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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.

About a year ago I was teaching a Greek class where we were translating Paul’s short letter to Philemon. I mentioned the idea that States could use the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in order to curtail the rights of women to travel across state lines to secure an abortion. In case you are not aware, friends, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 criminalized any provision of aid or sanctuary to escaped enslaved individuals. And I was not just making it up. There are articles both in newspapers and legal journals to document my reference.[i]Unbeknownst to me, a student took issue with my statement and decided to correct me. However, they did not correct me during the class period and they did not correct me by scheduling a time to meet with me. Neither did the student decide to send me an e-mail. The student decided to send an e-mail to all of the White students in the classroom. The student did not send the e-mail to any of the Black students in the classroom. As you can probably discern from the title of this blog, the e-mail began with “I love Dr. Parker but. . . .” Of course, one of my students sent the e-mail to me and we had to process it during the next class period which, of course, was not part of my lesson plan nor a part of my syllabus.In the e-mail, the student indicated that it is ridiculous to imagine that states’ rights could supersede the rights of unrestricted travel for US citizens, regardless of whether one leaves the state for an abortion or vacation. The e-mail then went on to state that “Statistics show that for every one white abortion there are five to six black abortions. Black persons should view abortion as a white man’s way of trying to limit the population of blacks in the United States.” The tone was almost as if Black people should be grateful that White Republicans (this person identified as Republican in the e-mail) loved them so much that they were trying to stop abortions.There are two predominant ways to think about love paternalism and both come through Pauline literature. The first is the idea of a love that gives up rights. This stems from Paul’s use of the terms the weak and the strong. The idea is that the strong give up their right to do something if that thing, in fact, causes the weak to stumble. The classic example is in the case of meat sacrificed to idols in 1 Corinthians 8-10. A contemporary example can be found in the idea of men telling woman to cover up themselves in case they arouse a man’s sexual interest and suffer a rape. This is an instance of victim-blaming and leaves the onus on a woman instead of arguing that a man should actually have self-control.[ii]Another aspect of love paternalism involves limiting someone’s autonomy and freedom for their own good. I see this idea particularly in the student’s statement that Black persons should view abortion as a white man’s way of trying to limit the population of blacks in the United States. Throughout history White people do whatever they can to justify their understanding of why they mistreat Black people. For example, during the transatlantic slave trade, slaveowners and traders justified trafficking enslaved persons by saying that they were introducing them to the gospel.What should the African American female professor’s response be when love paternalism smacks her in the face in the midst of a semester when she is teaching Greek? Of course, she must confront it head-on and be able to maneuver and be nimble right in the middle of the semester. Pedagogically, I table any theological discussion during Greek translation because the focus during that particular time is on morphology and syntax within the text. However, in this instance I did allow a moment to discuss the e-mail and then connect it to the manipulative ways in which Paul’s rhetoric shows up in the letter to Philemon. We tackled the e-mail through power dynamics. We also had to have a frank discussion on why the student only sent the e-mail to White students.Bottom line: Openness, frank discussions, and nimbleness are required when love paternalism unexpectedly affronts a professor. I do not know if my White colleagues experience such moments in the classroom. However, you never know what your minoritized colleagues are going through when we are teaching our classes, so please be kind. Notes & Bibliography[i] See Angela N. Parker. “You Can’t Pay Back What You Never Owned: A Conversation on Reparations and Paul’s Letter to Philemon,” in Reparations and the Theological Disciplines: Prophetic Voices for Remembrance, Reckoning, and Repair, ed. M. Barram, D.G.I. Hart, G. Kettering, and M.J. Rhodes, (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2023), 91-104. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/abortion-missouri/; https://www.law.georgetown.edu/gender-journal/online/volume-xxiii-online/legal-vigilantism-a-discussion-of-the-new-wave-of-abortion-restrictions-and-the-fugitive-slave-acts/.[ii] See Roger E. Olson, Whatever Happened to the Christian Principle of “Love Paternalism?” (Newstex, 2019).

Below is the jargon which has pervaded our conversation. I call this the “re-” lexicon:re-designre-inventre-arrangere-imaginere-createre-thinkre-conceivere-examinere-visionre-considerre-workre-coverThe call to “re-” the system of education has been in response to shrinking student pools, dwindling tenure-track positions, collapsing denominational structures, tightening budgets, rising awareness of student debt, curriculum misalignment, and the mounting backlog of deferred maintenance on aging buildings. Even before the shift in the federal government’s relationship to education, theological education needed an overhaul. The list of words entered our discussion but their potential nor their aspiration has not been fully realized.Many schools have taken on the task of rethinking their institutions – most in reaction to crisis. Many of the “re” processes assumed that what has served well should be mended, fixed and pressed back into service. Administrators, in planning institutional changes, started with strategies to restore what had served admirably in the past. Many schools rethought their curriculum for existing degree programs, added certificated programs, replaced tenured faculty positions with the hire of contingency faculty, sold land, increased their endowment draw down, and hoped for increased student enrollment. These strategies, depending upon the context, have had a modicum of success. Indeed, some vulnerable schools have prolonged their demise. Other schools are announcing downsizing and closings. Our attempt at “re” is faltering.Not only have leaders failed to figure out a way to revitalize theological education as an enterprise, the patched-together strategies are likely not to be sustainable 5, 10, 20 years into the future. There is palpable fear that given the new realities of the digital age’s influence on teaching, exacerbated by the lack of crisis management skills of deans and presidents, schools will not accomplish the hoped for “reset” in theological education.We are confounded. Yet, we are persuaded.Theological leaders are convinced that our society—now and into the future—is better with a vibrant and thriving theological education enterprise. Leaders believe that the societal need for educated faith leaders—clergy and laity—has increased and will continue to grow. We believe theology and religion will prove more, not less, relevant in the digital age. We know that the church as well as all forms of organized religion are the major stakeholders in theological education. Our work is paramount—if only we can figure out how to craft new, accessible systems.Given the severity of the situation, what if it is ultimately detrimental to repair or restore our current paradigms of education? What if fixing the current system is tantamount to patching bicycle tires only to return to riding on nail-riddled roads? From my vantage point, our challenge, rather than repairing the current, is to let go of the past. We must freshly build, compose, make, and design news systems of theological education based upon a future we do not know but that is coming quickly.What if the solutions lie in building new systems from scratch? What would it mean to compose brand new approaches to educational needs? How can we fashion new pedagogical apparatuses? What would it take to manufacture the new and the needed educational models?Leaders have, in the past, relied on institutional traditions and strategic planning. Those tools were helpful, but no longer sufficient. Now is the time for a creative process. We must ask ourselves not about repair and retrench, but about the new. What new - that is yet to be realized -will be the very thing to produce the next educational system?This is not a call to be creative as much as it is a call to create.[caption id="attachment_253985" align="alignleft" width="300"] Najee Dorsey (BAIA) Nancy Lynne Westfield and Rachel Mills (Wabash Center)[/caption]The Wabash Center has partnered with Najee Dorsey. An exquisite artist in his own right, Najee is the founder of Black Art in America (BAIA). Under Najee’s leadership, BAIA is a community art gallery and garden dedicated to teaching art, creativity, and artist advocacy. BAIA hosts our cohort groups as part of an effort to expose our faculty to artists, the creative process, and imagination. Najee and the artist colleagues guide scholars in future-building ways of thinking. Participants engage directly with artists about their work and lives—as creators, producers, and visionaries. At BAIA, scholars encounter colleagues whose careers are devoted to building and making. The shift from being creative to becoming a creator requires tactile, embodied learning. Najee knows this terrain.In the conversations between the BAIA artists and our participants, I have noticed consistent themes in the conversations. Artists wake up each day with the question of What am I going to create? in the forefront of their minds, then align their schedule to accommodate time for creating. Creatives are not afraid to be wrong or make mistakes. We must consider that unless educational systems celebrate rather than stigmatize risk-taking, failure, and experimentation, no new systems will emerge. A creative process causes you to change what you can see and challenge what you have previously seen. Creatives do not believe dreams are ancillary to the process. They embrace visions, daydreams, visitations, nightmares, wishes and messages from earth, wind, fire and water. They inhabit many worlds. What would it take for us to, collectively, think in these modes and frames?Exposing theology and religion colleagues to the profound understandings of artists, artists’ lifestyles, as well as providing colleagues with a glimpse of the creative process is a way that the Wabash Center is championing the need for leaders in education to build, craft, make a new paradigm of theological education that is original and sustainable.I do not believe the future of theological education to be condemned nor foreclosed. Our future is, however, dependent upon our willingness and understanding that the new is needed and that we must, together, create the new if it is to exist. Who among us has the guts to proceed?ReflectionWhat would it mean to use the creative process to design and build new educational structures?What would it take to collaborate with artists in developing new educational structures?In your context, who are the conversation partners for the shift in mindset to a lifestyle and daily practice of building, composing, and making?