Well, here we are. So many enraging things have happened in higher ed lately that I feel I should acknowledge them, but it’s difficult to know where to start. It’s not difficult to know what to say: I’ve written about 5,000 words over the last 14 days just to get all the thoughts down, many of which will probably not be published. The trouble is picking which disaster to focus on at the moment.
Maybe I’ll start where I am, at the flagship university of the state of Mississippi. I’d better say in advance: the views expressed herein are my own, and do not in any way represent the views of my institution.
In Mississippi, we’re staring down the barrel of some long-expected DEI legislation, of the same kind that has affected other state institutions. Our House and Senate have each passed bills that would effectively eliminate DEI-related trainings and possibly censor the kinds of things we could discuss in the classroom, among other provisions. Right now, the legislators are putting their heads together to take the best or worst from each bill to create a final version they can both agree on.
I don’t want to get too deeply into the text of these bills, because there’s far too much to unpack and they’re going to change anyway. I do want to note one key feature of the Senate bill that I imagine will persist into the final version: the fact that it doesn’t lead with DEI. The bill is framed as
AN ACT TO ENACT THE “REQUIRING EFFICIENCY FOR OUR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES SYSTEM (REFOCUS) ACT”
(Sidenote: maybe the word choice here is standard for legislation, but—an act to enact an act? Couldn’t we put this more elegantly?)
I’m far from the first to observe this, but let’s be real here: no one cares about “efficiency.” Not Mississippi legislators, not the Republican party, not even the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” that is currently wreaking havoc on the federal government. It’s just a useful keyword. “Efficiency” is both anodyne and popular—who could be against efficiency? As such, it’s a good guise under which to decimate public funding, “DEI,” and anything else billionaires or their cronies don’t like.
Plus, it allows them to make statements like this:
“At no point are we doing anything to make an attempt to destroy education in Mississippi, for we’re only trying to make it better,” McCaughn said. “It does not mean we are abandoning diversity.”
Conspicuously absent here, of course, are the words “equity” and “inclusion.” Black kids from the Delta are definitely welcome to attend our state institutions—as long as they don’t expect to be respected or supported once they get there. I’m not committed to “DEI” as a formulation, but come on. Is “diversity” the best we can do?
Government officials aren’t the only people talking about efficiency. So are the AI boosters. Many of the companies selling AI products promise that their applications will make us more efficient teachers and our students more efficient learners.
Authors of Teaching with AI José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson agree. They suggest that AI can “free up faculty time to focus on the teaching and relationship-building that matter most.” The “tedious tasks” AI can perform “at scale,” according to Bowen and Watson, include providing “grades and feedback” for essays, and doing so in the instructor’s own “voice.” AI can also “improve relationships” by remembering important facts about students for us. My AI assistant, for example, could “recognize” a student who comes to my office hours, instantly call up information about them, and then remind me to ask them about their dog. It’s like “Grammarly for empathy”!
Did anybody ask for this? Does following my machine-generated script for human social interaction really display “empathy” or is it just the performance of it? Does it matter? Does anybody care that we’re creating a simulacrum of a student-teacher exchange rather than fostering a real relationship with another person?
What if, instead of devising evermore dystopian ways to efficiently manage 800 students a semester, we simply hired more teachers and created smaller classes? What if instructors had time to provide substantial feedback to students in their real voices, instead of asking a machine to poorly ventriloquize them? What if they had the brain space to actually remember that their student has a beloved dog and the emotional capacity to care and inquire about it? What if they could relate to other human beings in authentic ways rather than asking a large language model to pretend to do that for them?
Why does this feel like an impossible dream? Well, for starters, the university would go under, or so I’ve been told. Such a plan wouldn’t allow us to keep generating more and more tuition money to make up for larger and larger cuts to state funding. Cuts perpetuated, of course, under the guise of “efficiency.”
Unlike “DOGE” or the proposed “Mississippi University System Efficiency Task Force,” generative AI can, I believe, provide a few helpful services, some of which (to give Bowen and Watson their due) might even save me and my students time.
Ultimately, however, the underlying goal of all of these right-wing/corporate/AI entities is the same, and it’s not to promote “efficiency”: it’s to continue gutting public goods, like higher ed, so the same people can keep exploiting others and making money. Why hire more teachers when you could invest in Khanmigo? Why tolerate African-American studies and anthropology when other majors produce much better capitalist worker bees? Why fund public education at all when you could subsidize the ultra-wealthy instead?
This blog post came to be through a ridiculously inefficient process. What you’re reading is a third attempt, written on a third topic. I’ve also gotten feedback on various drafts from two colleagues (both of whom lovingly advised me to rein it in). I’ve spent much more time on my writing this week than I normally spend—far too much on a silly little blog post.
The reason I spent so much time is because I had so many thoughts and emotions that I needed to process. Even this post, on what I anticipated would be a more focused topic, is straining to contain all the ideas I want to cram into it. I myself am straining to take the venomous anger I feel and shape it into something more measured and coherent and useful. (I’m afraid I’m having only limited success.)
But this process is only inefficient if you think my time is better employed by creating a product than by thinking and feeling things. It’s only inefficient if my primary purpose is to be a productive worker rather than a human being. Are there more profitable uses of my time? Sure. Do I feel my time has been wasted? Absolutely not.
As a writing teacher, I think this is what writing can do. It’s one of the best uses of writing I can think of, actually. And I want my students to have what I have: the ability to work through white-hot, burning rage by accidentally banging out 5,000 words of pure snark when they’re supposed to be doing something more “productive.”
I want them to use AI, if they use it at all, to advance their learning, not to make their writing process more “efficient.” I, like others at my institution, want students to pursue what one state official has called “useless degrees” in “garbage fields” if it enriches their time on this planet. I want them to become the kind of critical thinkers who can analyze the rhetoric of Senate bills and executive orders to see how words like “efficiency” and “wasteful” and “merit” are being used as dog whistles—and who can disrupt the startling efficiency of this backwards project by throwing sand in its gears.
I want us all to make human thriving, not efficiency, the center of our work. Is that too much to ask?
Please don’t rein it in. 😊 I’ve been complaining about “efficiency” since before all this went down so I am so here for this.
Thank you so much for this post, Emily. It is exactly what I needed to read today. Someone at last November's POD conference recommended the book The Slow Professor and that's been giving me life this winter.