Academic etiquette & service in the age of GenAI

Why I am concerned about the increasing use of GenAI in interpersonal interactions

Anne-Wil Harzing - Mon 27 Jan 2025 17:13 (updated Sat 10 May 2025 07:52)

Academic etiquette

When I started blogging in 2016, quite a few of my posts dealt with academic etiquette. Here is a list of the posts I published on this topic in the first six months alone. It is clear I had something to get off my chest, isn’t it? Well, isn’t that partly what blogging is about?

In the next six months, I added two more posts, both dealing with appropriate forms of address in academia:

Some of my later posts dealt indirectly with academic etiquette talking about when to say no, toxic collaborations, being a good co-author, conference networking, promoting your work without being obnoxious, how to change academia through positive interactions, and a more general post about kindness and gratitude.

But I haven’t felt the need to write about academic etiquette proper for nearly 8 years.

Academic service work

I briefly considered writing a post on the etiquette involved when asking someone to do “academic service work” for you. Like many senior academics I get zillions of emails from academics asking me to do one or more of these things for them (always for free):

give a session on a specific predefined topic in their staff development program. [So they can impress their boss for getting a famous speaker 😁]
lecture in their class on a specific time on a specified topic that’s already in their syllabus. [I suspect they just want a week off, wouldn’t we all 😁]
help them publish a paper in a top journal. [I guess they are reasoning my “brand name” will make it a shoe-in. 😁 Save your breadth, it really doesn’t!]
be their referee for a scholarship, promotion or tenure application, job application, award nomination. [Name your pick 😁]
run literature searches for them or help them out with their bibliometric study, because they can’t figure out how to use my free Publish or Perish software. [Why consult the extensive helpfiles or the dedicated guide when you can just ask the provider to do it for you 😁]

Remember these are all activities that take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks of my time. Some weeks I get half a dozen of these emails. Before we disabled the PoP help email, I would sometimes get half a dozen a day for PoP alone. Even politely declining these requests takes up a good chunk of my time.

Don’t get me wrong, I have engaged in the “legitimate versions” of all these – and many other – academic service activities on a very regular basis over the past 30 years. I do examine, engage in “mentoring authorships”, run staff development about topics I am passionate about, give the occasional guest lecture in my area of expertise. I have also written more references than I can remember, and I have responded to thousands of PoP help requests.

But – PoP help requests excepted – I only do them in areas that I know something about and for people that I know and/or respect, or who are at least connected to someone I know and/or respect. Increasingly, however, these requests come from people I have never heard of before. Or they are from people that I have met in a former academic life but haven’t heard a beep from for 10 years! In some cases, they even come from people that have connected with me on LinkedIn just minutes before (I am very liberal in my acceptances, so I do accept requests from people I do not know).

Honestly, I really don’t think asking someone you don’t know or haven’t bothered to keep in touch with a huge favour is “the done thing”. Obviously, you can try and sometimes you will strike lucky. I might be in a generous mood, or I might be interested in visiting a particular city. [Pro tip on campus visits: not even offering to pay travel costs isn’t likely to increase your chances😁. Not only are you asking me to sacrifice my time, but I am also expected to pay for the privilege of doing so!].

But generally, the answer to these requests will be a polite “no”, with a reference to online resources on my website that offer what they are looking for. That’s already quite a generous, I would argue; many academics would not even respond to these emails. Personally, I would only ever ask these favours from people that I had built up a relationship with over several years, or where I was able to demonstrate clearly how the activity would benefit them too. Where possible, I would offer to do something for hem, however symbolic it might be. Remember you are asking them a favour!

When ChatGPT takes over

Recently, however, some of these academic service requests have taken on a novel turn. They are starting to sound a bit “off” and left me with an uncomfortable and “icky” feeling. No, they are not as bad as the mail-merge emails from students wanting to do a PhD “in my lab” and become a member of my “prestigious research team” [Pro tip: Social Scientist don’t have labs, and they generally don’t have research teams either.]

However, these emails hardly ever refer to any specifics in my record that led to their request, just to my “distinguished reputation” and “pioneering research in the field”. They assure me that they have long admired my exceptional contributions, would truly appreciate my insights and be immensely grateful for my willingness to share my expertise and reflections. My presentation would be incredibly enriching for their students/colleagues, would provide invaluable perspectives and foster stimulating discussions, and leave a lasting impact on their academic journey. Interestingly, they often frame their request to me as an “opportunity for collaboration”.

These emails typically are at least twice as long as similar requests in the past and consist of perfectly balanced paragraphs with a uniform structure. On the other hand, they are devoid of any personal intro or outro and have a strangely lifeless feel. They appear to combine the flowery language of Indians, the deference of East Asians, and the politeness of the English. Don’t get me wrong, under normal circumstances I love all of these – as well as the many other – country specific communication patterns.

But flowery language only works when it is matched with real passion, deference when it is matched with genuine humility and humbleness, and politeness when it is matched with authenticity, as it is in natural human language. I very strongly suspect the senders have asked ChatGPT to “write an email flattering a famous professor into [doing something for me]”. These messages are so flowery they become suffocating, so deferent they become obsequious, and so polite they become disrespectful. The hyperbolic description of my expertise invariably makes me cringe.

It gets even worse when you give the authors of these messages the benefit of the doubt and respond with a genuine email that explains why you can’t meet their request. This then leads to another word diarrhea that simply recaps your own email back to you in highly obsequious terms, no doubt generated by a ChatGPT prompt like “write me a polite response that keeps the option of future collaboration open”.

In the past, I have complained about not getting any response when helping others (see: Thank You: The most underused words in academia?). But now I am starting to wonder what’s worse: knowing that someone doesn’t value you enough to give you a response or knowing that they are happy to trick you into thinking they do. The former is just rude, the latter is deceptive and rude.

Are we willing to sacrifice craft and community?

And yes, if you are a non-native speaker (I am too), I fully understand it is tempting to use ChatGPT to write perfect emails. But honestly, I’d much rather read your imperfect, but genuine email and have an interaction with another human being. If you are worried about typos or grammar, just use a grammar checker. If we use AI to automate our interpersonal interaction, why do we interact at all?

Maybe, we should just let two AI communication bots battle this out instead? If yours flatters mine into submission, they can ask my AI presentation bot – trained on my presentations and writing – to narrate the presentation/lecture, fronted by my avatar. The audience (students) can send their AI co-pilots to the session, and use their own AI bots to write up their assignments, which will then be marked by my AI marking bot.

Only those not rich enough for the most sophisticated bots would need to waste their time by interacting with another human academic ever again (see also Watermeyer et al. 2024). Others can simply focus instead on leveraging the efficiency gains that AI offers in mass-producing assignments and research that nobody reads.

Why are we so worried that “management” is going to allow AI to take over our jobs? Many of us seem to be perfectly willing to sacrifice the very soul of our profession – craft and community (see Bechky & Davis, 2024) – in an endless quest for productivity and efficiency. If we are ready to sacrifice our souls, why worry about our jobs?

References

Bechky, B. A., & Davis, G. F. (2024). Resisting the Algorithmic Management of Science: Craft and Community After Generative AI. Administrative Science Quarterly, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241304403

Watermeyer, R., Phipps, L., Lanclos, D., Knight C. (2024). Generative AI and the Automating of Academia. Postdigital Science and Education, (6): 446–466

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Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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