Oberlin Luddites, I Love You

The Oberlin Luddites, a student organization at my alma mater, wrote an opinion piece last September in the Oberlin Review last September, asking the president of the school to opt out of the use of AI in school work.

We are drafting this letter to you on a typewriter that is over 70 years old; this is a machine that we know well. With it, we ditch the crutches of spell-check and generative AI, and we think intently about every phrase we pound out. As we force ourselves, for once, to slow down, we engage in an inner dialogue.

Most of us did not enroll at Oberlin in search of superficial perfection, nor of lazy convenience. Rather, we chose it for its quirky individualism and a tangible education — the challenging of our young minds’ potential, not the chasing of institutional “gold-star” approval.

I expect nothing less from my fellow Obies: banging out letters on antiquated1 technology just to prove a point is peak Oberlin. I love seeing this kind of campus activism.

  1. Antiquated they may be, but utterly delightful. ↩︎