Every Essay Lamenting College Students' Inability To Write

A parody

You may have heard, from various educators, certain dire warnings about the quality of the writing of today’s college students. I assure you, however bad you think it is, it is far worse. Today’s college students can neither read nor write. Their critical thinking is somewhere around the level of a goldfish.

I’ve been a college professor for a hundred and five years. Back in the days before TikTok and ChatGPT, students were capable of reading a complex text and digesting it. They could provide reflections on Chaucer, Freud, and Dostoevsky. While the writing of the typical undergraduate was never particularly impressive, they at least were capable of rudimentary cogent thought.

Now, they are barely literate. They cannot focus on a text for more than nine seconds without needing to check the TikTok and YouTubes. During exams, when people do not have access to their phones, they experience serious withdrawal symptoms—beginning to rock back and forth, whine piteously, and shake violently. Then, when their phones are returned, like ravenous hyenas, they begin drooling all over the table and open up TikTok with a shout of ecstasy—roughly akin to that which one might have when acquiring cocaine after a lengthy period of absence.

Most of these people have never heard of punctuation. If they know what commas are, they do not make it obvious. Certainly they are largely unaware that periods should go at the ends of sentences. Instead, having seen periods in randomly-selected bits of writing that they witnessed occasionally from within the midst of their TikTok-induced fugue, they pepper their essays with periods in rather random and creative places. A. bit like. this.

They cannot, of course, read. Reading a complex text requires focusing on it. When I was an undergraduate, in order to digest a complex text like that of Chaucer, I went to the Himalayan mountains and pondered it with a monk for seven years—he also taught me the ways of Karate. But with no ability to focus on anything for more than seven seconds, they cannot consume any piece of serious literature. It’s unclear whether they know English—they communicate primarily in grunts and whines.

And they cheat. In the early days, before ChatGPT had advanced to where it is today, you often got essays like:

Bleep bloop, I’m a robot, Chaucer’s conception of the good was good and it was what it was.

Now, instead, you get obviously ChatGPT generated essays like:

Great question about Chaucer, though let me know if you’d like a different kind of analysis!

Geoffrey Chaucer stands at the threshold of English literature as both a consummate storyteller and a subtle social critic: writing in the vernacular at a moment when Latin and French still dominated, he endowed his characters with remarkable individuality—from the bawdy Wife of Bath to the contemplative Knight—thereby creating a microcosm of 14th-century society. His versification in the Canterbury Tales blends the flexibility of Middle English with the rising iambic pentameter form, allowing shifts in register that mirror each pilgrim’s class and personality. Beyond mere portraiture, Chaucer’s narrative framing—pilgrims exchanging stories en route to Canterbury—serves as a democratic stage where irony, humor, and moral reflection coexist, subtly undermining rigid hierarchies and inviting readers to judge both character and author. In this way, Chaucer not only documents medieval life but also inaugurates a self-aware, polyphonic tradition that foreshadows the complexity of the modern novel.

Teachers are quitting left and right. Our department has been declining faster than the population during the height of the black plague (my students would not get that comment, because they do not understand any historical references to a time before 2002). Of the ones who remain, they have the gritty determination of a war veteran, recognizing that teaching is not what it used to be.

And then there are the behavioral problems. Students in college classes begin randomly running around and screaming like banshees at random intervals. Because these people spent their lives in front of a screen, they are wholly unable to manage even fairly normal social interaction.

The kids are not alright. Academia is failing. Something needs to be done about the damn phones! I fear our civilization cannot survive this total and unprecedented collapse of critical thinking.