EXPOSED
The written core of this job — lecture notes, syllabus construction, reading summaries, essay feedback, literature reviews for publications — is exactly what large language models do at usable quality, and students are already using them on the other side of the desk. What survives is live Socratic seminar work, thesis and honors supervision, letters of recommendation that carry a named human's reputation, and departmental judgment calls on curriculum and admissions. The real threat to this occupation is less the model than the budget: political science departments are shrinking through adjunctification, and AI gives administrators a cheaper story about section sizes.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Drafting a comparative-politics syllabus, summarizing Tocqueville or Dahl for undergraduates, writing multiple-choice and short-answer exams, and marking 60 five-page papers on federalism are all tasks a model completes at grading-curve quality today, which is why this sits at 8 rather than mid-teens; the residue that holds the number above 6 is the unscripted seminar where you press a student on why their causal claim about democratic backsliding doesn't follow, and dissertation-committee work where you read a bad chapter and know which of three problems to fix first.
Some physical or field component. The physical component is showing up in a specific room at a specific hour — lecture halls, office hours, proctoring blue-book finals, faculty senate meetings — plus conference travel and occasional field or study-abroad supervision, which is bodily presence in controlled, climate-controlled settings rather than work that requires hands on anything.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no license to teach political science: a PhD is a hiring credential, not a statutory gate, no board can strike you off, and nothing you say in a lecture on constitutional law creates personal legal exposure — tenure is a contract protection, not a liability shield, and adjunct appointments carry not even that.
The human relationship is the product. The letter of recommendation for law school or a Fulbright is worth exactly the name signed to it and the advisor who can write "I supervised her honors thesis on EU enlargement for two years"; that plus the mentorship students seek out when choosing a major or a graduate path is genuinely the product, though it lands at 14 not 18 because a 200-seat intro-to-American-government section is a credential transaction where the instructor is interchangeable.
Meaningful discretion. You own real calls — plagiarism and AI-use accusations that can end a student's enrollment, grade appeals, graduate admissions rankings, curriculum votes on what counts as the methods requirement — but these run through department chairs, honor councils, and university appeals processes rather than resting on you alone, which is what keeps this at 10 instead of the high teens.
Law Teachers, Postsecondary EXPOSED
Has AI actually changed your work?