Why Ideas Still Matter in a World of Machines

One of my colleagues, an outstanding writing instructor for more than two decades, has mapped out her exit strategy. She earned a counseling master’s degree, recently completed her life coach certification, and told me she no longer believes in the mission of teaching college writing. Assigning prompts to students who submit AI-generated essays feels meaningless to her—and reading these machine-produced pages makes her physically ill.

Her words jolted me. I have devoted nearly forty years to this vocation, a career sustained by the assumption that teaching the college essay is an essential skill for young people. We have long agreed that students must learn how to shape chaos into coherence, confront questions that matter to the human condition, write with clarity and force, construct persuasive arguments, examine counterpoints, form informed opinions, master formats, cultivate an authorial voice, and develop critical thinking in a world overflowing with fallacies and propaganda. We also teach students to live with “interiority”—to keep journals, build inner lives, and nurture ideas. These practices have been considered indispensable for personal and professional growth.

But with AI in the picture, many of my colleagues, including the one planning her departure, now feel bitter and defeated. AI has supplanted us. To our students, AI is more than a tool; it is a counselor, therapist, life coach, tutor, content-generator, and editor that sits in their pockets. They have apps through which they converse with their AI “person.” Increasingly, students bond with these “people” more than with their teachers. They trust AI in ways they do not trust professionals, institutions, or the so-called “laptop class.”

The sense of displacement is compounded by the quality of student work. Essays are now riddled with AI-speak, clichés, hollow uniformity, facile expressions, superficial analysis, misattributed quotations, hallucinated claims, and fabricated facts. And yet, for the professional world, this output will often suffice. Ninety-five percent of the time, AI’s mediocrity will be “good enough” as workplaces adjust to its speed and efficiency. Thus my colleagues suffer a third wound: irrelevance. If AI can produce serviceable writing quickly, bypassing the fundamentals we teach, then we are the dinosaurs of academia.

On Monday, when I face my freshman composition students for the first time, I will have to address this reality. I will describe how AI—the merciless stochastic parrot—has unsettled instructors by generating uncanny-valley essays, winning the confidence of students, and leaving teachers uncertain about their place.

Still, I am not entirely pessimistic about my role. Teaching writing has always required many hats, one of which is the salesman’s. I must sell my ideas, my syllabus, my assignments, and above all, the relevance of writing in students’ lives.

This semester, I am teaching a class composed entirely of athletes, a measure designed to help with retention. On the first day, I will appeal to what they know best: drills. No athlete mistakes drills for performance. They exist to prepare the body and mind for the real contest. Football players run lateral and backward sprints to build stamina and muscle memory. Pianists practice scales and arpeggios to ready themselves for recitals. Writing drills serve the same purpose: they build the foundation beneath the performance.

My second pitch will be about the human heart. Education does not begin in the brain; it begins when the heart opens. Just as the athlete “with heart” outperforms the one without it, the student who opens the heart to education learns lessons that endure for life.

I will tell them about my childhood obsession with baseball. At nine, I devoured every Scholastic book on the subject I could order through Independent Elementary. Many of my heroes were African-American players who endured Jim Crow segregation—forced into separate hotels and restaurants, traveling at great risk. I read about legends like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, barred from Major League Baseball because of their race. Through their stories, I learned American history not as dates and facts, but through the eyes of men I revered. My heart opened, and I was educated in a way my schoolteachers never managed.

I will also tell them about my lost years in college. I enrolled under threat of eviction from my mother and warnings that without higher education, I faced a life of poverty. I loathed classrooms, staring at the clock until I could escape to the gym for squats, deadlifts, and bench presses. Yet in an elective fiction class, I discovered Kafka—how he transmuted his nightmarish inner life into stories that illuminated his world. Then Nabokov, whose audacious style made me long to write with the same confidence, more than I ever longed for a luxury car. If I could capture Nabokov’s authority, I thought, I would be like the Tinman receiving his heart. I would be whole.

These changes did not come from professors, institutions, or—certainly—not AI. They came from within me, from my heart opening to literature. And yet, a sobering realization remains: the spark for me came through reading, and I see little reading today. I am not dogmatic—perhaps today’s students can find their spark in a documentary on Netflix or an essay on their phones. What matters is the opening of the heart.

I cannot deny my doubts about remaining relevant in the age of AI, but I believe in the enduring power of ideas. Ideas—true or false—shape lives. They can go viral, ignite movements, and alter history.

That is why my first assignment will focus on the Liver King, a grifter who peddled “ancestral living” to young men desperate for discipline and belonging. Though he was exposed as a fraud, his message resonated because it spoke to a generation’s hunger for structure and meaning. My students will explore both the desperation of these young men and the manipulations of Bro Culture that preyed upon them.

Ideas matter. They always have. They always will. My class will succeed or fail on the strength of the ideas I put before my students, and I must present them unapologetically—defended with both my brain and my heart.