Making the rounds in April was a higher-ed post for our time: “The honest B or C student, submitting essays filled with awkward constructions, malapropisms, [and] earnest, if failed or surface-y arguments, [is] a surprise hero of the present age.” So wrote professor Matt Dinan of Canada’s St. Thomas University, a liberal arts institution in Fredericton, New Brunswick. But so could have written every English professor to whom I’ve spoken in the last 2 1/2 years, from bustling Los Angeles to the remote Nebraska plains. Across the nation — indeed, across the computer-age world — the introduction of ChatGPT and...