With the arrival of August, fall 2025 is upon most college faculty. My classes begin in three weeks. But fall 2025 feels different from my previous thirty-five years of teaching.
It feels essential to state the stakes.
We are at a dire moment. I don’t feel I can just do what I’ve always been doing, drifting along, incrementally adding new tools, moving the blocks around.
It feels bigger than this.
As Zak Stein and others point out: education is the metacrisis. Will Richardson despairs that “Our narratives of education are…on the brink of collapse. Schools as we know them were created for a time that no longer exists.”
John Dewey, a hundred years ago, pointed out that democracy and education are intertwined. Under certain conditions,
the school becomes itself a form of social life, a miniature community and one in close interaction with other modes of associated experience beyond school walls. All education which develops power to share effectively”—not contained within purely schoolish walls—”in social life is moral….Interest in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential moral interest (John Dewey, Democracy and Education, p. 360).
Goodness knows we need more morality in our collective life.
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Democracy is in peril in the US and globally. Oligarchs control strongmen, who control courts, who bow and scrape to maintain favor, while the people are rounded up by lawless masked thugs, and the sick wander the streets, vulnerable and alone.
The planet is heating, heaving. Burning, crying, swirling with lightning and heat and wind and water out of place, or at least out of the places we want it.
Students face the consequential judgment of their teachers, tests, systems, parents, and anticipated employers, and are desperate for all possible methods of keeping themselves from failure and shame. They feel that their futures and survival lie in the balance. They are on edge, overwhelmed, afraid.
Teachers are offered untried magical solutions that will make our lives simpler, more efficient, convenient. “Seamless integration” between one product created by an educational technology company married to a newer one, AI tools that will design classes, grade papers, summarize discussions: what’s not to like? (Students are offered a huge number of tools, too.)
I like none of it.
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So what is a professor to do?
What I'm going to do is refuse. [***I recognize and risk all my privilege in enjoying this freedom.]
I’m going to refuse the handed-down structures that serve everything, anything, other than my students’ humanity. This includes both my pedagogical structures and the tools I incorporate in my classes.
For a long time I’ve rejected conventional schoolish structures, which I’ve written about at length here and here, especially.
I invite students’ attention, their relationships, their participation. I don’t demand it.
I don’t demand attention, compliance, attendance.
I refuse to treat all the students in my classes as uniform cogs.
I honor their choices.
I don’t judge their interests, and I don’t create incentives that force them to pretend to inauthentic interest in me or my course.
I’m not going to force my students to produce pretend questions.
I’m not going to dictate how their curiosity should be corralled.
I make time for students to develop curiosity and to know each other.
I don’t grade individual work throughout the semester, though I do give feedback and foster both peer feedback and self-reflection. (I do have to submit a grade at the end of the semester, but I have no interest in this.)
I’ll keep doing all that.
But this semester, after trying it for over a year, I’m also rejecting the use of Canvas, which I wrote about just about exactly a year ago. I’m not going to have students submit their work into this “seamless integration” of a “Learning Management System” and a “Large Language Model.” I’m not using either of them, at least as much as I can avoid them.
All summer I've been reading about AI, and as new “opportunities” and “tools” are breathlessly offered, new questions keep arising, such as: What happens to students’ and faculty intellectual property? To their private information?
Nobody quite knows. (Shoshana Zuboff warned us in 2019 about surveillance capitalism, and that was before the surge in LLMs.)
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What I am going to do is to be present as a human being, who is delighted to meet dozens of younger people, with their energy, their stories, their selves. They don’t have to reveal those selves to me, but if they care to, I’ll cherish them.
I am going to be honest with them: I know a bunch of things but not everything. I’m intensely curious. I’m concerned about the world at large. I think my field (anthropology) allows us to notice things about the human world that might otherwise be taken-for-granted. I'm excited to share this with them.
Our bodies and attention are resources.
The reading, viewing, activities, projects are means to the end, which is nothing short of a new way of noticing.
I'm going to emphasize “threshold concepts,” the transformative, irreversible, integrative lenses that disciplinary expertise builds on, and to do so within an environment of cooperation and calm interaction.
We are not going to cram in as much content as possible.
We are not going to speed through everything. In fact, I'm deliberately embracing the power of slow learning, but it will be hard—the hardest thing—because I have decades of practice going fast.
We're going to be as analog as possible. Whenever I decide to use a technological tool, I am going to interrogate it:
Who owns it?
Who profits from it?
Who pays for it?
What are the environmental effects? Energy? Cooling? Rare earth minerals?
What happens to the data once we use it? Student writing, intellectual property? Privacy?
What are the labor conditions behind it?
What are the relational effects? Sharing? Learning? Avoidance?
Do we need it?
What is it pushing us to do?
Who has access?
Where does it go after it is used?
Does it feel good? Is it beautiful? Does it bring joy, or dread?
I am going to continue to use sticky notes on boards, index cards, pieces of paper, pens. I am going to encourage my students to order physical books, though I know they find ebooks more “efficient.”
I’m going to be wondering with them about this promised new world of virtually effortless—and thus learningless—college.
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I'm reminded of Wendell Berry’s brief but powerful article, published in Harper’s in 1988, called “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer.” He did an interview three decades later, in 2019, with Travis Kitchens of the Christian Science Monitor, ending with this thought:
The only motive that’s worth anything is love. If you don’t do the work that you love, and if you don’t do it for love, your artistry is not informed by love. It can’t be any good….You can’t make a robot that will work from love. It doesn’t work from anything; it doesn’t have any motives. Or its motive is electricity, you could say…So my little essay about…why I’m not going to buy a computer…was just a part of my strategy to try to keep myself whole as a human being. I don’t want my life to be lived for me by a machine. (Wendell Berry, 2019)
Berry’s human and humane motive of love is not what we usually hear. Far more common is to hear tools promoted for the benefit of profit, return on investment, efficiency, speed, power, promotion, competition, status, prestige, success. I understand that students live in a world where their attention is payment for everything that is “free,” where they are cynically manipulated to consume, where school feels like drudgery and miraculous tools can liberate them, so they can have success without the effort.
But after teaching so long, I also know that every human has a spark of curiosity, even, dare I say, a spark of a soul. It’s that that I’m going to be keeping in mind.
I am going to begin my course revisions with a reminder that what matters is the fully human, fully relational, dignity of the humans who appear in my classes, and if I occasionally invoke the motive of “love,” and shock them, well then, I guess shock is better than cynicism.
And we have enough of that.
If my class can be a little oasis, showing students that they don’t have to give up all belief in the world that could be, the world of a beautiful planet where people live in dignity and security, then I will have done my job just a little better.
The LLMs might imitate it. But I don’t think they can achieve it.
