As the semester ends, Dr. Andrew Pavelich, professor of philosophy here at the University of Houston-Downtown, reflects on the cycles of teaching, discussing death and animal ethics in the classroom, and artificial intelligence. In this discussion, he shares key insights into the courses he will be offering in the summer and fall, with a personal touch.
Q: I have some questions for you. Okay, so as the semester wraps up, how are you feeling about the year overall? Any highlights that stand out to you, any student work, or anything?
A: Part of what’s great about the academic life is that things are constantly beginning and ending. Every semester is a new thing; it’s fun to start, put together new classes, and meet new students. And yes – I’ve seen some great student work this semester – some really insightful ideas. But as much as I enjoy teaching, it’s also nice when the semester comes to an end. That’s the cyclical nature of this job, of this life. I’ve been at UHD for 23 years, and, for that matter, I’ve been taking or teaching classes every year since I was six. But it doesn’t get old, because things change, and every semester has its own cycle of starting, growing, and ending.
Q: I’ve always wondered, do professors get so tired of teaching the same thing that they’ve studied over and over?
A: I’m definitely the kind of person who wouldn’t want to do the same class over and over, and I’m lucky that in philosophy, we get to pretty much pick what we teach. We have three different philosophy classes in the core, so if I get bored with teaching one of them, I can shift to another one for a few years. Likewise, our upper-level classes rotate, so I don’t have to teach the same thing over and over. Some people like to do that, but I’m not built that way – I like to move around in what I teach.
Q: I’ve heard about your death course before. It’s very popular among the students. Are you teaching it this summer?
A: Yes! Lately, I’ve been doing Philosophy of Death in the summers. Summer classes are awesome. It’s five weeks, and so it breaks down really nicely into five sections. In week one, we confront the question: What is death? Like, what is the literal medical definition of death? You’d think it would be easy, but it’s really not. Then there are two weeks on the possibility of an afterlife, and then there’s a week on whether death is bad for someone who dies – again, it might seem obvious that death is bad, but there are a lot of philosophers who have argued that death can’t be bad for you, because you’re already dead. The last week covers suicide—that can be a difficult week, but there’s a lot to think about.
Q: Interesting. And so what are you going into on suicide?
A: Suicide is the 11th leading cause of death in the United States (for years, it was the 10th, and then COVID came in and pushed it down). The fact is that almost everybody knows someone who’s killed themselves. But I don’t think we should shy away from talking about it. The big question is, is suicide ever justified? Is it ever rational? On the one hand, you want to respect people’s autonomy, but on the other hand, something like 90% of people who attempt suicide and survive the attempt don’t try again. So we try to prevent it, but how far does that go? Is there any level of suffering where it starts to make sense? Maybe in people who are already dying and suffering? As I said, it’s a tough set of questions, but with 40,000 suicides a year in the U.S., it’s worth thinking about.
Q: So you never get unsettled with the repetition of death courses in the summer?
A: It can definitely be unsettling! I love the death course, even if it’s kind of depressing sometimes. That’s partly why I like to do it in the summer – 5 weeks of death is plenty. Thinking about death, what might come after, and what it might mean, is one of the things that started me off in Philosophy a long time ago. And as I get older, it seems to matter even more.
Q: I’ve heard about your animal ethics course, too. Are you going to do that this upcoming fall?
A: Yeah, that class is one that I made about four years ago, and I will be teaching it in the fall.
Q: Tell me about this animal ethics course. It sounds really neat.
A: So for years, I was teaching classes on environmental ethics. In part of that class, I was talking about animal rights because it sort of seemed to fit. Because environmental ethics is about things like, should we protect the environment? Animals are a part of that, but only a part. There was so much to say about animals that I spun that off into its own class.
Q: How does it correlate to philosophy, though?
A: You know, part of why I like teaching Philosophy of Death is that those questions are still really important to me personally, and it’s the same with Animal Ethics. Like, tonight my wife and I are planning to get some burgers for dinner. And obviously, I’m going to eat meat, and hopefully, I’m going to really enjoy it. But a cow died for that, right? And it probably had a life that wasn’t very pleasant before its death. So the fundamental question of the animal ethics class is: do we have a moral right to kill animals for food just because we like how they taste?
This is why I like teaching the class. The animal ethics class confronts choices that all of us are making every day (unless maybe you’re already a vegan—which I’m not). The fact is that our food system includes mass slaughter, with hundreds of millions of cows, pigs, and chickens and fish being just ground up on an industrial scale for nuggets and hamburgers. And the amount of suffering that goes into that process is staggering. Some people respond by saying, “Okay, I’ll get organic beef; I’ll go to a small farm and get beef”. But you’re still killing an animal that has a life and has a family and has joy, and you wouldn’t do that to your dog. If you found out your neighbor had killed his dog and ground it up and made sausage, that would be pretty bad. You probably wouldn’t go over for dinner. But then we go to the supermarket and buy some meat that came from a cow, pig, chicken, that were just as alive and maybe as happy as that dog.
Q: Do you implement AI in the classroom?
A: AI is terrible. Some students have always cheated on papers, but in the last three years, it has changed dramatically. It used to be cutting and pasting, right? And it was relatively easy to find it. Now it’s AI, and overnight, nobody cuts and pastes anymore. And there’s a lot of debate about whether using AI is appropriate or how much is okay, but for me, it seems pretty clear that many of the ways it’s used are just dishonest and bad.
Imagine I give you a paper assignment and you take it to your friend and say, “How would you write this paper?” Maybe they give you some ideas, and probably it’s fair for you to take those ideas and write the paper. But if you say to them, “outline the paper for me,” Or maybe you just ask them to write the thing. Or maybe you don’t have them write the whole thing – maybe you make some notes, then give it to your friend and say, “Please rewrite this to make it sound better.” And then you turn in the paper, with your name on it. How is that not cheating? Those aren’t your ideas, and you didn’t write the paper. And of course, if you do that with an AI, it’s just as bad.
I hate it, and part of what I hate is how the AI industry has invaded everything. Those programs are everywhere, and they’re marketed as just being a normal part of life. At UHD, it’s a part of our Word Suite. We’re paying for it, and we’re giving that program to students. It’s sitting right there. So, of course, some people will use it, but that doesn’t make it right.
Q: Do you think these patterns will continue in academia?
A: I hope that it will change. AI is so new, and we have to keep talking about it and figuring out what the guardrails should be. Maybe things will change when the economic AI bubble bursts, and suddenly it costs money to use these things. Right now, the costs of using these programs are being covered by the investor class. They hope the bubble keeps getting bigger, but what happens when that dries up? If you had to pay $10 for every use of the thing, it might be different.
Q: Okay, last question, what are you doing this summer? What are you most excited to do with your personal free time?
A: Well, I teach summer classes, so there’s not a huge amount of free time. But I have a number of hobbies that I try to maintain to make sure I’m not just doing philosophy all day, every day, and I’ve been sort of neglecting them for the last six months, and I want to get back to them. Mostly, I want to get back into painting. I’ve been trying to carve out a bit of time each day to do it, but it’s easy to skip it and just zone out. So this summer, I want to take a class at the MFAH to learn more about painting techniques and sort of force myself to get back into it.
Q: So you take a class there?
A: I’ve taken two classes there over the last couple of years. It’s not for college credit, but it’s a real course.
Q: Wow, the roles are reversed, the professor becomes the student. There is a lot of vulnerability with that, right?
A: It was actually a really great experience for me. It’s like, oh yeah, this is what it feels like to be a student: To show the teacher your work, and be nervous about what they’ll think. Or to struggle to find the time to get my homework done, or even to find the energy to get to class sometimes. It’s weird to feel that anxiety. But there’s also something great about just being a student that I had been missing out on – being there, trying something new, and absolutely not being the authority on it. It’s really refreshing. I like to think that I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be a student—that I can put myself in my students’ shoes. But it’s a whole different thing to actually do it.
