As generative artificial intelligence becomes a more pressing discussion in academia, professors, students and instructors have faced both the implementation of and attempts to remove AI from the classroom. For the University’s English department, some professors have chosen assignments that utilize AI in writing, while others take the approach of completely eliminating students’ access to generative AI in their writing process.
Anna Brickhouse, Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English and American Studies, said in a statement to The Cavalier Daily that in response to students' access to generative AI, she and her colleagues have had continuous discussions regarding the significant impact of AI on the field.
“Our department has a venerable history of scholarship on the material book, an ancient technology that remains essential to the deepest experiences of reading,” Brickhouse wrote. “We are a department of the book, and the AI moment has helped to clarify that basic value [on the physical book].”
Brickhouse said to combat generative AI, there has been an emphasis among her colleagues on screen-free reading and writing within the English department. James Seitz, English professor and director of the Writing and Rhetoric Program — which offers first-year writing and upper-level courses in writing and rhetoric — also said in a statement to The Cavalier Daily that the use of AI in writing classes defeats the benefit of the course for students.
“I believe AI will have much to offer students in other endeavors, but when it comes to reading and writing, [there is] no substitute for doing it yourself,” Seitz wrote. “To give reading and writing to AI would leave our population intellectually impoverished.”
For fourth-year College student Amelia Johnson, AI has not had a place in any of her English classes over the last two years. An English major, Johnson said that when she entered the University in 2023, there was no clear instruction from professors regarding how to utilize AI in her classes but that professors in the past couple of years have implemented explicit rules against it.
“Most of [my classes] are tech-free classes, so I can't have my phone out or anything in class … I do all the writing by hand, and I get course packets for the reading,” Johnson said. “Basically everything is analog, and I have found that to be really helpful … it definitely has forced me to become a much better writer.”
Johnson said she is currently taking a class with English Prof. Jane Alison who has opted out of having an online Canvas page for the course. This is due to Alison’s worry that a student’s work could be uploaded somewhere else online after being submitted to Canvas, Johnson explained.
Not all classes in the English department are shying entirely away from technology and AI, however. Seitz stated that some professors are allowing students to use AI as an attempt to explore its possibilities and shortcomings, especially its failures at writing. Mana Iyer, third-year Commerce and College student, experienced this approach in her first-year writing requirement course two years ago.
The first-year writing requirement is an English class that University undergraduate students take during their first year, and cannot be tested or opted out of. The goal of the course, according to the Arts & Sciences Writing and Rhetoric Program website, is to focus on student writing and develop skills that benefit the student beyond their college years. This includes participating in critical inquiry, developing rhetorical agility, engaging diverse communities and attending to writing as a process.
Iyer said that one of her assignments in this course offered students the option to utilize generative AI for writing a paper, which the students were expected to edit themselves and include a disclaimer and reflection on the process of using AI. She noted that the purpose of this was for students to see whether AI could replicate the human imagination, and that the paper demonstrated that AI could eventually be utilized to mimic the human mind.
“The kind of thought experiment there [with the assignment] was whether AI can imagine or not, and how that compare[s] with human imagination,” Iyer said. “I think professors as a whole are maybe more thoughtful about what AI means for the future of thought.”
Gabby Kiser, a graduate instructor and Ph.D. candidate in the English department, has previously taught first-year writing requirement courses and said that when she began teaching in the fall of 2024 during a semester-long writing pedagogy course, there were no discussions about approaching AI with students.
“AI just wasn’t a priority [when becoming trained], so I wasn’t really prepared for it,” Kiser said. “When I came into the classroom, I only had 10 students my first semester. Because I wasn’t trained to keep an eye out for it, I don’t know if my students were using AI. I like to think they weren’t.”
Kiser said that now AI has grown into a much larger discussion in the English department, and in response to generative AI, the Writing and Rhetoric Program has urged instructors to move all student writing to be done completely in-person. This would entail in-class timed essays taking the place of take home essays, and writing assignments being done only during scheduled class times.
However, Kiser said she likely would not require all classroom writing to be in-person, with concerns about whether assignments done completely in-person or on paper would mimic writing skills required in students' potential careers, internships or academic careers. She added that the first-year writing requirement should help students develop writing skills that can be catered to different audiences and for different academic or career purposes, and that having writing only done on paper can be limiting.
“I would like to think that the first-year writing requirements don’t just prepare students for college assignments, but for other kinds of communications,” Kiser said. “I think that we can broaden our horizons a little bit so that we are not [having] every ENWR … preparing students for this kind of paper they don’t want to write … but for other kinds of writing.”
English Professor Courtney Watts said in a statement to The Cavalier Daily that many students are starting to feel that using generative AI is their only way to “keep up” in writing-focused classes.
“AI is definitely having a big impact across U.Va.'s writing classes. Writing can be hard, even painful,” Watts wrote. “Regardless of how well a given essay turns out, practicing writing makes us better at both writing and thinking, and the act of doing things the ‘hard way’ builds our capacity to take on daunting tasks.”
Watts also said that the use of AI in writing-focused classes prevents students from growing as writers, and that she and her colleagues hope that students are willing to put the work in themselves for the benefit of their own education.
Lily Kostro is a staff writer on the news desk and a third-year student in the College studying Politics. Lily is from Beverly, Mass. and enjoys writing about events happening on Grounds.
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