EXPOSED
The paper side of this job — syllabus drafting, lecture outlines, reading summaries, literature reviews, first-pass essay feedback — is squarely inside what current models do at usable quality, and the scholarly output (journal articles, book chapters) faces the same pressure. What holds is the live seminar: facilitating charged discussions about race, identity, and power where a human's presence, credibility, and willingness to be accountable in the room is the pedagogy, plus thesis advising and mentorship students specifically seek from a person. The real threat to this occupation over ten years is enrollment shifts, program consolidation, and political defunding more than automation — and the modal worker here is increasingly adjunct, with no licensure or tenure shield.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Roughly half your week — building the Chicana feminism unit reading list, drafting lecture notes, summarizing secondary literature, writing the first pass of comments on a 12-page paper on settler colonialism — is work a model does at draft-usable quality today, which is why this sits at 9 rather than 14; what pulls it up from 5 is that running a seminar where students are arguing about their own family histories and someone starts crying is not a text-generation task.
Some physical or field component. You are in a physical room, and that matters — reading the silence after a hard comment, holding office hours, occasionally leading a community site visit or archival trip — but nothing in the job requires manual skill in an uncontrolled setting, and the pandemic proved much of this delivers over Zoom, which caps it at 6.
No licence, no signature requirement. No state licence, no board, no exam: a PhD (or in adjunct hiring, an MA plus availability) is a credential the department screens on, not a legal barrier, and if a course is cut or a section handed to a cheaper instructor no statute requires that instructor be you.
The human relationship is the product. Students choose this field and these advisors for reasons that are personal — a dissertation chair who understands what the archive silences look like, a mentor whose letter carries weight in a small subfield where everyone knows each other — and that named, specific relationship is what dissertation committees and alumni loyalty are actually made of, which is why it clears 13.
Meaningful discretion. You decide whether a text stays on the syllabus when it will hurt some students to read it, when a heated exchange gets stopped versus pushed further, and how to grade an argument you think is wrong but well-made — real, unscripted calls — but they are made inside institutional rubrics, grade appeal processes, and a department chair's oversight, so the buck does not stop at 14+ with you.
Law Teachers, Postsecondary EXPOSED
Has AI actually changed your work?