EXPOSED
The paper-facing half of this job — syllabus construction, lecture notes, reading guides, rubric-based comments on freshman comp essays, plagiarism triage — is exactly what language models do cheaply, and the writing assignments themselves are being destabilized by student AI use. The classroom half survives: running a live seminar where twenty people argue about a text, coaching a student through four drafts, writing the recommendation letter that carries a name behind it. The bigger near-term threat isn't AI replacing professors, it's collapsing English enrollment and adjunct-heavy staffing shrinking the seat count, and there is no license protecting the role.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Grading a stack of comp essays against a rubric, building reading lists, and drafting lecture notes on Beloved are all things a model does in seconds, but a two-hour seminar where you read the room, redirect a student who has misread the poem's tone, and push a discussion past the obvious reading is not scriptable — roughly half the workload holds, which is why this sits at 11 rather than in the resistant teens.
Some physical or field component. You are physically in a room three days a week — projecting to the back row, watching who has stopped taking notes, holding office hours where a student cries about their thesis — but the room is a climate-controlled classroom and everything you produce could be emailed, so this lands at 8 rather than the 14+ of work done outdoors or on machinery.
No licence, no signature requirement. No state licenses postsecondary English instruction: a PhD or MFA is a hiring credential, not a legal gate, and adjuncts are routinely hired on a master's with a semester's notice — nobody's signature on a syllabus creates personal liability, hence 2.
The human relationship is the product. Students choose your section, come back for your Victorian novel seminar, and ask you specifically for the recommendation letter because your name and your knowledge of their four drafts is the thing being vouched for — that repeat, named relationship is a real moat, though it stops short of 18 because gen-ed comp sections are assigned by registrar and taught by whoever is staffed.
Meaningful discretion. You decide whether a paper is plagiarized or AI-generated and what that does to a student's transcript, whether a student who missed six weeks passes, and what a contested text is worth on the syllabus — genuine discretion with consequences, but appealable through department chairs and academic integrity committees rather than resting on you alone, which is what separates 11 from 16.
Has AI actually changed your work?