Resources by Brian Hillman

Being honest with oneself is challenging. One might think that academics, committed to intellectual pursuits, would have an easier time being honest with themselves. I fear this is not the case, at least for me.Frustration and rejection abound in academia. Whether it be the rejection of a piece of writing, an unsuccessful grant proposal, or, more commonly, a teaching difficulty, academics face a smorgasbord of possible sources of strife. Some become defiant phoenixes, rising above disappointment and angst, sometimes becoming hyperconfident egoists. Others ignore the positives and engage in a Sisyphean pursuit of perfection, morphing into self-flagellating pessimists. Others are more even-keeled, particularly those who can separate a sense of self from their job, although I suspect this level of equanimity takes years, if not decades, to develop. Let me tell you what I hope is my first lie of this essay:If a professor is sufficiently skilled, all students will be motivated to learn, will put forth their best effort, will be completely attentive in class, will accept the professor’s judgment of their assessments, and will not violate academic integrity.At every educational level I have attended or worked at, some of the instructors were spoken of reverentially. Their pedagogical acumen was mythical, captivating their students and guiding them to produce work of remarkably high quality. I assumed that their teaching ability was not just better than mine, but categorically superior. To employ a baseball analogy, if they were Major League quality, I belonged in Little League. Although many of my students were graciously engaged, showed up prepared, behaved attentively, and accepted my assessment judgments, the fact that not all my students can be described as such reflected a deficiency on my part. Not only was I letting myself down by not being a better teacher, but I was also doing my students and my institution a disservice. I had to improve somehow. I could always explain course material more clearly. Perhaps I should grade even more generously. No, I should grade more strictly, then students would be more motivated to focus in class and to prepare for their assessments. It was so simple for the great teachers about whom I had been hearing my entire life.Let’s try to be honest.Even though I fall into the self-flagellating pessimist category outlined above, do I really think that every student issue was my fault? Let’s try another question. Do I blame my colleagues when they report struggling with a student who habitually shows up late or violates academic integrity? I would not, just as I would not blame other people who receive subpar treatment.So, why am I unable to excise the lie mentioned above from my psyche? It comes back to the mythically great teachers. They, certainly, have solved the problems I am having. Thus, a perfect, or nearly perfect teacher exists; I ought to work to be as strong an instructor as they are. Do I have empirical evidence that these instructors are, in fact, universally beloved? I suppose I do not, but that has not shaken my belief in their mythology. Here’s a second lie I’m going to tell that underlies the first one:You should want everyone to like you and you have the capacity to get everyone to like you.I’ve never been comfortable with anyone, let alone students, not liking me. I have been told that getting everyone to like you is like trying to fit a rug that is too big for a room—whatever you do, there will be a corner in which the rug won’t fit or lie flat. Even in classes in which most students reported on their evaluations that they would recommend me as a teacher, if it wasn’t 100 percent of them, I felt as if I had failed to live up to standards. This takes me to a final lie: Student satisfaction is a direct reflection of quality teaching.I accept this as a lie, despite institutional pressure to return high student satisfaction scores. If I acknowledge this, then the fact that I am not universally beloved by students does not entail that I am an inadequate teacher. The hard truth is that I would likely be a better teacher if I focused less on my perception of how my teaching is received. There is likely nothing I can do to make everyone like me. Perhaps the mythically great teachers are just that—myths I’ve held on to as a way of magnifying the negative at the expense of the positive.

In one of my teaching documents I claim that good professors motivate, prepare, and support their students to produce good work in their courses. I remain deeply committed to this view. But something has been happening over the past several years that has shaken my faith not only in my ability to teach well but in my perception of reality. I’ve started receiving assignments that feel off. I start reading, ready to comment on student work, and run into words, phrases, and ideas that don’t fit. Sometimes it is a peculiar use of language. Other times a paper references information that was not explored in a course and is not common knowledge.Worse, I’ve received uncannily similar assignments from multiple students. Not only is some of the outside information they use wrong in a similar way, the stock phrasing of basic material is identical. I find myself wondering if it’s more likely that multiple students decided to use a word like “tapestry” in their analysis due to some affinity for the term or if something else is afoot.I have begrudgingly accepted that my students are using artificial intelligence (AI) to write their assignments. A Google search for “what percentage of students are using AI?” suggests that at least half of them use it. It is unlikely that my students are an exception.I’ve had several uncomfortable meetings with students about suspected plagiarism using AI. On occasion they admit their work is AI-generated. Other times they acknowledge outside source usage but deny AI. Often they flatly deny anything, even as they struggle to explain the words they claim to have written.What does a good professor do in this situation? Do they give their students the benefit of the doubt? Do they follow the procedures for suspected plagiarism even as these are based on legal principles which often perpetuate social and racial inequality? Is it their fault they were unable to motivate students to do the work themselves? Was their course poorly planned given that it wasn’t AI-proof?Answering these requires addressing two additional questions: (1) Is plagiarizing using generative AI different from the plagiarism of old, where a student might clandestinely copy from an encyclopedia on a typewriter? and (2) Why is this so bad if AI, as administrators and technocrats often remind us, is here to stay?My class, often the only humanities class a student is taking, nurtures skills of reading, writing, and critical thinking that cannot be duplicated by a computer. One can produce passable work with AI. I’ve accepted that. But one cannot create and recognize good work without developing proper skills.I don’t want the sins of some previous students to dictate the way I treat my current and future students. In fact, I don’t want the ways I’ve been mistreated by friends, family, partners, or anyone else to dictate how I interact with new people. But it would be naïve to assume that others won’t ever act similarly. Still, I don’t want to approach student writing suspiciously because students have used AI in the past. I worry that I over-emphasize that AI is unacceptable. Sadly, this has not prevented me from occasionally experiencing the uncanny feeling that something is off in an assignment.Grading has begun to feel like gaslighting. Kate Abramson in On Gaslighting (Princeton University Press, 2024) characterizes gaslighting as a trusted person aiming to make another incapable of reasoning, perceiving, or reacting in ways that would allow them to form appropriate beliefs, perceptions, and emotions. My experience of grading has fundamentally shaken my confidence in my ability to make good judgments about reality – what my students learned, how they write, and if they would have the audacity to submit work that they didn’t write themselves despite my repeated warnings that it was unacceptable.I’ve gone from hoping that my students put effort into their assignments to merely hoping that they wrote it themselves. I now savor the occasional typo, misspelling, sentence fragment, or odd formatting, things that occur in student writing as they develop their skills.Something can be done. All is not lost. I’ve shifted multiple preplanned assignments from short at-home writing exercises to in-class assignments. For text papers, I require students to submit an annotated primary source reading.We are all teaching in a new reality, one that causes discomfort for many. Good teaching may look different going forward even if it falls short of our ideal. Nonetheless, the principles of good teaching remain the same even as the experience of teaching changes.

I spent my first week as an assistant professor contending with what I have deemed the “Dropocalypse.” My Introduction to Judaism class was full before the ink on my contract was even dry, and I was eager to teach students at a new institution. I posted the course website several days before classes began. As I checked the roster the morning of my first class, I was disconcerted to note that four students had dropped. Had my course site frightened them? Was my workload unreasonable? I shoved these questions aside as I walked nervously to the classroom, putting on my friendliest face. After what I thought was a good class, I vowed not to check the roster until the add-drop period had concluded. My next course, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, had similar positive energy on the first day.Despite my resolution, I checked the roster that evening. Two more students had dropped my Introduction to Judaism class, and one had dropped the other class. By the end of the week, ten of the thirty initially-enrolled students had dropped my Intro to Judaism class, whereas only two had dropped my other one. No other teacher in my department had more than three students drop.When I saw my chair in the hallway on Friday, I nervously confessed that a troubling number of students had dropped my class. Was I in danger, he asked, of falling below the minimum number of students? Thankfully, I was not. He tried to comfort me, reiterating that students drop classes for countless reasons and that it wasn’t a reflection on me as a teacher.As I spent the weekend refreshing the enrollment page, scared that if I averted my gaze for too long more students would escape, I replayed the classes in meticulous detail. What had I done, I wondered, to alienate students? What could I have done differently that would have kept them enrolled? The colleagues I asked for advice, sensing my rising panic, reiterated my chair’s perspective: students drop for inscrutable reasons that are not a reflection on the instructor.Despite these kind words, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the preponderance of drops was my fault. If I gained a reputation of alienating students, I wouldn’t last long at my institution. The fact that I had so many drops in one class but only a few in the other class helped me to pull back from the despair of the Dropocalypse. It was clear that many students who enrolled in Introduction to Judaism claimed Jewish heritage and, consequently, might believe that they would have a head start in the course. If that expectation was shattered, perhaps they would leave? In contrast, students who enrolled in a course on Abrahamic religions might have less of an expectation that the course would be easy for them. Or, it could have been that the Judaism class was at 10 a.m. whereas the Abrahamic class began at noon.Whatever the answers, a fundamental question remained: Did my actions, while preparing the course or during the class, alienate them? If so, how could I improve? This gave rise to another question: Is it a bad thing for students to drop my class during the first week? I had assumed that it was, feeling the institutional pressure for high enrollments. But if students would have a bad experience, it was better for them and for me for them to find a more suitable class.I weathered my first semester and, despite the turmoil of the first week, received generally positive student evaluations. In subsequent semesters, I continued to try to make the first week of class fun and intriguing, hoping to show students that the academic study of religion was worth their time and effort.This experience showed me that checking the enrollment vicissitudes would be deleterious for me. At best, I would feel the relief if no students had dropped. At worst, I would feel creeping panic if students had dropped. The difficult truth is that I’ll never know why those ten students dropped my course and why future students will, inevitably, switch out of my classes.As instructors, we need to balance the ability to be self-critical while not letting perceived concerns about student satisfaction guide our practices. No matter how many students drop, my job is to teach the students who stay in my class; worrying about the ghosts of students who dropped does a disservice to them.

Welcome back to Common Questions! In this series, we bring together some of the most esteemed scholars and educators in the field to engage with a central, thought-provoking question. The goal is to challenge and inspire. By exploring these questions, we hope to create a dynamic platform for scholarly dialogue, illuminate complexities in education, and enhance our understanding of the transformative power of teaching and learning in these vital disciplines. Featuring a diverse range of perspectives, this effort is a means of expanding the borders of academic rigor with profound spiritual and philosophical inquiry. This time, we asked…What about your work do you find most beautiful? What would it take to plan for more of this kind of beauty in your work?Gathered here are responses from:Sonya Cronin, Florida State University / The Carrier Pigeon PostJoshua Ryoo, Azusa Pacific UniversityGabrielle Thomas, Emory UniversityBrian Hillman, Towson UniversityAndrew P. Wilson, Mount Allison UniversityWonchul Shin, Villanova UniversityIf you are interested in sharing you response to this prompt or future Common Questions, please reach out to our blogs editor, Donald E. Quist at quistd@wabash.edu.