So many Kenyon students are so incompetent and morally corrupt that I’m beginning to lose hope for this college that I once deeply adored. I cannot make it 10 feet on this campus without seeing someone engaging in blatant academically dishonest conduct. At Peirce Express, the guy in front of me is Googling the answers to his take-home quiz; in class, the girl next to me is having ChatGPT write her entire political science paper; during my in-class exam, the student to my right is using their Apple Watch to cheat. I’m almost more upset that you all have no shame in your brazen displays of stupidity and ineptitude than the behavior itself.
Originally, I thought y’all should have gone to community college, but now I realize it’d be an insult to the community colleges for y’all to apply there too. None of my examples in this piece will be straw men — every person I’ve mentioned is real and I interact with them regularly (though definitely not by choice). Some people at this school are trading away their ability to critically read, write and think — something that already has significant negative consequences for their cognitive elasticity — and for what? An extra hour of free time? The ability to scroll Instagram Reels? By reading this opinion, you’re already doing more than the average AI potato has done this entire semester.
Naturally this is not the majority of students, but it’s enough students who haven’t actually learned anything for me to feel scammed and depressed. I sincerely hope that the high schoolers touring campus see you and share in my disgust enough to never apply here — be aware that these people are turning away deserving students. I understand that college isn’t easy, but that difficulty is purposeful and is meant to help you grow as a person. Please understand that thinking you’ve found that “one weird trick for easy As that the institution doesn’t want you to know about!” is not just harmful for you, it’s making a fool of all students.
The pain I feel for misled prospective students is a molehill in comparison to the mountain of sadness I feel for professors. I don’t know how many of them are even aware that students are genuinely not trying. With the amount of people willingly paying additional monthly charges to OpenAI on top of their $90,000 annual tuition just to ensure that their laziness isn’t noticed, I’m sure professors don’t catch or report all uses of AI given the growing expectation of inaction among educators. It’s become less academically taboo to outsource your writing to AI, so they’d be dying on a hill that no one will stand on when AI becomes normalized — look at Denison’s new “Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence” minor. I’ve stopped reporting to professors when this behavior happens because nothing comes of it.
I don’t have any advice for the academically dishonest. If you’re having AI write everything for you at the famous “writers’ college” that you applied to, then either your brain or your ethics are too far eroded for anything I say to be meaningful to you. I’ll summarize my sentiment for those incapable of thinking critically enough to deduce it yourself — you don’t deserve to be at Kenyon, and the most I can do is implore you to transfer to someplace more tolerant of idiocy and sloth.
Given that Kenyon is so prestigious, I understand and empathize with impostor syndrome, but if you use AI or cheat instead of critically thinking then you are genuinely an impostor. For those holding true to the morals and responsibilities of a Kenyon student, I beg you to shame this behavior when you see it. Your education, the one that you cough up more than most people’s annual salary to experience, is being diminished in value by cheaters, plagiarists and AI users. You are not angry enough about the genuine, hard-working applicants who never got to attend Kenyon just so the person in your English class generating ChatGPT summaries of every book you’ve read this semester could get a seat at the table. In mourning of the incredible peers you could have had, be angry that your work and your degree is as valuable as an OpenAI subscription.
Angel Cunningham ’27 is a sociology major with a law and society concentration from Niagara Falls, NY. He can be reached at cunningham3@kenyon.edu.