As higher education grapples with the disruptive rise of artificial intelligence, a fierce debate is unfolding across American college campuses over how students learn, think, and demonstrate their mastery of ideas. Just months after Harvard University made headlines by closing its historic Writing Center, the pedagogical philosophy underpinning the traditional college essay has come under direct attack.
The friction intensified recently when a faculty member at Williams College published an opinion piece in The New York Times arguing a provocative thesis: writing is not, in fact, the supreme form of human thinking. Instead, that distinction belongs to talking. Based on this premise, the professor revealed that he permits his students to utilize AI on their papers, provided they are able to defend their arguments live during oral examinations later.
"At least half of the class was more agile, more reflective and clearer during oral exams than they were in their papers," the Williams professor wrote. For Julia Morgan McKenzie, director of the Williams College Writing Center, reading that claim immediately brought to mind a glaring question: Which half?
Writing from her perspective as an educator, McKenzie believes her colleague’s embrace of conversational assessment over written composition is deeply dangerous—and not merely because she disagrees on the foundational importance of writing. Rather, she argues that the conversational model is hazardous because of the students it inevitably leaves behind. While writing certainly allows students to sort through complex ideas and think deliberately on the page, it does something even more fundamental: it gives each student a distinct voice, including those who struggle to find one in the high-pressure environment of a live classroom discussion or an oral exam.
The implications of replacing written work with high-stakes spoken dialogue become starkly apparent when examining the diverse realities of modern student bodies. McKenzie points to vulnerable groups within the academic community, such as a student she knows who was raised in a culture where women are strictly prohibited from speaking to men outside their immediate family, let alone challenging the intellect of a male figure in a position of academic power. Imagining how such a student would handle being engaged through messy, searching conversations to gauge comprehension reveals a glaring equity gap.
Similar concerns apply to students facing temporary or chronic medical challenges, such as a student recovering from a concussion who might struggle to recall a specific theoretical thread from two class meetings ago entirely on the spot. In evaluating the professor’s assertion that half the class thrived orally, McKenzie asks about the other half—the students for whom spontaneous verbal sparring does not foster confidence, but rather deepens anxiety.
Reflecting on her own academic journey, McKenzie recalls the autumn of 1993, when she sat at a seminar table after spending a year waitressing to save money for college. Tormented by the physical anxiety of shaking hands, she grappled with what could possibly be said about the colorful clay she had grown up pressing into spaghetti strings. Mishearing her professor’s introduction of the syllabus, she initially believed the class would discuss Play-Doh, only to realize with a jolt of panic that he had actually said Plato.
Fortunately, she did not have to voice her confusion aloud because a classmate across the table—clearly the product of a more privileged preparatory high school background—had already read The Republic and was speaking about it with effortless confidence, drawing approving nods from the professor.
Though McKenzie dutifully returned to her dorm room, read and reread Plato, and ultimately unpacked the sophisticated ideas within the text without ever mentioning her early mix-up, her understanding grew while her confidence stalled. She never once spoke in that seminar. The sole window her professor had into her intellect, whether regarding ancient philosophy or any other subject, was the text she produced in her papers. Her writing proved successful enough that, years later, that same professor penned a graduate school recommendation letter on her behalf.
Even as her academic comprehension evolved, McKenzie remained acutely aware that the voices dominating class discussions were exclusively young men, leaving her to quietly wonder if her admission to the elite institution had simply been an administrative mistake. Decades later, she encounters students every single day who share that exact sentiment—individuals who view writing not as a chore, but as a safer, more deliberate form of thinking that helps alleviate the crushing weight of impostor syndrome.
Dismissing these dynamics simply as impostor syndrome or reducing a classmate’s outspoken confidence to male privilege misses the mark, according to McKenzie. She notes that plenty of women speak up in academic settings without fear, just as plenty of men experience paralyzing panic attacks when faced with assignments they cannot complete. The core issue is not gender per se, but the complex, entrenched power dynamics that govern classrooms and oral examinations, regardless of how diligently faculty members attempt to mitigate them.
In her professional experience, students who have not inherited the innate confidence born of structural power and privilege—including women, international students, students of color, and gender-nonconforming students—frequently feel deeply uncomfortable playing out unformed, messy ideas in front of an audience of peers and professors. Authentic verbal thinking requires a baseline of security: it only functions when a student feels fundamentally confident, is handed an uncontested stage, and can breathe without the looming fear of interruption.
When institutions discard writing either out of panic over generative artificial intelligence or through a philosophical shift declaring speech to be the superior medium for intellect, they fail the very students who most urgently need a structured mechanism to find their voice, process complex thoughts, and communicate with educators. Without writing, McKenzie warns, higher education risks abandoning its core mission of teaching everyone—and the professional mandate of the academy is to reach every single student in the classroom.
Earlier in the AI era, McKenzie wrote about the growing bifurcation among student populations that emerging technologies threatened to accelerate. This new pedagogical pivot toward prioritizing spoken dialogue over written revision threatens to forge a different, equally insidious kind of divide—one that mirrors broader societal inequalities by disproportionately benefiting and privileging white, cisgender men.
Pointing to her colleague’s admission in The New York Times that adopting oral defenses "will take courage on [students’] part to abandon the safe recursion of revision and narrative refinement," McKenzie is left with a sobering question about who, precisely, is afforded the systemic safety and societal permission to practice such courage in the first place.
