My quick experiment with Pangram in July led to me becoming the bookends in a story about Pangram and higher education, including my plan to retire in 2027.

I’ve been writing about retiring for a few years on my personal blog, said as much to colleagues when asked when I’d apply for Full Professor, noted it in my annual reviews, and geeked out about it with anyone discussing personal finance (i.e., Financial Independence, Retire Early). But I suppose this was sort of a “stealth announcement,” as one colleague noted.

Because of stuff—many reasons—Dear Reddit, Am I the Asshole was to be my last scholarly book. I thought I might then switch to teaching full-time for a few years, as long as I enjoyed it (i.e., Coast FIRE) and Nora wanted to remain at her job. A few years ago I realized AI would upend education; now teaching is much less fun, so I am changing things up, as noted in the story.

If students in Joseph Reagle’s Communication in the Digital Age class last spring planned to have Claude or ChatGPT do their assignments, they found out early in the semester it might not go well. Reagle told everyone that, among other checks, he planned to run their writing through an artificial intelligence detector called Pangram.

Reagle, a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology research engineer who’d been a professor of communication studies at Northeastern University for 15 years, had recently discovered AI misuse by students almost by mistake. He’d assigned another class to contribute to Wikipedia, telling them the work had to be substantively their own and not a chatbot’s. But Wiki Education, a nonprofit helping with the assignment, used Pangram to review the submissions and detected multiple apparent violations of Wikipedia’s ban on AI content. Some students seemed to have just copied and pasted AI output.

…

At Northeastern last spring, Reagle did end up referring a few students for possible discipline. After the semester ended, he ran an informal experiment, giving Pangram hundreds of samples turned in for his digital communications class before AI chatbots existed. It got them all correct — fully human. Then he did the same with 50 samples each from several semesters after ChatGPT’s release. For the earliest batch, it detected AI in 6% of assignments; the figure peaked at 42% the semester before he started running homework through Pangram. Once monitoring began, the share fell back to 6%.

As a deterrent, his approach seemed to have worked. And yet the policing left him exhausted and demoralized. “It’s a very confrontational, oppositional stance,” he says. At the end of the semester, he received some of the worst teaching evaluations of his career.

Reagle recognizes that students will be graduating into a world saturated with AI content, and that employers might well encourage them to create it themselves. He’s grown so unsure about what this all means for communication — and how to teach it — that instead of faking it, he’s decided to retire early, at 55, after the coming school year.