This September when classes started, it wasn’t the first time I had met with the students who walked through the door. That’s because during the week before they arrived on campus, I had conducted online group interviews with students who expressed an interest in taking my courses. All the students had to do was show up at one of the times I had set aside to meet with them.
The interviews are a tradition at Sarah Lawrence College, where I teach, and they are designed to let students get to know more about us as individual faculty in order for them to see if they want to take one of our courses. It’s a practice other colleges should try.
The interviews, which typically last about 30 minutes, are not a substitute for the descriptions of my courses or the syllabi I post. They are best described as the academic equivalent of a movie trailer.
The difference in this case is that the students, unlike moviegoers, are not asked to sit quietly in their seats. They are invited to ask questions after I have conducted a short presentation of what I hope will happen in my class. In these precourse interviews the students are the ones with the decision-making power. When an interview ends, they can simply decide my class is not for them and go off to another interview.
Some of the questions I get are of the nuts-and-bolts variety. How much reading do I assign a week? How many papers do I require over a term? But many of the questions are substantive. Why Book X rather than Book Y? What was the most interesting essay I got back last year?
If there is enough time, I will ask the students interviewing me to say why my course might interest them and how it fits in with the other courses they are contemplating. Students are welcome to stay after the group interview is formally over and have a one-on-one conversation.
During the interviews, I also try to explain my thinking about teaching. I don’t, for example, subscribe to the tonnage theory of assigned reading. A course in which a student races through 500 pages a week is not, I believe, better than a course in which a student closely reads 200 pages a week.
Equally important, I don’t think students should be strictly on their own when it comes to writing their papers. In the so-called real world, my editors don’t wait until I have published a book or an essay to offer up their advice. They do it before I publish, and I try to apply that practice in my classes. I see myself as my students’ editor before I ever become their judge and jury.
When it comes to AI and ChatGPT, I don’t have a lot to say these days. I think the subject has been talked to death. I tell my students to stay away from AI and ChatGPT as much as possible. Why, I ask, pay good money for an education, then turn to software that limits your critical thinking and research? The writing assignments I give are, I hope, sufficiently thoughtful that AI and ChatGPT can only be of minimal value. When it comes to long-form essays, I want my students to think about the material they are analyzing with a depth that is impossible on a timed test.
Looking back on a week of interviews, I often worry that I have imposed too much of myself on students. But in the end that is, I think, a risk worth taking. What precourse interviews offer is a chance for students to see that a course is more than a rote plan. It’s an undertaking that depends on mutual engagement that resists easy prediction.
Nicolaus Mills is chair of the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).
