearing on your life goals? Where is the learning in using technology to efficiently complete busywork so you can focus on your actual major? It’s madness.
I’ve been told I should “make assignments AI-proof” or “focus on application rather than regurgitation.” But why should I change my assignment that I’ve been giving since 1997? The problem isn’t the assignment. The problem is that students today lack the moral fiber to pretend to care about things they don’t care about.
Back in my day, we respected our elders enough to waste our own time manually. We plagiarized from SparkNotes like dignified scholars, not from some soulless algorithm. We copied from books in the library—books we had to physically locate using the card catalog. That was education.
Some radical voices suggest that perhaps, just maybe, we should reconsider whether every single student regardless of their field needs to write multiple papers on subjects entirely unrelated to their careers. They ask whether general education requirements have become bloated. Whether we’re charging students tens of thousands of dollars for mandatory courses that won’t serve them.
These troublemakers clearly hate learning itself.
No, the solution is simple: more surveillance software, stricter plagiarism policies, and longer essays. If students won’t voluntarily engage with material they’ll never use again, we’ll force them to. It’s the only way they’ll develop into well-rounded individuals who can discuss the socioeconomic implications of 19th century French literature at dinner parties they’ll never be invited to.
Because that’s what education is really about: making sure everyone suffers equally, the old-fashioned way.
Professor Earnest Gatekeep teaches “Compulsory Humanities for STEM Majors Who Just Want to Graduate” and is working on his seventeenth book that three people will read.
