The scholarly dispositions, practical skills, and professional ethics fostered through graduate level training in English cannot be outsourced to generative artificial intelligence technologies without seriously undermining the basic premises of the discipline. For this primary reason, the Department of English strictly prohibits the use of generative artificial intelligence technologies in the creation and revision of scholarly writing for all work done at the graduate level.
This department-wide prohibition applies especially to the variety of activities that go into the production of scholarly writing: engaging in close and extensive reading; working with primary and critical sources and understanding their relationship; formulating viable ideas and understanding their viability; learning specialized vocabularies and concepts; crafting sentences and paragraphs in service to unique argumentation; and synthesizing the knowledge of past and present in original contributions to the discipline. These activities are nowhere more important than in the so-called milestone projects of graduate education, the theses or dissertations that often serve as the basis for professional proposals, presentations, and publication.
Violations of this policy will be treated like other violations of academic integrity and subject to probationary review (falling out of “good standing”) and the possibility of dismissal from the graduate program. The faculty members of the department’s executive committee will oversee these disciplinary decisions.
The use of generative artificial intelligence technologies in certain classroom situations and pedagogical settings may be entertained and is largely left to the discretion of individual faculty, but these occasions mark the exception to this policy.
In these situations, faculty members must
a) clearly define in the syllabus or lesson plan the scope, nature, and potential benefit of the use of generative artificial intelligence technologies; and
b) generate a mandatory attestation statement, whereby students agree to document and describe their use of generative artificial intelligence technologies in assigned work.
This policy does not apply to the kinds of assistive artificial intelligence technologies, such as spell-check programs or thesaurus functions. The current ubiquity of assistive artificial intelligence technologies suggests, however, that this policy on generative artificial intelligence technologies will need to be regularly reviewed and, as need be, revised, as institutional priorities and industry fiat increasingly incorporate them into our everyday condition. As such, this policy on generative artificial intelligence technologies must be reviewed by the department’s executive committee on a yearly basis, with any substantive changes to its letter or tenor subject to departmental vote.