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  1. Mark's avatar

    I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…

  2. A in the UK's avatar
  3. Jonathan Turner's avatar

    I agree with all of this. The threat is really that stark. The only solution is indeed in-class essay exams,…

  4. Craig Duncan's avatar
  5. Ludovic's avatar

    My big problem with LLMs at the present time, apart from being potentially the epitome of Foucault’s panopticon & Big…

  6. A in the UK's avatar

    I’m also at a British university (in a law school) and my sentiments largely align with the author’s. I see…

  7. André Hampshire's avatar

    If one is genuinely uninterested in engaging with non-human interlocutors, it is unclear why one continues to do so—especially while…

Thoreau’s revenge on literature professors during the pandemic

This is funny; an excerpt:

A few months ago, you were talking smack about my year in a cabin. Now you’re trapped in your condo in Yonkers or the backside of Amherst or wherever, and you’d trade it in a heartbeat for 150 square feet and a whole forest full of owls and frogs and shit….

Every damn fall, you tell your first-year Am Lit seminar that I’m completely full of shit. You stand there in your goddamned tweed jacket with the suede elbow patches, and tell the kids how my experiment in self-reliance was all just a sham. Then you angle your head just so, and say something snarky about “performative solitude” or “cabin porn.” And for the coup de grâce, you proclaim that I was never really alone at Walden Pond, because I had regular visitors.

Bitch, I disclosed my visitors — I wrote a whole damned chapter called “Visitors.” Can’t blame me if some debutante from Darien didn’t read it. And who’s entertaining visitors now? Not your quarantined ass.

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