Novel Readings

Look, I don’t want to pretend everything is fine, in general or in my classes. Last week I was grading take-home midterms for Mystery & Detective Fiction and feeling to my core the truth of what is now a commonplace: AI is pervasive, and not “for better or for worse”—just, unequivocally, for worse. The one consolation I had (and it is, truly, not particularly consoling) is that the results, for the students, are not usually good. This means it doesn’t matter whether I can prove AI use or not: I can just mark the answers on their merits and move on. But it really sucks going through this process and wondering what the point of it even is. I felt demoralized, sad, and frustrated, which is unfortunately how I have often felt about this course this term because attendance has been so poor: on a good day, maybe 60% of the students are present, and there are some who have almost never been to class at all since January. What am I even doing, I have wondered, and how much longer can I keep doing it if it just no longer means to them anything like what it means to me?

BUT.

Here’s the other side of how things have been going in Mystery & Detective Fiction. There is a solid core of students who come every single time (or close enough—it’s perfectly reasonable, of course, to miss a class here and there because you are sick or your bus was late or whatever). I don’t know if they are all reading every page of every book, but enough of them are keeping up that we have pretty good discussions: the ones who speak up seem keen and interested, and they seem to be listening to each other, and they laugh when I try to be funny (which is one way to see if they are paying attention!). We have worked our way through a lot of good, complex, thought-provoking fiction, most recently Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s The Terrorists. (It is a book that seems uncannily relevant to our current moment, with its questions about what happens to citizens when their government is actively indifferent to their needs and politics is the playground of people too corrupt and too wealthy to be held accountable.) Sure, a lot of the midterms I marked had the whiff of ChatGPT (or Copilot, I guess, which is now oh-so-helpfully available via the Microsoft suite the university installs on its computers)—but a lot of them did not, and some of these were really excellent. To answer my own plaintive question, then, what I am doing is showing up, as cheerily as I can, to offer these students the class they deserve. As always, I will also keep puzzling about how to reach the ones who aren’t: AI may be new, but students turn to it for reasons that are not new, reasons I have been trying to find solutions for as long as I have been teaching.

Even to myself this positive spin, if that’s what it is, does not sound completely convincing. Yes, something is different now. I’m just not sure it’s as bad as this gloomy article says it is. Maybe I’m kidding myself. A few years back, one of my best students let slip that a lot of students in my 19thC fiction class were basing their contributions on what they’d read in SparkNotes, not the assigned novels themselves. I wished she hadn’t said that! Was it true? Is it still true? It doesn’t feel true in these classes! I want to believe! But also, even if it is true about some students, it is definitely not true of all students. I just get too much evidence to the contrary, often from conversations with students outside of class, like the one who came to my office hours recently to talk about her term paper ideas but also to ask for recommendations for more Victorian novels to read after she graduates. Guess which novel she’d studied with me had most won her heart: David Copperfield! (It is truly heartwarming how many students who were in the Austen to Dickens class last year have told me they loved David Copperfield. A lot of them signed up for Dickens to Hardy this year and I have never had a group dig in to Bleak House with so much enthusiasm!) Twice this term, students who had already graduated from Dalhousie asked to sit in on my Victorian Women Writers seminar just to hear some of our discussions of Middlemarch. The current students who are actually taking that seminar seem genuinely caught up in the novel—some of them so much so that they will be writing on it. Those who aren’t will be writing on Villette, or on North and South.

These are long, complex, demanding books! So when the author of that essay declares that “our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read,” that students “are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done,” I have to wonder: are my students really so exceptional? I mean, I do think they are lovely and wonderful; I genuinely look forward to every class. It’s true they are English students, and mostly Honours English students at that, with some graduate students as well, so definitely, when it comes to reading, both an elite and a self-selecting group. Still, when we tell stories about higher ed today, shouldn’t we talk about them too?

It’s not just about choosing between glass half empty and glass half full perspectives: I think it really matters that we not turn our grimmest anecdata into the dominant narrative. If things are really as bad as all that, after all, what are we all doing, and how much longer should we keep doing it? It is important that alongside our laments about the “stunning level of student disconnection” we acknowledge the students who do care, who choose engagement, who want to read and think and write and don’t want their education to be stripped of its humanity (and the humanities). Here in Nova Scotia our provincial government has proposed a bill that would give them the power to interfere with universities that aren’t doing what they consider a good enough job serving “provincial priorities.” Giving these students the education they want and deserve should be one of those priorities—though I am morally certain that is not the kind of thing our leaders have in mind, even though, as we have explained over and over, studying literature actually is excellent preparation for a whole range of careers, if that’s what you think is the point of an education. (Do you think if I dropped off copies of Hard Times at Province House they would see themselves in Gradgrind and M’Choakumchild and be ashamed?)

Anyway. I am as guilty as the next tired professor of occasionally giving in to cynicism and anger and venting some of it on social media. Many of us believe, or at least hope, that AI will go the way of MOOCs (remember when they were going to revolutionize education?). In the meantime it is definitely making things harder for us, and (despite the edtech industry’s promises) no better for the students, unless “ubiquitous” and “seems easier than doing the work myself” is all that counts. The antidote to despair is not AI detectors or in-class tests, though: it’s the students themselves. Just as I thought we should stand up to the Srigleys of the world when they declared our classrooms “contentless” and said we were leaving our students’ “real intellectual and and moral needs unmet,” so too I think we should counter the “it’s all over” doomsayers with some positivity. I am a Victorianist, after all! Optimism comes with the territory.