As spring classes start at UCF, I’ve removed a familiar name from my course syllabi: Jack Gordon of Gordon Rule fame. As four decades of Florida college students know, “Gordon Rule” refers to the writing intensive classes they must take as part of their general education program. Beginning this semester, however, UCF has joined other state colleges and universities in renaming the requirement. The Gordon Rule is now called the State Writing Requirement. Although only the name has changed — the substance of the policy remains the same — I find myself surprisingly wistful about losing old Jack Gordon.

The rule originated in the early 1980s as Jack Gordon, a Democratic state legislator from Miami, pushed to raise education standards in Florida’s high schools and universities. “We in the Florida Legislature became very concerned about the low level of some basic skills,” Gordon said in the 1985 interview. Many colleges “were exceptionally lax in the quality of work they required of students in English and other humanities.”

Gordon’s solution: students should do a lot of writing. He envisioned students taking four courses in English and other humanities that demanded a paper a week, as he’d done as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the 1940s, which he equated to 6,000 words per course. That’s 24,000 for each student over their Gordon Rule class sequence.

The rule proved controversial from the start. The volume of writing was overwhelming for instructors, even in 1982 when the rule went into effect. UCF’s enrollment that year? Only 14,000 students.

Institutions have modified their implementation of the rule over time and moved away from strict word counts to emphasize instruction in the writing process. That’s lucky for me. I have 200 students this semester. At 6,000 words each, I’d be grading 1.2 million words!

Under the rule’s new name, UCF still emphasizes quality over quantity, and that’s what’s most important. Still, I’m going to miss calling it the Gordon Rule.

As a historian, I liked how “Gordon Rule” tied the policy to a particular person acting in a particular time and place. Jack Gordon had been a member of the Dade County School Board and he’d served on the Florida Senate Education Committee. Over time, he devised a plan and then persuaded his colleagues in the legislature and on the State Board of Education that his proposal would bear fruit.

History is the study of contingency — events that might have turned out differently. Jack Gordon’s rule changed the education of millions of Florida students. They would not have written nearly so often or taken nearly as many humanities courses without him, even though few students know who this Gordon guy was and where his rule came from.

As a teacher, I like to tell stories, and telling the story of Jack Gordon as I go over the syllabus on the first day of class always sets the right tone.

By explaining where the rule came from, I show students that the course will be about more than memorizing names and dates. The course will be about explaining how the past influences the present, even in small ways, like why they will be writing essays in the class. I also signal that the course will be about how students are both different from people in the past — those poor 1980s kids didn’t have the internet, smartphones, or AI! — and similar to students today, when writing is still the best way to learn how to think.

College writing instruction is at a crossroads. When ChatGPT exploded in late 2022, commentators declared the death of the college essay. Now, students can order an AI-produced essay on any topic and at any length, even 6,000 words. They can tell AI to make the essay sound like a college student. And AI spits out a passable essay in seconds.

But AI doesn’t replace thinking for yourself, which is the point of a university education. That was Jack Gordon’s concern in the 1980s. “We have no idea,” Gordon reminded the State Board of Education, “as to the kind of world these graduates are going to face in ten years, let alone twenty, thirty, or forty.”

Godon was right 45 years ago and he’s right now: students writing and thinking — on their own — is the best preparation for the future. That wisdom is why I’ll miss having Gordon’s name on the state’s writing requirement.

David Head teaches history at UCF.