In colleges and universities, teachers (like the professor at Brown) are quickly moving away from having students write papers (that is, out of class). Instead, they are giving in-class exams that can be monitored.

Many of my colleagues in the English Department have abandoned “term papers.” The English Department! We discuss what we can do to make sure our students don’t “cheat” as a time when it seems virtually (!) impossible to tell the difference between a real paper and a fake. So, the “blue book” I hated as an undergraduate and thought had died a natural death, has been resurrected.

I refuse and won’t give in. Or at least I haven’t so far.

I’ve been teaching a long time, but it never gets old. My teaching is always changing, like me and the world, which these days doesn’t seem to be changing for the better, though I think I am. Actually, the devolution of the world makes teaching feel more urgent than ever. I bring not only experience and continual learning to my teaching, but also my own experience when I was a student.

For my students to write papers out of class, there must a cultivated sense of trust or else teaching is not worth doing. More than one colleague and friend say I’m naïve, but I have my reasons and I remain hopeful.

Long ago, I stopped giving final exams in my “Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry” and “Milton” courses. As my students always write a long paper as the culmination of the term, a final exam seemed superfluous. What was I testing? Facts? Memorization? Once during the Milton course I told my students I’d just give them one question to write about. I told them, no need to study, just think deeply about Milton and the semester. The Question: “The College is going to get rid of the Milton course. Write your essay about whether and why they should or should not, while thinking about his writing and its significance.” I told them I didn’t care whether they said the course should disappear, only about the knowledge and understanding they exhibited. I received the most thoughtful and interesting “final exams.” (yes, in a blue book).

I know that for in-class exams, finals or midterms, many instructors give students passages to identify. Will students ever use this skill in their lives? But writing excellent essays—the ability to analyze, think and make an argument, provide evidence, discover and have new thoughts in writing—matters, and writing under the pressure of the clock in class does not produce the best thinking or writing.

The way I teach, including my relation with my students, also matters. In recent years I have seen how hard the world is, especially for young people, and have changed my teaching. I include as part of my syllabus that students need to discover what is important to them in what we’ve read and decide what they want to explore, and to use that in their term papers. (Actually, I give them a certain freedom in their earlier papers too, so they get used to exploring.) They should write a paper that makes them feel they’ve taken a step forward in their lives at the most difficult time. I give them this freedom (with rules), encouraging them to take a risk.

As for AI? I’m not worried. When they’re inspired by the material (and yes, the classes), they will put in the effort. On the first day of class, I tell them they cannot use generative AI and I cite articles about what AI does to your brain, which needs exercise just as much as one’s body. I ask if they want to get brain rot? Early dementia? Do they want their parents to pay, (or to get loans for) $90,000 a year to go to this elite college for that? If so, then be my guest.

My students know I care, that I’m there for them, and that my door is always open. I work with students who come in when their early papers are disappointing or when they aren’t sure what to write about. Yes, this is labor-intensive. I could not put this amount of time in if I were teaching large lectures, as I did at the University of Illinois. I know that I’m privileged, but even friends at small liberal arts schools say they can’t trust their students now because of seductive AI.

Yes, there will always be cheaters, just like there will always be haters. But I choose to live by the golden (and biblical) rule, do unto others as you would have done unto you. I still believe students will do the work because they are interested. And if they know you care about them, if you have faith in them, it makes a difference.

I have never graded on a curve and I won’t limit the number of A’s. They will get what they earn. I get amazing papers. Some students write far better papers than I did at their age. Why should I punish them for that? If I don’t give them this freedom, they will never grow to be strong enough to survive, let alone thrive, in this world.

It was before Covid hit, and I was teaching my Enlightenment Colloquium for junior English majors, when my students first brought up AI as a problem. Not that they were using it yet. We had yet to have ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot popping up unasked on our screens.

Our class had been reading eighteenth-century texts about the “Enlightenment,” Kant’s insistence that one dare to use reason and to be an adult, not a child, under “tutelage.” Before Kant there was Francis Bacon, the so-called father of the “new philosophy,” or new science, based on observation, experiments, using instruments/tools, not relying on the wisdom or authorities of the past. After him was Newton. The glorification of reason, what “man” can accomplish. John Milton, writing in “Areopagitica” (1644) argued that individuals, created by God with reason and free will, have the responsibility to think for themselves, to question, rather than follow, custom, to be active (not passive), seek truth, needing to distinguish between perfection and error, even if it is difficult. This is the work and goal of education, as we call it, the development of critical thinking

One of my thoughtful students brought up AI. She feared it, did not like that it might think for us, take over our lives. They feared the loss of control, a surrender of agency and autonomy---the very things they were fighting to have at the age of twenty. The class of twelve students were all of the same mind. All were English majors. Some were also pre-medicine, or had double majors, but not one of them thought the prospect of AI was liberating.

Now, here we are seven or eight years later. Colleges, students, and educators are living in a different world. The world according to AI. A prestigious press published a book that turned out to have (to their surprise?) been written by AI. A brilliant former student, teaching as she works on her Ph.D, tells me it has become increasingly hard to catch an AI-written student paper since AI can now be adjusted to sound more like the student, more natural.

Inside Higher Ed published an article about the Brown University economics professor who allowed his class to do a take-home midterm, only to find that most of them had used AI, and so, had the same answers. When he then told the class that the final would be in class (not a take home), many of his students immediately dropped the class. And an article in The Atlantic, “Bring Back the Blue Book,” extols its virtues. This August, The New York Times published, “AI Agents are Taking Entire Online Courses for Students.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about how education has changed, starting in kindergarten. An extension of our tech/screen obsession has created fertile ground for what I consider cheating, but may feel natural to young people, who as babies, have grown up with screens and a technology that might be fun (sometimes useful) but makes us passive receivers of things, as well as isolated, rather than social.

I just read a wonderful article in The Washington Post (Aug 4, 2026—“What elementary schools are slowly learning about screens”) on how tech has invaded elementary classrooms. 80% of school districts now issue devices to kindergartners, first-graders, and second-graders. Interactions are with screens and tech rather than each other. What I call the dehumanization of learning—a process that the changes the brain. It seems related to the decline in reading and literature (see the The Atlantic essay describing our descent into a new dark age where books and reading do not matter). And even among much older “readers,” many of them prefer audio-books (again, too passive an experience for me).

Given these changes in education our students have been experiencing, is it any wonder they gravitate to generative AI? It probably feels normal (not like cheating), and merely an extension of what they’ve been taught to experience . . . and how to learn!

Brave new world, indeed.