Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)?
Last September, Tyler Austin Harper published a piece for The Atlantic on how he thinks colleges should respond to AI. What he proposes is radical—but, if you've concluded that AI really is going to destroy everything these institutions stand for, I think you have to at least consider these sorts of measures. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2025/09/ai-colle...
I was pretty interested until I got to this part:
> Another reason that a no-exceptions policy is important: If students with disabilities are permitted to use laptops and AI, a significant percentage of other students will most likely find a way to get the same allowances, rendering the ban useless. I witnessed this time and again when I was a professor—students without disabilities finding ways to use disability accommodations for their own benefit. Professors I know who are still in the classroom have told me that this remains a serious problem.
This would be a huge problem for students with severe and uncorrectable visual impairments. People with degenerative eye diseases already have to relearn how to do every single thing in their life over and over and over. What works for them today will inevitably fail, and they have to start over.
But physical impairments like this are also difficult to fake and easy to discern accurately. It's already the case that disability services at many universities only grants you accommodations that have something to do with your actual condition.
There are also some things that are just difficult to accommodate without technology. For instance, my sister physically cannot read paper. Paper is not capable of contrast ratios that work for her. The only things she can even sometimes read are OLED screens in dark mode, with absolutely black backgrounds; she requires an extremely high contrast ratio. She doesn't know braille (which most blind people don't, these days) because she was not blind as a little girl.
Committed cheaters will be able to cheat anyway; contemporary AI is great at OCR. You'll successfully punish honest disabled people with a policy like this but you won't stop serious cheaters.
The author did not outright suggest the banning of all technology. They even linked to a digital typewriter. After the very paragraph you quote, they suggest instead to offer a more human centric approach to helping disabled people. It's not a huge leap to suggest that your sister could continue to learn with the above two solutions; a disability tutor combined with a OLED screen.
You don't have to agree with his precise solution, and in fact I'm not sure whether I do. However, I found the article useful because it got me thinking about the universe of things we could be considering, if we really do think AI is poised to destroy education as we know it.
I don’t know about anyone else here, but college was not educating because I was at college. I did all of the reading and studying on my own. The classes weren’t very interesting, most of my TAs didn’t speak the native language well at all, nor did half the professors.
I enjoyed my time, I made a lot of lifelong friends, and figured out how to live on my own. My buddies that enrolled in boot camp instead of college learned all those same skills, for free.
Education won’t be ruined or blemished my LLMs, the whole thing was a joke to begin with. The bit that ruined college was unlimited student loans… and all of our best and brightest folks running the colleges raping students for money. It’s pathetic, evil, and somehow espoused.
Sounds like you just had terrible professors because most of mine were good and we learned quite a bit in classes, at least I did. I distinctly remember one professor who, every class, would meander discussion over many topics then find a way to bring them all together at the very end, crystalizing all of these disparate thoughts into one cohesive theory. And he did that every single class that semester. It was a marvel to behold.
I remember my calc teachers, married, last name gulick, university of maryland. The calc book was sold as the same book for calc 1/2/3. The couple, gulick were the authors. Every semester they released a new edition, the only thing that changed was the problem set numbers. So, if you took calc 1/2/3, you spent $200/semester for the same fucking book.
Magical times.
What he is referring to are perfectly good students whose parents will go shopping for a medical diagnosis so that their child can get "accommodation" like extra time to complete tests.
The problem is that this is treating the symptom rather than the cause. The symptom is that cheating for college admission and achievement is too effective. The cause is that college admission and achievement has become high stakes, and it absolutely should not be.
Yeah, this proposal is likely straight up illegal.
> Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)?
My 40-some-odd years on this planet tells me the answer is yes.
you might be right but 40-some-odd years is a tiny amount of time.
Sure, relative to the universe, but it's more than those who haven't had idealism beaten out of them by the world.
>What he proposes is radical
It sounds entirely reasonable and moderate to me.
Also entirely ineffective. Banning individual behavior won't prevent collective dysfunction and will only harm honest actors. The only answer that makes sense is reforming the acceptance of work to be resistant to the inevitable (ab)use of AI.
It's the exact same anti-cheating method used to great effect in top level e-sports. You can't trust competitor-supplied hardware, so the only option is for the institution to ban it and supply all hardware itself. Higher education is primarily about competition between job candidates. Eliminating cheating needs to be top priority or the whole system will collapse.
> Eliminating cheating needs to be top priority or the whole system will collapse.
It's going to collapse regardless because of the replication crisis. You might as well tackle the hard problem and figure out how to integrate replication into acceptance, or the consensus publication is intended to represent is meaningless. This is true regardless of whether a human or a robot is performing the work.
It's neither reasonable nor moderate, which is why it'll never happen.
Well, we are already rolling over and dying (literally) on everything from vaccine denial to climate change. So, yes, we are. Obviously yes.
In the US it is dying off.
Not so in plenty of other countries. Hopefully US reverses the anti-science trend before it's too late
These movements are growing in every western nation. The trend has been growing over decades. It would be nice to see it reverse but seems unlikely before calamity.
It’s a deliberate process powered by rightwing and capitalist interests designed to create a dumber, less educated and more distracted population. A war as stupid as the one with Iran would not have been possible three decades ago. As ill-advised as the Iraq war was, Bush at least spent months explaining the rationale and building support for it, successfully. Now that’s not needed.
I saw interviews with young Americans on spring break and they were so utterly uninformed it was mind-blowing. Their priorities are getting drunk and getting laid while their country bombs a nation “into the stone ages”, according to their president. And it’s not their fault: they are the product of a media environment and education system designed for exactly this outcome.
I was there for that war. Kids weren't listening and didn't care back then either. If anything, Gen Z is the most politically-aware generation we've had since we started keeping track.
Trump doesn't have to justify a single thing because the billionaires behind him know that every last bet is off and their very livelihoods are at risk, and his entire base of support up and down the chain are either complicit or fooled.
What the world does when they finally realize Democrats and Republicans are simply two sides of the vast apparatus suppressing the will of the people by any means necessary will be... spectacular.
I was there as well, the bush presidency lasted my entire middle and high school career, and I got the chance to vote for Obama in my senior year.
I remember things very differently. Everyone cared about the Iraq war, gay-straight alliance was one of the most up and coming clubs, and political music was everywhere. Green Day had their big second wave with American Idiot, System Of A Down was on top of the world, Rock Against Bush was huge, anarcho-punk like Rise Against was getting big.
I'm not a teenager anymore obviously, so it's entirely possible I'm just missing it, but I've seen very little that compares to those sort of movements. On the other hand, most millennials I know are still wildly politically active.
In 2002, there war in Iraq had large popular support, something like 70-80 percent. It took a few years for people to realize it was based on a lie and was a massive mistake. It was also morally reprehensible, but that part is not often discussed in mainstream US politics.
If you compare that to the current Iran war, a majority of the population is already against it, however the current administration doesn't seem to care much about public opinion, and there doesn't seem to be much that the public can do about it.
Yeah I was there too and I don’t know what this guy is talking about. Gen X was highly politically active. This was the era of violent in the street anti-globalization clashes like the WTO protests.
Trump was in part a response to that realization, an outsider from both parties that used the Republicans to get in the door. Bernie Sanders was supposed to be the same, and when he dropped out a lot of us switched to Trump because they represented the same thing.
Tearing down entrenched establishments that don't work for the people is what people were voting for in 2016 and were disappointed he didn't do it. They're glad he's finally doing what he promised a decade ago.
"Bernie Sanders was supposed to be the same, and when he dropped out a lot of us switched to Trump because they represented the same thing."
That is definitely an opinion.
It was a pretty widely shared one in 2016, if I remember correctly.
Where exactly because in the Midwest we were very vocal about it. We have tons of military families out there and we were poor enough to feel almost like military service was inevitable if we didn’t get scholarships for school. You know the band NOFX had an album, the War on Errorism that was quite successful based on the fuckery of the bush administration. Punk rock and protest music was huge then.
i think wolves in voles clothing was more apropos, and is now as well
That canard about a vast conspiracy to explain why people don't agree with you? It sounds exactly like conservatives blaming the liberal schools for in essence the same thing, not agreeing with them.
Schools must be quite busy and schizophrenic what with the completely ideologically inconsistent indoctrination they are apparently doing.
Not to mention judging engagement in spring break goers is kind of a major selection bias. Those who are upset about it wouldn't be in the mood to vacation.
The replication crisis is hardly unique to the US and is greatly exacerbated with the use of AI.
Article is paywalled, so perhaps you could just summarize his proposal?
> At the type of place where I taught until recently—a small, selective, private liberal-arts college—administrators can go quite far in limiting AI use, if they have the guts to do so. They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution. Get rid of Wi-Fi and return to Ethernet, which would allow schools greater control over where and when students use digital technologies. To that end, smartphones and laptops should also be banned on campus. If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Work and research requiring students to use the internet or a computer can take place in designated labs. [...] Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected.
You can access the full article at https://archive.is/zSJ13 (I know archive.is is kind of shady, but it works).
> If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else.
Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper.
> Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected.
Just like my on-campus classmates never smoked weed or drank underage, I'm sure.
Just return to old fashioned styles of universities with tutorials, lectures, offline handwritten exams, and viva voce.
It's very hard to hide the fact that someone else did an assignment when you have to defend it in front your tutor and a small group of fellow students and it's next to impossible to pass a final viva without knowing and understanding what you are talking about.
The problem is we have all become addicted to cheap 'education' and a the traditional methods are expensive.
But I think the institutions and the students need to ask themselves what the university is for. Is it to hand out diplomas or is it there so that the students can learn? A student who only wants the diploma has an incentive to cheat, one who wants to learn does not because the only person cheated is themself.
I think your last point is precisely why universities shouldn't limit access to llms beyond reasonable means. Make it hard for the weak to access, and easy enough for those dedicated. the ones to make an effort to cheat aren't there to learn anyway
so we should just let them through?
Are you suggesting we should do nothing if the solution has any flaws?
Some solutions have flaws but still improve things. Others are hopelessly ineffective and add nothing but overhead.
There's always going to be ways to cheat, the idea is to make it hard. I think secretly replacing a computer's internals such that no one else will notice is pretty hard.
Local inference? Why? Just install a SIM card and connect to your BigTech account.
While jamming cell signals is illegal, scanning for transmissions is quite easy.
This isn't aimed at you, but this strikes me as exactly the kind of divorced-from-the-real-world thinking that academia is pilloried for all the time. This kind of proposal will never happen, I'd basically stake my life on it. Students (and their parents) have zero interest in this kind of anti-technology nonsense, so it's DOA. College isn't compulsory, and those students aren't some captive audience you can do whatever you want with, they're customers. And I frankly doubt that most professors or administrators want this either.
If an elite institution offered a low tech pathway with the right amount of gatekeeping, you could make an aspirational trend out of it.