Reasons Not To Be a College Professor Right Now

 

Peter Hans, President of the UNC System

 

A.I.  

I retired as a college professor in the nick of time (well, 26 years ago, but still). I taught a lot of advanced composition, coaching students in three basic writing challenges: the personal essay, in which a student tells his own story; research, usually tracing and characterizing the pop culture reaction to major national stories of importance; interview, telling someone else's story. I think I was good at it.

But what the hell would I do now with A.I. unleashed on the world? My teaching method -- having every student in my office once or twice a week to review their drafts and make suggestions -- made plagiarism almost impossible. I don't think any of them would have dared hand me something someone else wrote. But A.I. not only makes easy plagiarism possible. It makes it almost inevitable.

Say a student has chosen to research press accounts of the Lindberg baby kidnapping in 1932. My students used to go to the library and pore through old magazines and read the New York Times on microfilm. But now? I dare you to impersonate a student and ask Chatgpt how mass media characterized Lindberg before and after the kidnapping and whether there was any nay-saying about the national hero and his tragic loss. You'd get a publishable essay, with all the links to sources. Research paper done!

A.I. is going to change all of education.

 

Peter Hans  

It's one thing for Silicon Valley to mess with individual achievements based on long and good work; it's wholly another thing when the president of the UNC system -- which includes AppState -- acquiesces to witch-hunters on the Right and mandates a new university-wide policy that all faculty class syllabuses are now public records and will be posted up online for the convenience of politically motivated groups looking for anything that doesn’t match their viewpoint.

One man mandated the new policy -- not the General Assembly, but the UNC System President himself, Peter Hans. Single-handedly. All by himself. He didn't even get the agreement of the UNC Board of Governors. Hans is so clearly in his position because the Republican super-majority in the General Assembly wants him there, and he intends to please them in the continuing harassment of higher education. Hans was himself a one-time Republican political operative who worked as a senior policy advisor to senators Laugh Faircloth and Richard Burr and became a campaign consultant for Elizabeth Dole. 

In October 2025, the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project tried to use their fishing license— public-records requests -- to target some 70 UNC-Chapel Hill courses, "particularly courses dealing with race, gender, sexuality and related subjects." Some administrators pushed back, averring that instructors' syllabi were not public records. So in December 2025 -- three months after the Heritage Foundation went fishing -- President Hans announces the new policy that all course syllabi are public records and must be posted online for the convenience of stalkers and revenge-addicts. 

Here's what the new policy requires of teachers -- in addition to the usual week-by-week outline of reading assignments. I consider it onerous as well as ominous:

1. Course name and description. 

2. Goals, objectives, student learning outcomes and expectations. 

3. An explanation of how the professor will approach grading, including a scale, a percentage breakdown of major assignments, and attendance and participation expectations. 

4. All course materials that students will have to purchase. 

5. A statement indicating that the inclusion of diverse scholarly perspectives does not imply endorsement of those perspectives, but rather is an attempt to develop critical thinking.

I'm glad to be out of the system.