Steven D. Krause

The New York Times published an opinion piece the other day by Joe Cruz, who is the chair of the philosophy department at Williams College, called “What if Writing Isn’t Central to Thinking?”

This post is very EMU-centric– not to say that anyone at EMU will be interested either!

It’s far from done, but 2026 has already been a notable year of declines, changes, and endings for me, and I’m not just talking about the demise of the CCCCs.

(h/t to the 1975 New York Daily News for the headline.

Even before I started reading Rose Horowitch’s long essay in The Atlantic, the title, “The End of Reading is Here,” both aggravated me– because no, it’s not!

Jay Caspian Kong’s New Yorker article “The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I.” is about, well, some professors in “despair” about teaching in the age of AI.

Chances are, you have heard of/seen various viral clips of commencement speakers talking about AI getting booed by the graduating students.

This past semester was an odd one for me.

I have a vague (and likely mostly an imaginary) memory of turning 10 in 1976, thinking how it was cool my age was in double-digits and vaguely wondering what it would be like to be 20 or 30, figuring out that when I turned 40, it would be the next century.

In all three of the classes I’m teaching this semester (and, like last semester, I’m teaching two sections of first-year writing and Writing, Rhetoric, and AI), I am once again having students read and discuss Hua Hsu’s New Yorker essay from last summer,…

The two things that ran continuously in the background for me in 2025 (when they weren’t in the foreground) were AI and Trump, Trump and AI, AI AI, Trump Trump, again and again and again.

It’s been three years since ChatGPT was released and AI exploded all over the place, causing a whole new moral panic in academia that is still going strong.