Widespread AI use subverts the institutional goals of colleges and universities. Large language models routinely fabricate information, and even when they do create factually accurate work, they frequently depend on intellectual-property theft.
Teaching students how to use AI tools in fields where they are genuinely necessary is one thing. But infusing the college experience with the technology is deeply misguided.
Even schools that have not bent the knee by “integrating” AI into campus life are mostly failing to come up with workable answers to the various problems presented by AI. At too many colleges, leaders have been reluctant to impose strict rules or harsh penalties for chatbot use, passing the buck to professors to come up with their own policies.
In a recent cri de coeur, Megan Fritts, a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, detailed how her own institution has not articulated clear, campus-wide guidance on AI use. She argued that if the humanities are to survive, “universities will need to embrace a much more radical response to AI than has so far been contemplated.”
She called for these classrooms to ban large language models, which she described as “tools for offloading the task of genuine expression,” then went a step further, saying that their use should be shunned, “seen as a faux pas of the deeply different norms of a deeply different space.”
Yet to my mind, the “radical” policy Fritts proposes—which is radical, when you consider how many universities are encouraging their students to use AI—is not nearly radical enough.
Shunning AI use in classrooms is a good start, but schools need to think bigger than that.
All institutions of higher education in the United States should be animated by the same basic question: What are the most effective things—even if they sound extreme—that we can do to limit, and ideally abolish, the unauthorized use of AI on campus? Once the schools have an answer, their leaders should do everything in their power to make these things happen.
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