Provocative title, empty core. Less scholarship, more tantrum in academic garb. They also skate past what’s actually new about generative AI: cheap, personalized, high-volume output with opaque provenance and eroded authorship signals. That changes assessment design and verification, full stop.
Publisher: Inside Higher Ed
That title struts like it settles something and then face-plants. “No, the Pre-AI Era Was Not That Great” promises a myth-busting autopsy and delivers a soggy sermon. It’s clickbait swagger glued to hand-wringing.
The “evidence” is a couple of Inside Higher Ed and Chronicle links, some warmed-over faculty memory, and one shiny Perusall anecdote. No prevalence data. No before-and-after outcomes. No scale or cost. Nothing on cheating trends, grade distributions, or workload tradeoffs. Where are the learning gains, integrity incidents, throughput, and faculty time before and after? Nowhere. You can’t call something a systemic diagnosis while refusing to measure the system.
The causal story is juvenile. They wave at course design, motivation, and cheating platforms like you can fix incentives with a pep talk. Cheating behavior is baked into grading regimes, adjunctification, enrollment pressure, accreditation, and student economics. Saying “AI revealed it” without grappling with those levers is theatre.
They also skate past what’s actually new about generative AI: cheap, personalized, high-volume output with opaque provenance and eroded authorship signals. That changes assessment design and verification, full stop. Process evidence, drafts, and live defenses aren’t “nostalgia cures,” they’re the baseline now. Pretending otherwise is malpractice.
The whole thing reads like a small-town bureaucrat grief ritual—performative nostalgia cosplaying as bravery. It has the emotional coherence of people trigger-texted into a moral panic, the terrified squirming of men worried an algorithm will replace their office hours.
Call them tenure-protected therapists diagnosing the campus with codependency and you’re close. They weaponize nostalgia to hide pedagogical cowardice, talk big about honesty while dodging measurement, and hold up Perusall like a talisman.
Provocative title, empty core. Less scholarship, more tantrum in academic garb. Bring numbers and tradeoffs or stop lecturing everyone else about rigor—and for the love of all that’s holy, fire whoever picked that stock art.
