The Rebranding of College Writing Instructors as Prompt Engineers

There’s a cliché I’ve sidestepped for decades, the kind of phrase I’ve red-penned into oblivion in freshman essays. But now, God help me, I must say it: I see the handwriting on the wall. And it’s written in 72-point sans serif, blinking in algorithmic neon.

I’ve taught college writing for forty years. My wife, a fellow lifer in the trenches, has clocked twenty-five teaching sixth and seventh graders. Between us, we’ve marked enough essays to wallpaper the Taj Mahal. And yet here we are, staring down the barrel of obsolescence while AI platforms politely tap us on the shoulder and whisper, “We’ve got this now.”

Try crafting an “AI-resistant” assignment. Go ahead. Ask students to conduct interviews, keep journals, write about memories. They’ll feed your prompt into ChatGPT with the finesse of a hedge fund trader moving capital offshore. The result? A flawlessly ghostwritten confession by a bot with a stunning grasp of emotional trauma and a suspicious lack of typos.

Middle school teachers, my wife says, are on their way to becoming glorified camp counselors with grading software. As for us college instructors, we’ll be lucky to avoid re-education camps dressed up as “professional development.” The new job? Teaching students how to prompt AI like Vegas magicians—how to trick it into coherence, how to interrogate its biases, how to extract signal from synthetic noise. Critical thinking rebranded as Prompt Engineering.

Gone are the days of unpacking the psychic inertia of J. Alfred Prufrock or peeling back the grim cultural criticism of Coetzee’s Disgrace. Now it’s Kahoot quizzes and real-time prompt battles. Welcome to Gamified Rhetoric 101. Your syllabus: Minecraft meets Brave New World.

At sixty-three, I’m no fool. I know what happens to tired draft horses when the carriage goes electric. I’ve seen the pasture. I can smell the industrial glue. And I’m not alone. My colleagues—bright, literate, and increasingly demoralized—mutter the same bitter mantra: “We are the AI police. And the criminals are always one jailbreak ahead.”

We keep saying we need to “stop the bleeding,” another cliché I’d normally bin. But here I am, bleeding clichés like a wounded soldier of the Enlightenment, fighting off the Age of Ozempification—a term I’ve coined to describe the creeping automation of everything from weight loss to wit. We’re not writing anymore; we’re curating prompts. We’re not thinking; we’re optimizing.

This isn’t pessimism. It’s clarity. And if clarity means leaning on a cliché, so be it.