An English Professor's Case for Splitting Literature and Composition

The Argument Inside One English Professor's Syllabus

Anne Lovering Rounds, a full professor of English at Hostos Community College, part of the City University of New York, has published an opinion piece arguing that the panic over students using generative AI to write essays is masking a more fundamental problem in her field. Like many of her colleagues, she has added boilerplate syllabus language banning tools such as ChatGPT from assignments. But she argues the standard defenses of that ban are weak, and that the real issue is what English courses claim to do.

Her target is the course she herself teaches: Literature and Composition, a requirement for every student at her college. The title, she writes, bundles together three separate things — appreciating literature, knowing literary history, and writing essays — as if they were one skill. In practice, students new to literary study are asked to encounter texts for the first time, learn the vocabulary of literary devices, describe their effects in short responses, and then produce full essays about it all within a single semester. She compares that to asking a novice to pass a classical music identification test after 15 weeks while also learning to play an instrument.

Her proposed remedy is straightforward: name courses for what they actually teach. A course called Literary Appreciation or Identifying Literary Techniques would have plenty to cover on its own. A course called Writing Essays would teach essay writing without requiring it to be about literature. A Shakespeare course could teach the plays rigorously without assigning pages of essays by semester's end. Under that structure, she argues, the question of whether AI wrote a student's essay becomes far less fraught — because fewer courses would be demanding essays in the first place.

Why the 'Literature and Composition' Bundle Is Under Strain

What the AI Debate Is Really Exposing

Rounds's argument is that generative AI did not create a crisis in English teaching so much as reveal one. The syllabus language banning ChatGPT is, in her account, a defensive measure that avoids the harder question of whether a single course can credibly deliver literary appreciation, literary history and essay-writing proficiency at once. She notes that the details she most enjoys teaching — that rhythm and rhyme are not the same thing, that meter is more than syllable counting, that a line is the defining feature of a lyric poem — have nothing to do with composing essays. Those skills do not need an essay requirement attached to them to be taught rigorously.

Where Frank Bruni's Defense of English Falls Short

Rounds engages directly with a New York Times opinion piece by Frank Bruni praising the English major, which promised students they would "swim in a borderless sea of thoughts beautifully expressed" and become better communicators. She questions what "better communicator" actually means — a more succinct emailer, a more entertaining presenter, a more precise poet? — and points out that understanding the seeds of creativity is not the same as shaping stories or producing written text. An English department, she suggests, should have room to teach each skill, but building a positive feedback loop between reading and writing may take longer than one semester.

The Structural Constraint Nobody Wants to Name

The piece is also, implicitly, about institutional limits. Rounds acknowledges that teaching students to write essays about literary texts requires "a sustained environment" — one that not every college can offer and not every student wants to inhabit. That is a pointed observation from a community college professor, where required composition courses often serve large, diverse student populations with varied preparation and goals. The essay, she argues, is worth saving — but saving it starts with admitting that vivid, logical writing does not need to be about literature, and that reading literature does not need to come with a writing tax.