This semester my work e-mail has filled up with requests from people I don’t know. When I say “filled up”, I’m talking about multiple messages every day. Some senders ask me to review a book they wrote and appear to have published themselves. (No, I’m too busy reviewing student work and journal submissions.). Others ask for feedback on a product they developed. (No, I won’t be your beta tester or marketer). A third group asks me to supervise them, either as a postdoctoral fellow or as a PhD student. (Information about this is publicly available on our university’s website, but the e-mail sender seems never to have even considered reviewing our website before messaging me.)
Academics have always received inquiries from prospective students, along with the occasional request to review a book. That’s fine and we expect those messages. But lately, my inbox seems flooded with messages that all seem to have a similar through line (an ask for my time or expertise) and the e-mails all seem to have a similar ring to them… Something I just can’t put my finger on, but it doesn’t feel… well… human.
When I don’t reply, I sometimes get a second message from the same sender about a week later.
I suspect that AI agents write at least some of these messages, though I have no evidence to prove it. Anyone with access to generative AI (or a human agent who has access to these tools) can produce a personal-sounding request in seconds and send it to hundreds of academics at once, and automated e-mail tools commonly send follow-ups at a set interval. The messages I receive fit both patterns. Of course, a pattern proves nothing…
Writing to a professor you had never met used to take some work. You read a few of their publications, decided whether your interests lined up with theirs, and then wrote the e-mail. People who went through those steps were usually serious about the inquiry. When software handles the writing, the sender saves that time and the recipient spends it instead, reading each message and deciding whether a person wrote it and whether to respond. I get the distinct impression that at least some of these inquiries for supervision are coming from folks who haven’t done their homework in terms of understanding how applications for admissions or for jobs actually work at our university. (By the way, applications for 2027 graduate admissions in our school of education have now closed. Seriously, check the Werklund School of Education website for general details before sending a query to a prof.)
Some of the senders might be real people with goals, hopes, and dreams. A prospective doctoral student who has read my work and writes to me for that reason deserves a fair reading, even if their message resembles the ones I suspect are automated. Telling the two apart takes time, and that time comes out of my research, my teaching, and my work with the students I already supervise. I suspect (and again, I could be totally off base here) that some of this has been driven by my name ending up on some lists of prominent researchers in academia. I have intentionally not posted about being named to any such lists intentionally, as I have very mixed feelings about what counts as “succcess” in higher education.
When my students graduate from their chosen programs after years of hard work and finally receive their parchments, that’s success. When novice writers I have been working with publish their first article, that’s success. Being named to lists as being in the Top Whatever is kind of baloney because “top” is always temporary, and often decided in some arbitrary way by metrics that are never fully transparent.
I’ll step of the soap box now to say that I haven’t yet figured out a way to handle the volume of e-mail increases, apart from marking such messages as junk and using an auto-reply until I come up with something better.
Is anyone else noticing a similar trend? If you work in academia, are you receiving more unsolicited requests for reviews or supervision from people you don’t know, along with follow-ups when you don’t reply? If you’ve developed a system for managing these messages, please share it!
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Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, is a Professor and Research Chair in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. Opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer.
