Harvard’s Dean Treats Take-Home Writing as Unprovable Work

Harvard College Dean David J. Deming told students on September 2 that take-home exams and problem sets can no longer measure mastery. In the same first-day email he suggested AI acceptance, or even encouragement, on papers too long for a proctored room, and he promised advisory guidelines by the end of the academic year.

Humanities faculty heard an attack on writing. The practical change is where Harvard is still willing to put a grade.

Take-Home Exams Lost Their Seal at Harvard

Deming wrote that take-home tests, paired with bans nobody can enforce, trap honest students who fear falling behind classmates who will use the tools anyway. He compared those bans to tying yourself to a mast to avoid temptation. He also said Harvard should get out of the AI-detection business because it damages trust between faculty and students.

A different approach is needed for papers and other assignments that are too meaty to fit within a proctored exam window. Here I would modestly suggest AI acceptance, or even encouragement.

David J. Deming, Dean of Harvard College, September 2 email to undergraduates

He labeled those lines initial thoughts, not policy, and said any collegewide guidance would need extensive talks with faculty, staff, and students. “This year I believe we must act,” he wrote. Harvard’s teaching center had already told instructors over the summer to put more weight on in-person tests, so the email was catching up to a shift already underway in large courses.

On September 8, Deming said he still wants students to draft on their own. He uses AI for feedback, he said, not for the ideas, because “the writing is thinking.” He also called it irresponsible to pretend that a take-home ban solves the problem. The distinction is easy to miss in the outrage: he is trying to protect learning, and he is giving up on authenticating unsupervised prose.

Why Unsupervised Papers Can No Longer Be Graded

Deming’s case is less a theory of writing than a head count. He told students that everyone is using AI all the time, and his own research sits behind that claim. A labor economist who became dean in 2025, he has been measuring how people actually prompt chatbots, not how syllabi say they should.

WHO ALREADY USES THE TOOLS

• Harvard College: A 2024 survey of Harvard undergraduates (326 responses) found 87.5 percent had used generative AI.
• Among those users: Roughly 25 percent had already begun substituting the tools for office hours or required reading.
• Worldwide: Deming’s study of ChatGPT’s worldwide use, done with OpenAI economists, found about 10 percent of the global adult population was on the tool as of July 2025.
• Traffic: The same paper counted 2.6 billion daily messages, with adults 18 to 25 sending nearly half of them.

ChatGPT reached a billion daily messages in less than two years after its November 2022 launch. Google needed eight years to hit that mark after 1999. Young users are not waiting for a dean’s memo. Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of undergraduate education, put the grading problem in one line last year: it does not make sense to prohibit AI and then assign take-home essays.

Detection is the other dead end. Deming wrote on his Substack, minutes after the email, that AI writing and AI detectors are trapped like Alice and the Red Queen, running faster only to stay in place. Faculty who still want a human first draft have to watch the draft get made, which is why the live classroom is suddenly doing the job the paper used to do.

Most Humanities Classes Still Prohibit AI

A review of about 600 fall 2026 syllabi found a split that tracks the old map of campus. Science and engineering courses are already living with the tools. Writing-heavy departments are not.

AI RULES IN FALL 2026 SYLLABI

English professor Deirdre Lynch said she does not want to be “the cop” combing papers for chatbot traces. She will still keep a blanket ban in her two fall courses. History professor Peter E. Gordon warned that AI in writing classes would worsen a drop in student attention and push students toward canned responses to art, music, literature, and philosophy.

Writing is sort of a personality and individual thoughts clashing with something shared called language.

Deirdre Lynch, professor of English, Harvard University

Deming has said, since spring, that CS50 and an upper-level English seminar should not share the same guardrails. The email still landed as a single message about writing. On September 3, Tyler Austin Harper wrote that if professors buy the line that AI “integration” can coexist with a traditional liberal arts education, “you are being taken for ride.” On September 9, student editors argued that encouraging AI on long papers gives away synthesis, revision, and structure, the steps that used to be the education.

The email pointed readers to Colorado State professor Kyle L. Saunders, who lets students use AI at any stage of out-of-class writing if they disclose it. That is a workforce argument. Lynch’s objection is that the clash with language is the assignment.

Jane Rosenzweig and the Folded Writing Center

Critics read the email against a personnel file. In late July, Harvard College laid off Jane Rosenzweig, director of the Harvard College Writing Center for 22 years, and folded the center’s tutoring into the Academic Resource Center. She had helped build the AI module now required in Expository Writing, the first-year course that more than 90 percent of undergraduates take.

Deming pushed back hard on September 8. He did not close the Writing Center, he said. The site still exists, the main work is tutoring, and the sessions continue.

FROM LAYOFF TO EMAIL

1. Late July 2026: Harvard College lays off Writing Center director Jane Rosenzweig and folds tutoring into the Academic Resource Center during a Faculty of Arts and Sciences overhaul.
2. Late July 2026: Current and former tutors send an open letter, later signed by more than 100 people, calling the move reckless.
3. September 1, 2026: Deming tells freshmen at Convocation that universities should invest in learning communities because they no longer hold a monopoly on expertise.
4. September 2, 2026: His first-day email suggests AI acceptance on papers and a turn toward proctored exams.

FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm said students would still work with writing tutors. FAS leaders have described a $350 million structural deficit behind the wider cuts. Undergraduates can still book a writing tutoring session on the old address Deming named. In a typical semester, he said, the center runs about 1,000 of those sessions, and that work is not pausing.

The URL does not settle the argument. Rosenzweig was the person who trained the tutors and made the case, in public, for human revision after chatbots arrived. Removing that job, then telling students writing courses should accept AI, is why the two events are being read as one sequence, even if they did not share a memo.

The Compact Found Coursework Coming Last

Deming’s communal pitch has an older problem to solve than ChatGPT. The January 2025 classroom compact report, chaired by historian Maya Jasanoff and economist David Laibson, found that many Harvard College students do not prioritize their courses. Some treat heavy club schedules as a better use of time. Most faculty, the committee wrote, view that disengagement with alarm.

The group held more than 30 listening sessions. In spring 2024, only 33 percent of graduating seniors agreed they felt free to express personal feelings about controversial topics.

WHAT THE 2025 COMPACT HEARD

• Attendance: Instructors said undergraduates often skip class and skip the assigned reading.
• Course shopping: Students often pick classes for a light workload and a high grade, not for intellectual interest.
• Clubs first: Athletics, pre-professional groups, and social clubs crowd out coursework.
• Grade pressure: Students expect high marks while expecting to give less effort, a pattern faculty tied to course evaluations.

Deming’s answer is to make the academic side look more like the rest of campus life, the projects, the oral work, the check-ins, instead of lecturing students that class should outrank clubs. He is not, he said, about to tell departments how to teach. He wants a shared purpose stated out loud, then for the college to line up behind it. Meal swipes so faculty can eat with students are the small version of that bet. Redesigning the work that earns a grade is the large one.

The Scarce Thing Harvard Still Sells Is Presence

Deming told freshmen that universities used to monopolize expertise and no longer do, which he called a good thing for society. What they still uniquely offer, he said, is a crowd of young people living and learning together at a formative age, practicing how to listen, how to lead, how to take criticism, and how to sit with fairness and integrity. Those habits, he said, cannot be learned solely from behind a screen.

In his 2025 convocation remarks on his Substack, he told the Class of 2029 that an AI-infused economy would make a liberal arts education more valuable, not less, because the useful skill is learning to adapt. The 2026 version of that speech is more defensive. If a free chatbot can supply personalized expert knowledge in seconds, the campus has to sell the friction that the chatbot removes.

He reached for productive struggle, then walked the word “suffering” back. The hard concepts did not make sense the first time he read them. Pushing through the confusion, with other people doing it too, was the point. Colleague Tarek Masoud’s image is a mental gym: you add weight on purpose. Personalized feeds and always-on tutors erase that resistance. Deming wants Harvard to put some of it back.

Jason Furman and David Laibson already did the unsentimental version in Ec10, the college’s largest class, introductory economics. This year they cut the weight on take-home problem sets and added midterms, because they could not enforce an AI ban on homework. Laibson had also co-chaired the compact that said students were already treating class as optional. The midterm is how that finding becomes a grade.

That is the second move inside the email. Take-home problem sets lose their seal. Papers too long for a proctored window get AI leeway, plus scaffolding, first draft, talk to the professor, second draft, so the human still has to show up in between. The scarce product is no longer a polished file uploaded at midnight. It is a student in a room, on the clock, with other people watching.

Collegewide AI Guidelines Are Due This Year

Deming wants shared guidance for faculty who teach large courses like Ec10, so they are not inventing the rules alone. He still says the rules have to be driven by faculty, and that CS50 should not be policed like a seminar. Collegewide advisory guidelines are due by the end of this academic year.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The email: Take-home exams are out as a mastery test; papers may accept AI; detection is a dead end.
• The tutoring: Writing help continues through the Academic Resource Center, about 1,000 sessions a typical semester.
• The split: Lynch is keeping a ban; Ec10 already moved weight onto midterms.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The guidelines: No draft text, no vote date, and no decision on whether writing courses will be told to encourage AI or merely allowed to.
• The credential: Whether a Harvard paper written with accepted AI tools will still be treated, by employers or graduate schools, as proof of thought.

Until those guidelines land, the syllabus is the policy. Science courses have already let the tools in. Most humanities sections have not. Deming can call that a conversation. The grade that still counts is the one a chatbot cannot sit for.