A few months after Harvard closed its Writing Center, a Williams College faculty member wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times asserting that writing is not the best form of thinking; talking is—and this is why he allows his students to use AI on their papers, as long as they can defend them live later. “At least half of the class was more agile, more reflective and clearer during oral exams than they were in their papers,” he wrote. I know I wasn’t the only reader asking, which half?
As the director of the Williams College Writing Center, I believe my colleague’s opinion on talking as thinking to be deeply dangerous, and not only because of how strongly I disagree with him about the importance of writing. It’s dangerous because of whom it leaves out. Writing does so much more than give students the opportunity to sort through their ideas and think on the page. It gives each of them a voice—even the ones who can’t find that voice in class or during an oral exam.
As I read the piece in the Times, I thought about one of my students who was raised in a culture where women are not permitted to speak to men who aren’t part of their family—never mind challenge the thinking of one in a position of power. I wondered how she would handle being “engage[d] … through messy, searching conversation” as her professor attempted to “gauge whether we’re understanding one another,” as my colleague wrote. I thought about another student who suffered a concussion last semester and how he might handle being asked to “recall a thread from two class meetings ago” on the spot, to prove he’d been paying attention and had had further thoughts on the topic in the days since. I wondered about the other half of my colleague’s class, and if their confidence in their thinking was growing.
In the fall of 1993, after a year spent waitressing and saving money for college, I settled into a seat at a seminar table and wondered two things: if my hands would stop shaking soon, and what could possibly be said in this class about the colorful clay I’d grown up pressing into spaghetti. I’d initially heard my professor say we’d be discussing Play-Doh; as he passed out the syllabus, I realized he’d said Plato. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to admit this because the student across the table had apparently attended a better high school than I had and had already read The Republic. Here he was, speaking about it confidently. And there was the professor, nodding his head happily.
Of course, I went back to my dorm and read and reread Plato. Of course, as I began to unpack the ideas in that text, I pretended I’d never confused his name for a child’s toy. But as my understanding of the text grew, my confidence did not; I never once spoke in that seminar. The only way that professor knew what I thought, about Plato or anything else, was by what he read in my papers. Apparently he liked it: A few years later, he’d write a recommendation letter on my behalf for graduate school.
Even as my thinking on Plato evolved, it was never lost on me that the only people to speak up in class discussions were young men, and that I probably was not the only young woman wondering if her admission to the college had been a mistake. This same fact is not lost on me now, as I talk with students every day who feel writing is a safer form of thinking, one that can alleviate their feelings of impostor syndrome.
To call what I experienced in college impostor syndrome, or my classmate’s confidence male privilege, is too simple. I know plenty of women who speak up in class without fear and plenty of men whose impostor syndrome is so big they can’t complete an assignment without having a panic attack. My point isn’t about gender, it’s about the complex power dynamics in classrooms and during oral exams—no matter how much faculty try to mitigate them.
In my experience, students who did not inherit the confidence gained through being in a position of power and privilege—women, international students, students of color, gender-nonconforming students—don’t feel comfortable playing out unformed ideas in front of an audience. Talking can only be thinking when the student feels confident, is given a stage and can breathe knowing she won’t be interrupted.
When we throw writing out the window, either because we’re worried about the role of AI or because we’ve decided talking is the superior format for thinking, we are failing those of our students who most need to find their voice, think through their ideas and communicate with their professors. In other words, without writing, I don’t believe we are teaching. Or rather, I don’t believe we’re teaching everyone—and it’s our job to teach every single student in our classes.
What feels like a long time ago, I wrote about the bifurcation the AI age would deepen in our student body. This approach—to invite students to talk in order to think—will, I fear, create a different level of bifurcation, one that, like so much in our society, benefits and privileges white, cisgender men. My colleague admits, in his opinion piece in the Times, that “it will take courage on [students’] part to abandon the safe recursion of revision and narrative refinement.” I can’t help but wonder who in this society is given the opportunity to practice such courage.
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