EXPOSED
The text-heavy core of this job — lecture notes, syllabi, reading guides, essay feedback, literature summaries, exam question banks — is exactly what current language models produce at usable quality, and students already use the same tools on the other side of the desk. What resists is the live seminar: running a room where undergraduates argue about evidence, teaching source criticism by watching a student misread a document and correcting them in real time, and advising thesis work. The bigger near-term threat is not AI replacing historians but humanities enrollment decline and adjunctification shrinking the tenure-track base; the modal worker here is increasingly contingent faculty teaching survey courses.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Grading 60 identical Western Civ essays against a rubric, assembling a syllabus from a canonical reading list, and writing multiple-choice exam banks on the Treaty of Westphalia are already machine work, which pins this below the midpoint — but the seminar where you make eighteen-year-olds defend a claim about a primary source, and the dissertation chapter you argue with line by line, are not, which keeps it from falling to 5.
Some physical or field component. Standing in a lecture hall, handling archival material and rare-book collections in reading rooms, and running site or museum visits are genuine bodily components, but they happen in climate-controlled rooms with no manual dexterity or safety exposure, which caps this near the low end of the mid-band.
Certification preferred, not legally required. No state licence gates who teaches Reconstruction to undergraduates; the PhD and departmental hiring committee are the only gates, and accreditation obligations attach to the institution and the credit hour, not to you personally, so you carry credential friction without personal legal liability.
The human relationship is the product. Students choose your section, come to office hours, ask you for the letter of recommendation that decides their grad school application, and stay in your advising orbit for years — that named, cumulative relationship is most of what the tuition buys, and it is why a recorded lecture library has never emptied the room.
Meaningful discretion. You decide what counts as evidence, whether a paper is plagiarised, what grade closes a student's GPA, and how to teach contested historiography — real discretion with real consequences for individuals, but bounded by department curricula, grade-appeal procedures, and Title IX and FERPA reporting channels rather than owned outright.
Has AI actually changed your work?