The AI campus gender wars ahead
A call to cancel first-year writing
The most volatile demographic and technological clashes on campus this fall will not be on the streets but in the classroom. Incoming young men, increasingly conservative and highly optimistic about generative AI, will be placed in classrooms with non-tenure-track, overwhelmingly female, politically progressive first-year writing faculty fiercely hostile to AI.
Why? Because accreditors and state legislatures demand first-year writing, which no study has ever found effective, and now seems nonsensical in the AI era. (The last respectable study was in Arum and Roksa’s 2011 Academically Adrift, which found that students showed almost no measurable improvement in writing in their first two years of college.) The arguments for ending it are mounting. Does anyone think setting up the incoming AI-savvy 2026 cohort for a first semester classroom battle is worth it?
The Common App’s March 2026 report shows 9.4 million applications, up five percent over last year, 2.1 million more than four years ago. I’ve been following enrollment patterns for two decades. I look at those numbers and see young men who might not have applied to college in past years feeling more confident than before, with an AI at their fingertips.
According to a February 2026 report from the Pew Research Center, roughly two-thirds of teenagers currently use LLMs, with male students significantly more likely to view these tools as fundamentally useful and beneficial for their own lives and society. An ACT survey found that male students were more optimistic about AI and more likely to see it as relevant to college and careers. A Berkeley-Stanford-Harvard analysis of 143,000 people across eighteen studies found that women were about twenty percent less likely to use generative AI overall than men, who view these models as legitimate productivity engines.
Even without taking gender differences into account, the reality for universities is that eighty-four percent of high school students used generative AI tools for schoolwork in 2025, according to the College Board, with sixty-nine percent using ChatGPT specifically. Pew found that teen use of ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled between 2023 and 2024. Boys and girls use it at the same rate. The difference is in attitude. Boys are more enthusiastic. The LLM has likely helped many of them write their papers and lab reports for the past three years. These young men applied to college confident they can pull together a solid essay on any subject.
Again, these young men are increasingly veering right, politically, according to the Fall 2025 Harvard Youth Poll. And in their first semester, they’ll face a writing instructor likely hostile to AI.
The Conference on College Composition and Communication, the primary professional organization for writing educators, just passed a resolution affirming the right of students and faculty to categorically refuse the use of generative AI in the classroom. The productivity benefits of the technology are dismissed as unsubstantiated claims; adoption is characterized as corporate intrusion by Big Tech. Members are instructed to reject the workforce preparation justification, insisting instead that the writing classroom must remain a space for processing feelings and engaging in civic participation.
I’m not overstating how gendered this is. Today’s Inside Higher Ed coverage confirms this. Every scholar quoted is a woman. The resolution itself, which was passed “overwhelmingly,” grounds AI refusal in Black and Indigenous feminist theory. A female professor calls AI advocates “profiteers and opportunists.” A female graduate student says there is “more value in rediscovering why human intelligence is so valuable.” Over a thousand educators worldwide have signed a separate open letter refusing to adopt generative AI in education. My feelings about this should be obvious: I am horrified.
The battle lines are being drawn. Universities are requiring incoming first year students who view AI as a legitimate productivity accelerator to take classes with instructors whose professional organization has demanded they reject the technology in terms that include “white language supremacy.”
If you spend any time on academic social media (especially on bsky), you know how loud the clash will be. Anyone who thinks last year’s University of Oklahoma religion paper dustup was big should start making popcorn now.
It may be that the mass encounter ends with a whimper, not a bang. Perhaps instructors will just give an A to everyone. Or perhaps some state legislators will shine a light on first year writing and ask hard questions about return on investment.
What are students asked to do in college composition classes anyway? Multiple drafts of personal reflection. They aren’t taught “writing.” First year writing is a soft onramp for college students and a subsidy for graduate programs in the humanities. At the University of Central Florida, they “critically examine and act on the relationship among identity, literacy, language, and power.” At Miami University, students compose “a rhetorical analysis of a cultural artifact from a local community to which they belong.” A 2016-17 HERI faculty survey found that 80.6 percent of undergraduate-facing faculty agree that their role is encouraging students to become “agents of social change.” The profession’s own resolution says the goal is processing feelings and civic participation, not writing.
New calls to add “AI fluency” to first year writing are bound to fail if the same AI-skeptics are teaching these classes, compelling students to “disclose” AI use.
Is there no way to stop the fireworks this fall?
Online general education is over, as everyone is finally recognizing. There is no way for human students to demonstrate that they have actually learned anything from a class dedicated to teaching known knowns. Bringing these courses back in person means that taxpayers are funding hundreds of sections, housed in buildings that cost money to heat, for no return on investment.
If universities do not cancel first year writing, the volume of academic integrity cases will consume everyone. Young men will simply take their tuition dollars elsewhere. The academic payoff does not justify this massive institutional damage. The prudent executive action is to eliminate mandatory first-year writing before August. Kill it now.
Holy cow. The first course I ever taught, as a second year PhD student in literature, was freshman writing. The importance of policing the political perspectives of students was assumed as a matter of course. It was not questioned during the week of training or the weekly mentoring sessions that lasted for that first year. The focus was clearly on the "how" of it all, not the "whether." There was only one correct way to proceed, and this was it. I was a pretty typical PhD student, in that I lacked the perspective to grasp the manner in which our training for this position, and our execution of our responsibilities, had been totally ideologically captured. (Someday I will tell the story of what happened when I did question it during a training session, and was shouted down in front of dozens of faculty and students by a full professor.) For now, I will just say that how I was trained was standard and state of the art; entirely of a piece with graduate education itself at the time, not just at my program, but across the country. We thought we were sophisticated, right, and good. It took a lot of unwinding over a lot of years for me to see the problems with that clearly. I'm speaking of a moment 35 years ago – a lifetime of sorts. Things have only gotten "more so" since then. And now, the inevitable collision with multiple realities and multiple fantasies -- economic, technological, institutional -- may finally be here. Thank you for this illuminating piece.
It's fair to say that I am one of the most public critics of how FYW is generally taught and resourced at our institutions - I've published two (maybe three) books about it! - but this is some fucked up shit. Rash, delusional, ill-informed, and it will have the opposite of its claimed intended effect of moving students towards writing experiences that help them become effective communicators.
We have all kinds of knowledge about what kinds of experiences student writers will find meaningful and get them engaged with building their writing practices (skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of writers). I assigned these things over the 20 years of my career teaching writing and students showed real progress as writers.
Countering supposed "gendered" teaching with gendered assumptions about male students based on limited public opinion survey seems like pretty thin evidence on which to cancel all of first year writing across the country. This doesn't even rise to the position of an interesting polemic, it's grievance farming, a rising genre on this platform.