AI is Changing Higher Education

The AI boom of the past few years has rendered an inevitable reaction. Technology that is supposedly capable of replacing much of the cognitive tasks of human beings has shaken higher education to its core. The hype enjoyed by this fundamental shift in thinking has remained a fascination of our great minds of the Western tradition.

Unfortunately, in this era of unfettered development, this fascination has trickled down to our less attuned elite tastemakers with panicked warnings. The hand-wringing about how AI “changes everything” or “robs my students of the ability to think” litter the front pages of America’s most prestigious magazines. All the while, tech-optimists routinely proffer opposing claims that “the ‘AI job apocalypse’ is a complete fantasy.”

If we observe the feelings from college students at recent commencement addresses, “AI sucks” seems to be the common mood among those ready to enter the job market.

With the advent of AI, the recycling of the same questions becomes monotonous. Will students still learn how to write? Will AI destroy creativity? What about cheating? How are professors supposed to adapt? Is AI capable of replacing the entire system of education?

The genealogy of these debates are both ancient and modern.

The ontological anomalies of our AI age produce a renewed ambiguity. AI is here. AI is not going away. AI will be used by students, as well as professors. The anxiety surrounding AI simply exposes a further reduction of capability.

But the emergence of technology that extends our cognitive abilities further into the digital realm pushes the concept of thinking-itself into uncharted territory.

Like many of these AI-skeptic students, I grew up on the internet. And it is online where many of us came to learn about the world and about ourselves. The maze-like adventures of hyperlinks and “surfing the web” provided portals into alternate realities that shaped our cultural perspective. So when I started encountering a cascade of articles bemoaning the use of AI by college students, it didn’t seem all that surprising.

The AI panic in higher education often feels strangely futile. I and many of my colleagues went through the university, attaining graduate degrees, and playing by the rules so that we could hopefully provide ourselves with opportunities for career success.

And it was also the universities that spent decades transforming education into what is now a machine of credentialism with its professional sorting mechanisms and progressive indoctrination centers. The great liberal Cathedral that is higher education provided the great expectations for young people to enter the world and move forward the praxis of ideological containment.

But maybe the doom and gloom of AI is true. Maybe higher education is headed toward a genuine implosion. Maybe, just maybe, there will be a breakdown brought on by the slow realization that the culture of education is not prepared for the type of cultural disruption that AI will bring about.

Higher education was sold as the promise of landing a job, a stable income, a fulfilling life. The white-collar existence of the middle-class American is now threatened by AI. Massive destabilization by computational developments removes the very necessity of credentialization and specialization that has become modern academia.

Almost 60% of college-age adults say AI allows for students to “avoid learning,” while nearly 90% use AI “regularly” when doing school work. It would seem the outward hostility to AI by university students is a facade. Their objection appears more rooted in the underlying psychological strain about what AI’s widespread adoption might mean for their future job prospects.

Stepping into education is supposed to be a step towards the development of reason. Few would argue that our system of higher education promotes such virtue anymore. Instead, it has skirted that duty in favor of optimizing for ideological expectations. The overt pressure to conform to prevailing orthodoxies became the proxy to success. Is it any wonder, then, that students so easily hand over their thinking to AI? The arrival of AI did not suddenly mechanize thought because, in many cases, thought had already been subordinated, wedded to institutional procedure.

Students know, at some level, that leaning too heavily on AI weakens something within them. Writing has long been tied to self-formation, a searching struggle for words, an inner wrestling with unclear thoughts, a sitting and doubting about insight yet to emerge. The relief that comes with AI turns into dependence. With that dependence comes dullness. That dullness turns to apathy — then rage.

To recover the skills that once gave students worth in the pursuit of reason in higher education requires the recovery of the system of higher education itself. The strength of humanity is dependent on the cultivation of the great minds — which are challenged to think in confrontation with the great minds of the past.

AI does not conceal but rather reveals what is already present. The universities have already been hollowed out. The universities are no longer concerning themselves with the fundamental questions of God, man, nature, philosophy, art, and reason. And so students will continue to retreat, both in thought and in body to the autonomous mechanization of ease-of-use.

So now it’s up to the universities to foster a genuine liberal education — one rooted in fostering virtue rather than doctrinal commitment and habituation so it may serve the activity of the mind and soul.