EXPOSED
The paper-and-screen half of this job — lecture decks, syllabi, reading summaries, literature reviews, quiz banks, rubric-based essay grading, discussion-board moderation — is exactly what current models do at usable quality, and asynchronous online sections are where that substitution bites first. What holds is the live seminar: reading a room, pushing a student past a sloppy argument in real time, advising theses, writing credible recommendation letters, and owning grades that carry institutional weight. The real threat to this occupation is not a bot replacing a professor but budget-driven consolidation of course sections and continued shift to adjunct labor, with AI as the excuse.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Roughly half the workload — building the syllabus, generating lecture slides and quiz banks, summarizing assigned readings, grading short essays against a rubric, answering routine emails and moderating discussion boards — is already producible at passing quality by a model, and only the live seminar, thesis supervision, and defensible grade decisions push it up to 8 rather than into the bottom band.
Some physical or field component. Being physically in a room matters — projecting to a 60-seat lecture hall, catching the student who has checked out, running a field methods exercise or an archive/community-site visit — but the environment is a scheduled campus classroom, not an uncontrolled one, so this sits mid-range rather than at desk-only 8.
Certification preferred, not legally required. No state licence gates the title: hiring turns on a PhD and departmental vote, and legal exposure for a bad grade or a Title IX or FERPA matter lands on the institution, not your personal credential — the 5 reflects the terminal degree and accreditation/SACS-type faculty-qualification rules that still make a human of record necessary on paper.
The human relationship is the product. Students choose your section, come to office hours, ask you to chair a thesis committee and write the letter that gets them into a PhD program — that letter is worth something only because your name and reputation are on it, which is why this is the highest of the five scores.
Meaningful discretion. You decide what counts as a defensible argument, whether an assignment is plagiarized or AI-written, whether a student passes, and how to handle politically charged material in class — real discretion with consequences for individuals, but bounded by departmental learning outcomes, grade appeals, and curriculum committees, which caps it at 10 instead of the high band.
Has AI actually changed your work?