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.
I'm kind of glad you fought through it though. Not being willing to teach first-year comp can get you in hot academic water! Yada yada yada, I'm now in the philosophy department. :)
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.
I swear to god I thought I was being punked when I saw this article, because it's poorly argued, poorly sourced ragebait drivel from a university bureaucrat
Excellent and informative as always. But as a newspaper man, I would say you buried the lede: First-year writing students are not taught writing. It's been 26 years (omg!) since I taught introductory journalism at the local community college, but I have to say that at that time, they weren't taught writing in high school either. As you know, writing CAN be taught. I know this sounds crazy, but why not try it?
In high school, my students had been taught that the main purpose of writing was expressing one's emotions. This drove my own daughter nuts when she was in high school. “Why would I want to share my inmost thoughts with someone I don't know?”
I once did an independent study in writing with a graduating senior who needed the writing credit. He did color commentary on hockey games for the college radio station. He was a very fluent writer, albeit in an oral style.
I’m a first year writing teacher, by way of philosophy - my masters project was on comparative epistemology .. Masters project in English was in using adult literature to introduce philosophy to high school students.
I appreciate your questioning the value and purpose of good instruction in writing, and had not thought about the gender dynamic unfolding here.
But I think you’re very wrong on wanting to kill first year writing.
Writing, as we teach it in our tiny state school, is about rhetorical awareness, reading and research. I can think of no more important topic that we increasingly need: our capacities to read the world and respond accordingly… which is also a call to more genuinely care about one another, and inquire into how we might best serve the other.
Then again… I’m not that good of a writer… So I’m not sure I should be teaching it at all. I am an AI enthusiast, though, and so far, the only one I’ve met in my department.
Wow--an excellent addition to the conversation. Having worked as a first-year composition teacher at a community college for the last 26 years, I can corroborate much of what you are saying--including, I'm sorry to say, the claim that English 101 as currently constituted is not helpful in building students' writing skills. I will push back gently that students may get *something* useful in a well-designed ENGL101 class with a skilled teacher. If students aren't better writers by the end of first year composition, some of them may be better readers, or at least they may have higher cognitive endurance. And, in spite of (or because of) the cataclysmic changes afoot, we have an opportunity to design something better than the same old thing we've been doing for decades. I wrote about this opportunity myself a few months ago:
The point of first year writing isn't the papers that are produced, it is learning how to exist in an intellectual community while developing critical thinking skills. AI can't accomplish either of those goals for the first year student. It can't teach respectful intellectual disagreement, confident oral presentation skills, or how to write a good thesis statement. Effective writing teachers help students learn to do all of these things, even when we are women, and even when our students are young men. Critical thinking skills are necessary for students to be able to evaluate the quality of the content their AI tools produce, which is often very smoothly written glurge. No, the world does not need yet another comparative essay that juxtaposes X and Y work of literature. But it does need people who believe in the power of their own thought.
If “critical thinking skills” are separable from subject-matter expertise, and operationalized in small, simulated exercises like FYW assignments, then yes, the papers produced are the point. Dismissing their importance is to give the game away. They prove the attainment of skills, in the same way that a piano recital is proof of one’s piano playing ability.
FYW has a bizarre relationship to its own declared expertise. It claims to teach general “skills,” while disavowing the importance of their concrete demonstration, as you just have. And at the other end, rhet-comp disavows the importance of technical, testable proficiency, like the use of standard academic English, as the criterion of success or failure.
What exactly is left? An ethos? A vibe? This is what “community” seems to refer to, but it requires no expertise at all. Rather, it seems like a projection of the instructor’s own personality, which students are right to balk at and fob off with AI outputs.
Obviously the paper as proof of the mastery of concept is the point, but students often confuse the two. They believe the value of the paper is the paper qua paper, not the paper as a demonstration or performance of mental processes that are in development. Students who aren't confident in their own power to think will lean on AI to make the paper "good " But I tell my students that I would always rather see a messy paper with the imprints of their own growth as writers wrestling with concepts than something polished by the machine. The point isn't the polish, at that level. The point is the mental work.
I think in the background here is a dispute about whether AI *reaffirms* (your view) or *scrambles* (Hollis’s view) distinctions between product and process, or between knowledge and skill.
The underlying thesis isn’t just that men are more enthusiastic about AI, but something even stronger: Curious students are already learning both knowledge and skills from AI interactions in ways that outpace a lot, but maybe not all, of what happens in FYW classrooms. (One either believes this is true or not; I do.) If it’s true, then ideally, this state of affairs would free up time and energy for students and instructors to do other things... but the CCCC’s resolution about the right to “refuse” AI punts on this very possibility, with progressive self-aggrandizing blah-blah about power.
I can't speak to a resolution by an entity to which I do not belong, but I can say that all the discourse about AI at AWP was universally alarmist. But the issue as outlined here isn't about the absolute value of AI, or even the value of AI for writing. It's about whether or not freshman expository writing classes have value, even if a cohort of dr shman boys think they don't. And yes, a lot rests on the quality of teaching. But these programs take their learning outcomes seriously, and they are not in general training students to talk about their feelings. Thats what therapists do. Freshman writing classes exist to train college students in college level thinking, college level comportment, and college level responsibility. It's true that many freshman feel they don't need this training. That was true before they "got enthusiastic about AI." But the fact remains that they are in training for intellectual adulthood, and that takes practice. And the machine doesn't know how to do that.
One interesting thing about the CCCC resolution is that for a long time the fashionable position was that rejecting or banning the latest tech tools was discriminatory against the disabled and such. Obviously this argument could be made when it comes to AI pretty easily but the terms of the debate are shifting. These are also largely the people who wanted education to be remote permanently, so as not to discriminate against the immuno compromised or whatever.
CCCC is a nightmarishly awful organization, the absolute nadir of academic professional orgs. The one conference I attended was a true dark night of the soul. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.
A member sent me this in the chat, pointing out: “as a writing scholar and member of CCCC, that the resolution was not passed by a vote of the actual membership. They put it to a vote of the people physically present in that room at the conference on Friday afternoon. Most of the conference panels were about much better ways of thinking about AI and writing. And many of us (me included) made urgent pleas for us to rethink what we do in writing classes--immediately.” This is interesting.
I teach first-year composition, what used to be called Composition I and has since been renamed in the California community college system. The class still covers fundamentals like paragraph structure, integrating evidence, evaluating sources, conducting research, and organizing an essay so a reader can follow the reasoning.
AI has clearly changed the environment. In my courses, AI literacy is part of the curriculum. It has to be.
I’m currently trying to learn Python. I’m not trying to become a programmer who writes elegant code from scratch. I want enough familiarity with the language to recognize what code is doing and to work with it. AI lets me participate and create in that space without years of struggle that might otherwise lead nowhere. Without those tools, I probably would have excluded myself from that whole world.
I see something similar happening with academic writing. AI can open doors for students who once felt shut out of it, offering support that is patient, immediate, and always available. At the same time, students still benefit from understanding how ideas are organized: claims, evidence, reasoning, and structure. There’s room to teach both.
I took a freshman writing class a few decades ago. It was fine, but it did seem a little superfluous. If indeed "the kids can't write" (as they usually can't), I wonder if some kind of tutorial to help them with their written assignments for their major courses would be better than a dedicated "writing" class.
Both AI in general, and this problem in particular, get to the core of what "writing" is. It vividly exemplifies the "two cultures." Subjectivity and 'voice' are actually important in the humanities. If I read Auden, it's because I like Auden's mind, and I want to read what Auden has to say about something. But those things are not only unimportant, but actively deprecated, in the sciences. If I read an economics paper, I want to know what the authors' analysis reveals about their data. Authors and editors of papers like that usually eliminate all traces of subjectivity and voice from the work.
It certainly seems like the role of AI will be very different in these two kinds of 'writing.' If subjectivity and voice are important, then AI is a tool for faking and cheating, and will arouse anger and a backlash. But if those things don't count, then AI is just a new super-duper tool for slicing through more data, more quickly and efficiently.
If AI is doing the work, AI should get the degree. If students don't need to learn to write them to produce content then they don't need a college degree either.
Fresh and provocative, and maybe correct as a prediction. Writing instructors are right to resist AI, which is a threat to the development of human cognitive capacity, but that'll mean fighting the guys more than the girls, and apparently for little or nothing if writing courses aren't effective. I'll only push back gently on one small point. We don't yet know how effective writing courses are at undoing the damage of overreliance on AI in high school, which is a new malady, or how effective they might become with some innovation. And writing remains the best way to externalize complex thinking, so that it can be evaluated, and to improve one's own thinking, since if you can't write it coherently there's a good chance that it wasn't a coherent thought to start with.
Having taught both freshman comp and technical writing, I'm inclined to think that classroom based writing teaching is ill-suited to the nature of the task. I've also learned to play the trumpet to a fairly high level of technical and musical skill. I did that through years of one-on-one weekly lessons. That's the standard method of instrumental and vocal music instruction. I assume that's the case because each individual is different and those differences matter pedagogically. I'd think writing is the same. Weekly one-on-one tutoring would be far more effective and, alas, probably more expensive as well. But isn't that the point of writing centers, one on one tutoring?
I would think there is a way to set up an LLM agent system to teach students routine writing skills. The student drafts, the LLM variously critiques and redrafts, turns it back to the student & converses with the student about it. Then the student redrafts or writes something else. Though I've not thought much about it, I've spent LOTS of time interacting with Claude and ChatGPT. That sort of things seems doable. Create such a system, make it available, and then have a writing center for one on one "last mile" tutoring.
Such tools are starting to be developed. One that the institution I work for is currently trialling is Feedback Fruits. Definitely still has some issues to be worked out, but it is heartening to see the use of an AI tool with the intent to actually help students develop their own skills and understanding rather than merely pumping a prompt in and submitting the result.
Always good to hear your views, Hollis. I much prefer them to the safe and predictable and expected ways of talking about the issues. What surprises me is how little I care about what happens to first-year writing even as a first-year writing teacher myself. Part of it is because of my general disenchantment with and concerns about AI (here you discuss AI in the context of the classroom and higher education, but isn't there also a larger context as well?), but the bigger part is that, contrary to your assertion that accreditors and legislatures demand the courses be offered, I just don't think anyone really values the courses themselves and, more importantly, the people who teach them. So if that means that first-year writing is (or ought to be) in its death throes, then so be it. As a species, we get exactly what we deserve.
I was thinking of you, Max, as the exception to the rule, and someone who has suffered for being the exception to the rule. You should write something about this. I will amplify.
Some universities in Japan have had something like a first-year writing course where the instructors would be freshly graduated PhD students or postgrads, and the work would be abysmal for them while the students would learn how to format an email (while writing on their messenger applications). Most universities have cut back on these courses recently, because they have started vigorously cutting adjuncts and making classes as large as they can so as to reduce any financial burden.
I almost cut and pasted your disclaimer and almost left the name Duke, but decided at this point everyone knows I’m a lonely voice speaking for myself…
I recently engaged with a writing instruction issue because I am teaching a frosh seminar on academic freedom and free speech at Duke in the fall, and it is hard to get writing instructors who will align their class with a topic. I did not understand the degree to which writing has become a curriculum in and of itself
Interesting! I follow someone on LinkedIn-- Physicist Victoria Hedlund-- who writes a lot about AI and gender bias. I'm going to send this to her now: https://genedlabs.ai/about
The call to cancel first-year writing is interesting! In 2024, I wrote a piece for Time with the headline "I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT." AI obviously wasn't the only reason I stopped teaching, but it was the last straw. I did not want to spend the rest of my career playing detective or giving feedback to machines. The article went viral, which is reflective of the feelings of many educators.
A killer post! "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." One of the best lines I read all year.
I never understood the value of the freshmen year general education. In Israel, undergrad degree is three years, since the material taught in the US to the freshmen class is covered in high school. I always wondered what they teach here in high school. Then I had two kids go through US high schools and I understood: how to pep rally, how to drink without your parents knowing, how to protest things you vaguely understand, and how to try desperately to look cool.
Maybe if they start teaching high school better, we can get rid of the costly, useless, general education in college. But then the Guild (faculty) will naturally vote against it.
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.
I'm kind of glad you fought through it though. Not being willing to teach first-year comp can get you in hot academic water! Yada yada yada, I'm now in the philosophy department. :)
Thank you and me too!
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.
I swear to god I thought I was being punked when I saw this article, because it's poorly argued, poorly sourced ragebait drivel from a university bureaucrat
Excellent and informative as always. But as a newspaper man, I would say you buried the lede: First-year writing students are not taught writing. It's been 26 years (omg!) since I taught introductory journalism at the local community college, but I have to say that at that time, they weren't taught writing in high school either. As you know, writing CAN be taught. I know this sounds crazy, but why not try it?
Agree! I would make everyone go cover a local sports match at the very least. Who what where when why, who scored, who was in the bleachers. Do it 5x.
In high school, my students had been taught that the main purpose of writing was expressing one's emotions. This drove my own daughter nuts when she was in high school. “Why would I want to share my inmost thoughts with someone I don't know?”
Exactly. Total invasion of privacy.
So rather than say, “Stop teaching writing,” shouldn't we say “Start teaching writing… “
I once did an independent study in writing with a graduating senior who needed the writing credit. He did color commentary on hockey games for the college radio station. He was a very fluent writer, albeit in an oral style.
I’m a first year writing teacher, by way of philosophy - my masters project was on comparative epistemology .. Masters project in English was in using adult literature to introduce philosophy to high school students.
I appreciate your questioning the value and purpose of good instruction in writing, and had not thought about the gender dynamic unfolding here.
But I think you’re very wrong on wanting to kill first year writing.
Writing, as we teach it in our tiny state school, is about rhetorical awareness, reading and research. I can think of no more important topic that we increasingly need: our capacities to read the world and respond accordingly… which is also a call to more genuinely care about one another, and inquire into how we might best serve the other.
Then again… I’m not that good of a writer… So I’m not sure I should be teaching it at all. I am an AI enthusiast, though, and so far, the only one I’ve met in my department.
This is the conversation I want to be having, not about badly written word salad “resolutions.”
Wow--an excellent addition to the conversation. Having worked as a first-year composition teacher at a community college for the last 26 years, I can corroborate much of what you are saying--including, I'm sorry to say, the claim that English 101 as currently constituted is not helpful in building students' writing skills. I will push back gently that students may get *something* useful in a well-designed ENGL101 class with a skilled teacher. If students aren't better writers by the end of first year composition, some of them may be better readers, or at least they may have higher cognitive endurance. And, in spite of (or because of) the cataclysmic changes afoot, we have an opportunity to design something better than the same old thing we've been doing for decades. I wrote about this opportunity myself a few months ago:
https://thesubwaytest.com/2026/01/12/ai-proofing-the-classroom/
Thanks for identifying the elephant in the room here--
The point of first year writing isn't the papers that are produced, it is learning how to exist in an intellectual community while developing critical thinking skills. AI can't accomplish either of those goals for the first year student. It can't teach respectful intellectual disagreement, confident oral presentation skills, or how to write a good thesis statement. Effective writing teachers help students learn to do all of these things, even when we are women, and even when our students are young men. Critical thinking skills are necessary for students to be able to evaluate the quality of the content their AI tools produce, which is often very smoothly written glurge. No, the world does not need yet another comparative essay that juxtaposes X and Y work of literature. But it does need people who believe in the power of their own thought.
If “critical thinking skills” are separable from subject-matter expertise, and operationalized in small, simulated exercises like FYW assignments, then yes, the papers produced are the point. Dismissing their importance is to give the game away. They prove the attainment of skills, in the same way that a piano recital is proof of one’s piano playing ability.
FYW has a bizarre relationship to its own declared expertise. It claims to teach general “skills,” while disavowing the importance of their concrete demonstration, as you just have. And at the other end, rhet-comp disavows the importance of technical, testable proficiency, like the use of standard academic English, as the criterion of success or failure.
What exactly is left? An ethos? A vibe? This is what “community” seems to refer to, but it requires no expertise at all. Rather, it seems like a projection of the instructor’s own personality, which students are right to balk at and fob off with AI outputs.
Obviously the paper as proof of the mastery of concept is the point, but students often confuse the two. They believe the value of the paper is the paper qua paper, not the paper as a demonstration or performance of mental processes that are in development. Students who aren't confident in their own power to think will lean on AI to make the paper "good " But I tell my students that I would always rather see a messy paper with the imprints of their own growth as writers wrestling with concepts than something polished by the machine. The point isn't the polish, at that level. The point is the mental work.
I think in the background here is a dispute about whether AI *reaffirms* (your view) or *scrambles* (Hollis’s view) distinctions between product and process, or between knowledge and skill.
The underlying thesis isn’t just that men are more enthusiastic about AI, but something even stronger: Curious students are already learning both knowledge and skills from AI interactions in ways that outpace a lot, but maybe not all, of what happens in FYW classrooms. (One either believes this is true or not; I do.) If it’s true, then ideally, this state of affairs would free up time and energy for students and instructors to do other things... but the CCCC’s resolution about the right to “refuse” AI punts on this very possibility, with progressive self-aggrandizing blah-blah about power.
I can't speak to a resolution by an entity to which I do not belong, but I can say that all the discourse about AI at AWP was universally alarmist. But the issue as outlined here isn't about the absolute value of AI, or even the value of AI for writing. It's about whether or not freshman expository writing classes have value, even if a cohort of dr shman boys think they don't. And yes, a lot rests on the quality of teaching. But these programs take their learning outcomes seriously, and they are not in general training students to talk about their feelings. Thats what therapists do. Freshman writing classes exist to train college students in college level thinking, college level comportment, and college level responsibility. It's true that many freshman feel they don't need this training. That was true before they "got enthusiastic about AI." But the fact remains that they are in training for intellectual adulthood, and that takes practice. And the machine doesn't know how to do that.
An essay is a performance of mastery a performance of comprehension. I'm not sure there's any validation beyond performance.
Ideally yes and the percent who are effective is the question here.
One interesting thing about the CCCC resolution is that for a long time the fashionable position was that rejecting or banning the latest tech tools was discriminatory against the disabled and such. Obviously this argument could be made when it comes to AI pretty easily but the terms of the debate are shifting. These are also largely the people who wanted education to be remote permanently, so as not to discriminate against the immuno compromised or whatever.
CCCC is a nightmarishly awful organization, the absolute nadir of academic professional orgs. The one conference I attended was a true dark night of the soul. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.
A member sent me this in the chat, pointing out: “as a writing scholar and member of CCCC, that the resolution was not passed by a vote of the actual membership. They put it to a vote of the people physically present in that room at the conference on Friday afternoon. Most of the conference panels were about much better ways of thinking about AI and writing. And many of us (me included) made urgent pleas for us to rethink what we do in writing classes--immediately.” This is interesting.
Agree
I teach first-year composition, what used to be called Composition I and has since been renamed in the California community college system. The class still covers fundamentals like paragraph structure, integrating evidence, evaluating sources, conducting research, and organizing an essay so a reader can follow the reasoning.
AI has clearly changed the environment. In my courses, AI literacy is part of the curriculum. It has to be.
I’m currently trying to learn Python. I’m not trying to become a programmer who writes elegant code from scratch. I want enough familiarity with the language to recognize what code is doing and to work with it. AI lets me participate and create in that space without years of struggle that might otherwise lead nowhere. Without those tools, I probably would have excluded myself from that whole world.
I see something similar happening with academic writing. AI can open doors for students who once felt shut out of it, offering support that is patient, immediate, and always available. At the same time, students still benefit from understanding how ideas are organized: claims, evidence, reasoning, and structure. There’s room to teach both.
Totally agree and happy you're teaching both!
Hoo boy. Interesting times.
I took a freshman writing class a few decades ago. It was fine, but it did seem a little superfluous. If indeed "the kids can't write" (as they usually can't), I wonder if some kind of tutorial to help them with their written assignments for their major courses would be better than a dedicated "writing" class.
Both AI in general, and this problem in particular, get to the core of what "writing" is. It vividly exemplifies the "two cultures." Subjectivity and 'voice' are actually important in the humanities. If I read Auden, it's because I like Auden's mind, and I want to read what Auden has to say about something. But those things are not only unimportant, but actively deprecated, in the sciences. If I read an economics paper, I want to know what the authors' analysis reveals about their data. Authors and editors of papers like that usually eliminate all traces of subjectivity and voice from the work.
It certainly seems like the role of AI will be very different in these two kinds of 'writing.' If subjectivity and voice are important, then AI is a tool for faking and cheating, and will arouse anger and a backlash. But if those things don't count, then AI is just a new super-duper tool for slicing through more data, more quickly and efficiently.
If AI is doing the work, AI should get the degree. If students don't need to learn to write them to produce content then they don't need a college degree either.
Totally agree!
Fresh and provocative, and maybe correct as a prediction. Writing instructors are right to resist AI, which is a threat to the development of human cognitive capacity, but that'll mean fighting the guys more than the girls, and apparently for little or nothing if writing courses aren't effective. I'll only push back gently on one small point. We don't yet know how effective writing courses are at undoing the damage of overreliance on AI in high school, which is a new malady, or how effective they might become with some innovation. And writing remains the best way to externalize complex thinking, so that it can be evaluated, and to improve one's own thinking, since if you can't write it coherently there's a good chance that it wasn't a coherent thought to start with.
Having taught both freshman comp and technical writing, I'm inclined to think that classroom based writing teaching is ill-suited to the nature of the task. I've also learned to play the trumpet to a fairly high level of technical and musical skill. I did that through years of one-on-one weekly lessons. That's the standard method of instrumental and vocal music instruction. I assume that's the case because each individual is different and those differences matter pedagogically. I'd think writing is the same. Weekly one-on-one tutoring would be far more effective and, alas, probably more expensive as well. But isn't that the point of writing centers, one on one tutoring?
I would think there is a way to set up an LLM agent system to teach students routine writing skills. The student drafts, the LLM variously critiques and redrafts, turns it back to the student & converses with the student about it. Then the student redrafts or writes something else. Though I've not thought much about it, I've spent LOTS of time interacting with Claude and ChatGPT. That sort of things seems doable. Create such a system, make it available, and then have a writing center for one on one "last mile" tutoring.
Such tools are starting to be developed. One that the institution I work for is currently trialling is Feedback Fruits. Definitely still has some issues to be worked out, but it is heartening to see the use of an AI tool with the intent to actually help students develop their own skills and understanding rather than merely pumping a prompt in and submitting the result.
Always good to hear your views, Hollis. I much prefer them to the safe and predictable and expected ways of talking about the issues. What surprises me is how little I care about what happens to first-year writing even as a first-year writing teacher myself. Part of it is because of my general disenchantment with and concerns about AI (here you discuss AI in the context of the classroom and higher education, but isn't there also a larger context as well?), but the bigger part is that, contrary to your assertion that accreditors and legislatures demand the courses be offered, I just don't think anyone really values the courses themselves and, more importantly, the people who teach them. So if that means that first-year writing is (or ought to be) in its death throes, then so be it. As a species, we get exactly what we deserve.
I was thinking of you, Max, as the exception to the rule, and someone who has suffered for being the exception to the rule. You should write something about this. I will amplify.
Some universities in Japan have had something like a first-year writing course where the instructors would be freshly graduated PhD students or postgrads, and the work would be abysmal for them while the students would learn how to format an email (while writing on their messenger applications). Most universities have cut back on these courses recently, because they have started vigorously cutting adjuncts and making classes as large as they can so as to reduce any financial burden.
Tell us what you really think. Damn!
I almost cut and pasted your disclaimer and almost left the name Duke, but decided at this point everyone knows I’m a lonely voice speaking for myself…
I recently engaged with a writing instruction issue because I am teaching a frosh seminar on academic freedom and free speech at Duke in the fall, and it is hard to get writing instructors who will align their class with a topic. I did not understand the degree to which writing has become a curriculum in and of itself
It's all about feelings Don. I have strong feelings about it.
Interesting! I follow someone on LinkedIn-- Physicist Victoria Hedlund-- who writes a lot about AI and gender bias. I'm going to send this to her now: https://genedlabs.ai/about
The call to cancel first-year writing is interesting! In 2024, I wrote a piece for Time with the headline "I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT." AI obviously wasn't the only reason I stopped teaching, but it was the last straw. I did not want to spend the rest of my career playing detective or giving feedback to machines. The article went viral, which is reflective of the feelings of many educators.
A killer post! "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." One of the best lines I read all year.
I never understood the value of the freshmen year general education. In Israel, undergrad degree is three years, since the material taught in the US to the freshmen class is covered in high school. I always wondered what they teach here in high school. Then I had two kids go through US high schools and I understood: how to pep rally, how to drink without your parents knowing, how to protest things you vaguely understand, and how to try desperately to look cool.
Maybe if they start teaching high school better, we can get rid of the costly, useless, general education in college. But then the Guild (faculty) will naturally vote against it.