By Dr. Jacob Kaltenbach

Writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs can prepare students for emergent writing roles in the workplace. Our students need to learn to audit texts for validity, accuracy, and logic, to think critically about artificial intelligence (AI) tools and how they should be employed, and to see themselves as stewards rather than owners of meaning. Teaching these skills will require collaboration and cooperation across disciplines.  

2026 will be remembered as the year some college graduates booed artificial intelligence (AI) for its perceived impact on their job prospects, their creativity, and their cognition. Not all commencement speakers responded well. At the University of Arizona, however, Google CEO Eric Schmidt managed the gracious impromptu acknowledgment “I can hear you. There is a fear” (Bregel, 2026, para. 12). He’s right, and we can go further. We can listen actively to our students and validate their fears without abdicating our responsibility to prepare them for the emergent workplace.

We won’t get this precisely right. We never do. Just a few years ago, for example, school districts across the country sunk scarce resources into training a new generation of coders, and entry-level coding jobs have been among the first to disappear (Singer, 2025). Let’s do better. Let’s try to think a few years ahead rather than playing catch-up one year behind. In English, rhetoric, and WAC programs, we might start with a thought experiment. Think about our most verbal and text-savvy students, who have traditionally sought roles in writing, editing, public relations, communication management, or legal studies. Those roles will not vanish, but they are already being transformed. In this context, what do our students need?

Auditor

Students might need to learn auditing, verification, validation, fact-checking, and logic-checking. Too often, our students learn the value of these interlocking skills only when they are confronted with inaccuracies, fabrications, or wholesale hallucinations in submitted work. We need to prepare our best students to be responsible for high-quality text output integrating the work of multiple AI tools and human colleagues. They will need to validate files and version histories inside their organizations to ensure confidentiality, originality, and security; verify content; audit sources and citations; parse logic chains; and check facts. We can start by expecting all students to keep close, verifiable records of their research processes for quick reference when they are asked to explain a fact or interpretation, and by ensuring precise citation practice so that use of correct author, title, date, publication, and DOI designations are not afterthoughts of grading but universal prerequisites. 

Logic, however, is just as important. This means more than just proofing for coherence, sequence, and consistency. Fact-checking, or “assessing the veracity of a claim” through “examining official data and sources and consulting relevant experts” (Ryan & Hammerton, 2026, pp. 204, 202) only goes so far; logic-checking, on the other hand, “assesses the quality of reasoning used to arrive at a claim,” with the intended educational benefit that “agents using logic-checks will ultimately be able to see flaws in reasoning for themselves” (Ryan & Hammerton, pp. 204, 208). Textual logic-checking thus draws equally on computer science, philosophy, and journalism.

Critic

Students might need to learn tool criticism. I have never understood some academics’ reticence to practice their own criticism of AI tools. Employees and future employees in academic, public, and private workplaces alike have a duty to test, assess, classify, and criticize available tools. That’s not disloyalty but instead a real service to their leadership teams grappling with the reality of AI. Our criticism of literature, film, the fine arts, and other scholarship does not undermine those disciplines, after all, but in fact strengthens them. 

Effective tool criticism necessitates, according to a fascinating special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, “a slowing down and an eagerness to learn,” not only about our tools’ basic principles and functions, but also about their “values and assumptions pertaining [to] embedded concepts and methods that should be subject to scrutiny” (van Es, 2023, paras. 42-43). In other words, we need to analyze not only suitability for application, but also ethics of application in the context of care: for our colleagues, direct reports, leadership teams, and whole organizations.

Steward

Perhaps most importantly, therefore, students might need to learn stewardship. Borrowing from management studies, stewardship theory builds on the foundational ideas that technical artifacts such as communicative texts exist in the social contexts of their organizations (Bostrum & Heinen, 1997, as cited in Gierlich-Joas et al., 2024) and also that “individuals seek to fulfill higher order needs through pro-organizational behavior and thus will naturally align their interests with those of the organization” (Davis et al.  1997, as cited in Chrisman, 2019, p. 1051), prioritizing cooperation over defection. 

Responsibility for any text in the workplace, then, is a question of stewarding that document from initial need or request, through the editorial process, and finally to delivery and application, while maintaining appropriate levels of confidentiality and transparency as the context evolves. More than this, however, stewardship means ensuring that the document serves the collective goals of the organization (Chrisman, 2019) rather than those of any single writer, team member, manager, or AI tool. Many instinctively individualistic writers find it a challenge to serve an organization or business without at the same time ceding their own capacities for innovation and critical thinking. Our workplace writing classes in particular can help.

Nothing Is Lost

None of these skills are wholly new. We don’t need to invent new pedagogies to teach our students to audit, verify, validate, check facts and logic, act as good stewards of communication teams and texts, or for that matter, to think and write critically. We can borrow and adapt respectively from our colleagues in accounting, computer science, journalism, philosophy, theology, public and private management, and from our own work in literary criticism and critical theory.

And those fields will continue to borrow from us. 

One of my own daughters graduated from college this year, and I was proud to attend. The commencement speaker mentioned AI at least once. I don’t recall any boos or hisses. Later at the reception, however, I chatted with a successful financial technology (fintech) professional who had returned to the college for a graduate degree in the humanities. I wanted to know why. He felt his own job was secure, he said, so it wasn’t about retraining for new employment. In fact, he said he found the whole public debate about AI somewhat quaint. It was already integrated into fintech workplaces, with no going back, so the relevant questions were no longer whether to use AI, but how and why: which specific tools and human team members to employ for which tasks, how to justify the investment of resources, how to match processes with desired outcomes. To make such decisions wisely and justify them to his own leadership team, then, he needed advanced training in logic, ethics, rhetoric, and the ability to steward a complex and consistent textual argument from initial spark through oral defense. 

Our students deserve no less. 

References

Bregel, S. (2026, May 19). Students keep booing AI at graduation speeches this year. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/91544965/ai-getting-booed-2026-commencement-speeches-graduation

Chrisman, J. J. (2019). Stewardship theory: Realism, relevance, and family firm governance. Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, 43(6), 1051-1066. https://doi.org/10.1177/1042258719838472

Gierlich-Joas, M., Baiyere, A., & Hess, T. (2024). Inverse transparency and the quest for empowerment through the design of digital workplace technologies. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 25(5), 1212-1239. https://doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00879

Ryan, S., & Hammerton, M. (2026). Beyond fact-checking: The importance of logic-checking in public discourse. Social Epistemology, 40(2), 201-213. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2025.2549830

Singer, S. (2025, August 10). Goodbye, $165,000 tech jobs: Student coders seek work at Chipotle. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs-students.html

van Es, K. (2023). Unpacking tool criticism as practice, in practice. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 17(2), 1–13. https://dhq-static.digitalhumanities.org/pdf/000692.pdf

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About the Author

Dr. Jacob Kaltenbach is Chair of the English and Rhetoric Department at Purdue University Global and Partnerships Chair for the Association for Writing Across the Curriculum.