Category: Education

The fact that college admission is for sale is an open secret. As with other forms of institutionalized unfairness, there are norms and laws governing the legal and acceptable ways of buying admission. For example, donating large sums of money or funding a building to buy admission are within the norms and laws. But there was admission scandal in which celebrities and other elites broke the rules to get their children into elite colleges. On the face of it, there is no need to argue that what they did was morally wrong. What is more interesting is considering the matter in the context of fairness.

On the surface, the actions of the accused are clearly unfair. While the tactics varied, they included altering admission test results, bribing coaches to accept non-athletes as recruited athletes, and the classic direct bribe. Interestingly, most comments on these misdeeds noted the elites could have used traditional legal and accepted methods of purchasing admission. These methods are unfair because admission was not based on the students’ merits, thus they might have unjustly taken the places of students who merited admission. While the parents did act unfairly, it is worth considering this unfairness within the broader context of our society.

As many others have pointed out over the years, even the normal admission system is unfair. Poor children will almost always attend inferior schools and have far less opportunity to engage in the application enhancing activities available to the well-off. Poor children will also usually not be able to afford tutors, test preparation training, personal statement coaches and so on. They will also usually lack connections that influence admission. In contrast, wealthy children will enjoy a cornucopia of admission advantages. While there were programs and other efforts to provide some microscopic mitigation of disparity, the Trump administration is intent on defunding and dismantling most of these. As such, the disparities in admissions will grow.

It might be countered that some people rose from poverty to attend elite institutions and go on to great success, while some born into wealth have been failures. The obvious reply is that while these stories are interesting, they are just anecdotes and what matters is the general statistics. While some people succeed despite incredible odds, these few examples only show getting out of poverty and into an elite school is extremely unlikely. If people regularly arose from poverty, such success stories would be unremarkable.

In general, college admissions are like a race in which some people must run on foot, some get bikes, some get cars, and some get rocket ships. While one can talk about the merits of people in this race, the competition is fundamentally unfair in intentional ways. I do, obviously, recognize that people vary greatly in abilities. My point is, to stick to the analogy, that even the most talented runner is not going to win against someone who gets to race with a car.

While the elites cheated, they cheated in an already unfair race. To continue the analogy, their children were already driving fast cars in competition with people forced to run. These parents did things analogous to cutting the course and using illegal modifications on their cars. While this certainly matters, it does not matter that much from the perspective of those who were already competing by running. Again, I am not denying that people do vary in ability or that no one ever wins this race on foot or that no one crashes their metaphorical car. My point is that if fairness truly matters, then we should not just be outraged when the elites cheat in an already unfair system, we should be outraged by the unfair system.

During Trump’s first term, a New Jersey teacher was accused of bringing politics into the classroom in the form of an anti-Trump t-shirt.  In his second term, Trump’s administration has aggressively targeted education and this includes the threat to eliminate the Department of Education. As such, it makes sense that educators feel threatened and might be tempted to respond within their classrooms. As a professor at a state university, I am both an educator and a public employee and these two roles can conflict because of the distinct duties of each.

An educator at a state institution is a public employee. While being a state employee does not rob a person of their right to free expression, it does impose limitations on this right above and beyond the usual moral limits. As an example of the usual moral limits, there is a popular example about not having the right to yell about a non-existent fire in a crowded theatre.

As public employees are paid by the taxpayers to do a job, it is reasonable that they do not have the right to express political views to the public while working. As an analogy, I do not have the right to sell my books to students during class. Likewise, I do not have the right to try to sell my politics to students during class. There is also the matter of professionalism: while I am on the clock, I am representing my institution and not myself. As such, I am morally obligated to distinguish between my own views and those of the institution.

It might be objected that elected public officials, such as Governor DeSantis of my adopted state of Florida, use their offices for political activities that benefit themselves and their party. As such, it is morally unfair to deny the same opportunity to other public employees. One counter is that elected public officials are politicians, so politics is their job. That said, there are moral concerns about politicians using public resources for their re-election or to campaign against a ballot initiative; but this is more a matter of the use of public funds than a free-speech issue. As such, it seems morally acceptable to insist that public employees refrain from political activities while on the clock. But perhaps being an educator is a relevant difference.

On the one hand, it could be argued that even in political science classes the educator does not have the right to preach their politics. After all, the function of the educator is to teach rather than preach. If a teacher takes a clear stance on a political issue, then students might feel pressured to accept it. There is also the concern that expressing political views will alienate students and harm their education. For example, a teacher who expresses anti-Trump views can create a hostile learning environment for MAGA students.

On the other hand, it can be argued that educators do not surrender their right of free expression in the classroom.  If they use it responsibly in the classroom, they have the right to express their political views. This view is appealing at the college level. Professors are supposed to have positions on intellectual and academic issues, and these include political issues.  That is, they should be able to profess. But the proper role of a professor is a matter of debate. One classic ideal is the professor as one who professes by advancing their positions on the academic issues and inviting students to engage them. This does raise the usual concerns about the power disparity and, of course, the matter of grades. Another classic ideal is the professor neutrally presenting theories and ideas by laying out the ideas and letting students decide which they like best. The problem with this approach is it does not help students determine which ones are better and this would be a problem in engineering, math and science classes in which there are better and worse answers.

My practical solution to the problem has been to stick to the general issues of politics when they are relevant to the course.  Since I do not want my students to just repeat what I think on paper and tests, I am careful to present the positions fairly. If pressed for my opinion in class, I will refer to any writings I have done and warn them to never uncritically accept what I have written. I also make it clear that paper grades are not based on whether I like their view but on how well they argue for their view. When I use examples of politicians (usually for fallacies and rhetoric) I do try to include examples across the spectrum. However, the party in power does tend to be the subject of more examples than the party out of power for the obvious reason that they provide more examples.

As noted in previous essays, there is a diversity issue in higher education: liberals outnumber conservatives. Given that conservatives have made their view of diversity clear, it is fair to apply their ideology to the issue of the dearth of conservatives in higher education.

When faced a lack of diversity, conservatives usually have two replies. I addressed first in an earlier essay: members of the underrepresented group freely decide to exclude themselves. For example, one might explain the relative low number of women and minorities playing tabletop wargames, such as Warhammer 40k, by claiming that they are generally not interested in the hobby. The second explanation is that the lack of diversity is due to a lack of competence on the part of the allegedly excluded groups. For example, the low number of women in top business, military and academic positions would be explained in terms of women being less capable than men. Some might add that incompetent people are capable in other area where they are more proportionally represented or even dominant. For example, someone might say that while women are inferior to men in science or business, they are capable nurses, speech language pathologists and grade schoolteachers. In some cases, these assertions are undeniably true. For example, men dominate American football because the strongest men are stronger than the strongest women. As another example, women are generally more capable than men for the role of surrogate mother. Since conservatives often find this explanation appealing, it seems fair to consider that a lack of competence is the reason why there are few conservatives in higher education.

Applying this conservative view to conservatives, the explanation for the lack of diversity is that conservatives lack the ability to succeed in higher education. While there are some exceptions, the ideological distribution is fair because of this disparity in ability. This is like the conservative claim that the lack of women in the upper levels of business, academics and the military match the distribution of ability: they claim most women are not as capable as men, hence men rightfully and fairly dominate. By parity of reasoning, most conservatives are not as capable as liberals, hence liberals justly and fairly dominate the academy.

An obvious reply is that ideology is different from sex or ethnicity. Conservatives can be of any sex or ethnicity because ideology is a matter of values. As such, it could be claimed, the idea that conservatives are less capable than liberals make no sense. It would be like saying that deontologists are less capable than utilitarians, that impressionists are less capable than surrealists, or that Yankees fans are less capable than Red Sox fans. This does have some appeal, but we should not abandon the conservative explanation too quickly.

This reply can be countered by arguing that while ideology does not change a person’s capabilities, a person’s capabilities might determine their ideology. That is, people with certain non-ideological qualities would tend to be conservative while people with other qualities would tend to be liberal. While psychology is not an exact science, it does show some interesting claims about the differences between conservatives and liberals. For example, it has been claimed that conservatives tend to be more afraid than liberals and hence have a greater desire for safety and security. Given these differences, it makes sense that conservatives would be less capable than be liberals in areas in which these differences would matter. Higher education, it can be argued, is such an area: the qualities that make a person more likely to succeed as a professor also tend to make them liberal. In contrast, the qualities that make a person more conservative would tend to make it less likely that they would have the ability to become professors.

While some liberals might be tempted to claim that conservatives are stupider than liberals, this need not be the case. After all, becoming a professor is not just a matter of being smart. Most smart people are not professors, and not all professors are smart. Conservatives can be just as intellectually capable as liberals, yet some of the other qualities that make them conservative could impair their ability to become professors (or so one might argue). One factor is that the process of becoming a professor involves having one’s most cherished ideas questioned, challenged and even attacked over the course of years—something liberals might handle better. As charitable conservatives might say that as women and minorities are well-suited for some fields, a charitable liberal might say that conservatives are well-suited for some fields outside the academy.

If it is true that what makes people conservative or liberal is relevant to their ability to become professors, then there are solutions to the problem of diversity. One is to engage in a process of affirmative action and DEI for conservatives: preferential hiring and adjusted standards to address the lack of diversity. Conservatives who oppose affirmative action and DEI would not be able to accept this approach. Unless their view is a matter of self-interest rather than a principle.

A second approach is to see if the academy can be modified to be more inviting to conservatives. For example, it might be that the way grad school classes are taught that deters conservatives. While conservatives are generally not fans of efforts of inclusion, they would presumably welcome such efforts if they were the ones being benefited.

Some readers might think the real reason conservatives are underrepresented in the academy is that liberals are to blame. I will address this in my next essay.

As noted in the previous essay, perhaps conservatives have good reasons to not want to be professors or professors have good reasons not to be conservatives. In this essay, I will offer some possible DEI solutions to the dearth of conservatives in higher education.

If highly educated conservatives find academics unattractive because of the lower salaries, then there are two ways to motivate them into becoming professors. One is to argue that capable conservatives should “take one for the team” and become professors. While this would be a financial loss for conservative professors, their sacrifices would benefit the community of conservatives. The challenge is persuading those who see self-interest as a core value to act in a way seemingly contrary to their self-interest.

Another approach, which would probably be more appealing, is for conservatives to offer financial support and rewards for conservatives who become and remain professors. This is already done in some cases, but expanding the support and rewards would help increase the number of conservative professors. One challenge is to ensure that the support and rewards go to actual conservatives. They would need to police ideological purity to keep out clever liberals (or even secret Marxists) who might exploit these opportunities for their own profit. And we would certainly not want anyone profiting from pretending to believe something.

A possible downside to this approach is that these recruited professors could be accused of bias because they are being paid to be conservative professors. will leave a solution to this problem to any conservatives who might be troubled by it.

A practical worry about supporting conservative students so that they become conservative professors is that their experiences in graduate school and as faculty might turn them away from conservatism. For example, they might start taking rhetorical attacks on experts and science personally as they become experts and scientists. As another example, they might find the hostility of Republicans to higher education a problem as they try to work in a field being attacked so vehemently by their fellows. But what about getting professors to want to be conservative? How could this be done?

One option for conservatives is to change their anti-expert and anti-science rhetoric. Rather than engaging in broad attacks on experts or science, they could confine their attacks to specific targets. Those not being directly attacked might find conservatism more appealing. The Republican party could also change its hostile attitude towards higher education towards a more positive approach. They could, for example, return to providing solid funding for research and education. If professors believed that Republicans would act in their interest and in the interest of their students, they would be more inclined to support them. Conservative faculty would probably also be more likely to stay conservative.

Taking such steps would, however, be a problem for the Republican party. After all, the anti-science stance towards climate change and their broad anti-expert stance have yielded great political success. Changing these views would come at a price. Providing support for public higher education would also put Republicans at odds with their views about what should be cut while giving tax breaks for the rich. It would also go against their strategy of monetizing higher education. As such, Republicans would need to weigh the cost of winning over professors against the advantages they gain by the policies that alienate professors.

Oddly enough, some people claim that it is the Democrats and liberals who are more anti-science and anti-intellectual than the Republicans. If this were true, then the Republicans are doing a terrible job of convincing scientists and intellectuals to support them. If they could convince professors that they are the real supporters of the sciences and the Democrats are the real threat, then they should be able to win converts in the academy. The challenge is, of course, proving this claim and getting professors to accept this proof. But this seems unlikely, given that the claim that Republicans are pro-science is absurd on the face of it.

While the culture warriors claim Marxism dominates higher education, a more realistic concern is that higher education is dominated by liberals (or at least Democrats). Conservatives (or at least Republicans) are an underrepresented minority among faculty. This disparity invites inquiry. One reason to investigate, at least for liberals, would be to check for injustice or oppression causing this disparity. Another motivation is intellectual curiosity.

While sorting out this diversity problem might prove daunting, a foundation of theory and methodology has been laid by those studying the domination of higher education by straight, white males. That is, professors like me. These tools should be useful and ironic for looking into the question of why conservatives are not adequate represented in the academy.  But before delving into theories of oppression and unfair exclusion, I must consider that the shortage of conservatives in the ivory towers is a matter of choice. This consideration mirrors a standard explanation for the apparent exclusion of women and minorities for other areas.

One possible explanation is that conservatives have chosen to not become professors. While not always the case, well-educated conservatives tend to be more interested in higher income careers in the private sector. While the pay for full-time faculty is not bad, the pay for adjuncts is terrible. Professor salaries, with some notable exceptions, tend to be lower than non-academic jobs with comparable educational requirements. So, someone interested in maximizing income would not become a professor. Education and effort would yield far more financial reward elsewhere, such as in the medical or financial fields. As such, conservatives are more likely to become bankers rather than philosophers and accountants rather than anthropologists.

A second possible explanation is that people who tend to become professors do not want to be conservatives (or at least Republicans). That is, the qualities that lead a person into a professorial career would tend to lead them away from conservative ideology. While there have been brilliant conservative intellectuals, the Republican party has consistently adopted a strong anti-expert, anti-intellectual stance. This might be due to an anti-intellectual ideology, or because the facts fail to match Republican ideology—such as with climate change. Republicans have also become more hostile to higher education. In contrast, Democrats tend to support higher education.

As becoming a professor generally requires a terminal degree, a professor will spend at least six years in college and graduate school, probably seeing the hostility of Republicans against education and the limited support offered by Democrats. Rational self-interest alone would tend to push professors towards being Democrats, since the Democrats are more likely to support higher education. Those who want to become professors, almost by definition, tend to be intellectual and want to become experts. So, the conservative attacks on experts and intellectuals will tend to drive them away from the Republican party and conservative ideology. Those pursuing careers in the sciences would presumably also find the anti-science stances of the Republicans and conservative ideology unappealing.

While my own case is just an anecdote, one reasons I vote for Democrats is that Democrats are more likely to do things that are in my interest as a professor and in the interest of my students. In contrast, Republicans tend to make my professional life worse by lowering support for education and engaging in micromanagement and ideological impositions. They also make life more difficult for my students. The anti-intellectualism, rejection of truth, and anti-science stances also make the Republican party unappealing to me. As such, it is not surprising that the academy is dominated by liberals: Republicans would usually not want to be professors, and potential professors would tend to not want to be Republicans.

But perhaps there is a social injustice occurring and the lack of diversity is due to the unjust exclusion of conservatives from the academy. It is to this concern that I will address in a future essay. We might need some diversity, equity and inclusion to get conservatives into the academy.

In the eternal culture war, folks on the right claim that post-modern neo-Marxist college professors are indoctrinating the youth. Some have a more moderate view, seeing professors as merely being excessively liberal and indoctrinating the youth in liberal dogma. While I am confident the academy is not ruled by Marxists, there are still interesting questions about the extent of Marxism on campuses, the degree to which liberals dominate the academy and whether professors indoctrinate their students.

It is true that there are Marxist professors. I have even met some. In some cases, they do seem to understand Marxism and its implications, at least to the degree that anyone understands a philosophical theory. These folks are often political science or philosophy professors. I have also encountered professors who seem to think they are Marxists, but do not seem to understand Marxism. For example, at a conference I met a professor who claimed to be a Marxist, but also accepted free will and metaphysical dualism. Real Marxists are metaphysical materialists and embrace economic determinism. Fortunately, Marxists are rare even in the social sciences and humanities. As such, the idea that the academy is ruled by Marxists is not true. While there is a non-zero number of Marxist professors who preach rather than teach, I do have complete sympathy for students who get caught up in that nightmare.

Professors do tend to be politically liberal and it has been claimed they are becoming more liberal. From my own experiences, I have extensive anecdotal evidence that professors tend to be liberal. As to why they are becoming more liberal, this is often a matter of relativity because the political right in America has moved to the far right. Relative to the Trump administration, Reagan and Bush would be liberals.

That professors tend to be liberal is no more surprising than corporate executives tending to be more conservative. However, there is a reasonable concern that the academy is dominated by the left rather than representing the ideological diversity of the country. Ironically, consistent conservatives would oppose affirmative action or diversity initiatives aimed at recruiting more conservative faculty. However, they could still earn degrees or encourage other conservatives and increase the number of conservatives in academics. It would be a positive thing to have more conservative intellectuals in the academy (and in general). After all, ideology without opposition leads to a multitude of sins, such as intellectual laziness.

While the alleged liberal domination of the academy is a matter for concern, there is also the question of whether students are being indoctrinated in leftist ideology. I am careful to teach without pushing my own ideology. For example, in my ethics class I do not try to convert the students to virtue theory, they get the tools of moral reasoning as well as information about a range of moral theories. But, of course, I am but one professor and my example is mere anecdotal evidence. My not being a leftist indoctrinator no more proves that indoctrination isn’t taking place than a single example of a Marxist professor would prove that Marxism rules the academy.

As would be expected, there are researchers who argue that the academy does not indoctrinate students and that college does not make people more liberal. It could be contended that they are biased because they are liberals. This is a fair point: liberals defending the academy are biased, just as conservatives attacking the academy are biased. This does not entail that the liberals are wrong or that their arguments are flawed—to think otherwise would be to fall victim to an ad hominem: while bias provides grounds for suspicion, it does not disprove a claim. After all, the same sort of bad reasoning could be applied to the conservatives who claim that the academy indoctrinates students to be liberals; as conservatives, they would tend to be biased against liberals.

This question is an empirical one: researchers can comb through a representative sample of syllabi, PowerPoint slides, course notes, and recordings of lectures to find the relevant evidence for or against the claim of indoctrination. This research would need to meet the usual standards of a proper inductive generalization: the sample would need to be large enough and representative enough to provide strong support for the conclusion. Because of this, anecdotal evidence of crazed Marxist professors or professors who teach in a fair and balanced manner do not suffice as adequate evidence. This fallacy involves taking an anecdote as evidence for a general claim. Samples that are too small would result in the fallacy of hasty generalization and biased samples would result in the fallacy of biased generalization.

As would be expected, both conservatives and liberals can be tempted to use anecdotes, excessively small samples and biased samples to “support” their view. I am certainly open to the results of a properly conducted, large scale study of the academy; this is something that could be conducted in good faith by a bipartisan team of researchers. I am sure that there are some professors who try to indoctrinate their students. This would be of concern, but there seems to be no objective evidence that this is a general problem. After all, as folks on the right like to say about the police, we shouldn’t draw an inference from a few “bad apples.”

Even if some professors try to indoctrinate their students, there is also the question of whether they are likely to succeed. Having observed many professors across numerous institutions, such efforts would usually fail. As the joke goes, we have a difficult time getting students to even read the syllabus. Transforming them into deranged Marxists or even getting them to be slightly more liberal is unlikely. This is not to say that professors have no influence nor to deny that there are professors like Jordan Peterson who can sway people. But such charismatic corrupters are obviously quite rare and would be more likely to pursue other, more lucrative careers. Like Jordan Peterson did.

But even if professors fail to indoctrinate their students, it can be argued that they are wasting class time trying to preach rather than teach. This is a fair point. While off-topic discussions can be some of the best learning experiences, a professor spending class time pushing their ideology rather than teaching is a disservice to the students. Of course, professors rambling about fishing stories, D&D, stamp collecting, or their favorite movies also waste students’ time.

That said, it could be argued that professing does have a legitimate role in the classroom—if it has pedagogical value. Even if it does have some value, there is also the worry that by pushing a specific ideology, the professor will mislead the students about the merits or demerits of specific views.  This all ties into the classic problem of the proper role of a professor—although the ideal often advanced today is that of a conveyor of information and skills to prepare the job fillers for their existence as workers.

Despite the American myth, upward mobility is limited and most of us will die in the class we were born into. Part of this myth is the often-true story that college helps people move up the economic ladder. My family fits this narrative. My father’s parents did not finish high school as they had to take jobs in a shoe factory to help support their families. My father finished high school, got a master’s degree, taught high school for years and after his first retirement taught mathematics at the college level. My mother also has an M.A. My sister and I went to college, and I ended up getting my PhD and staying forever as a professor. Because of my family story, I support college education for those who want it.

While college has never been cheap, the increase in the cost of higher education has outpaced inflation. The reasons are clear. First, many states have disinvested from public higher education. Some of this leftover from the last time the financial elites burned down the economy, but most of it is politics. Some of this is ideological: Republicans tend to oppose funding public colleges, preferring to channel money into private profits. There is also the practical reason that weakening public education can push students towards for-profit colleges who have lobbied Republicans and Democrats. With less public support, more of the burden falls on students and their families.

Second, there is massive administrative bloat. Some of this bloat is the number of administrators. For example, while there used to be just deans, there are now assistant deans and associate deans. There are also assistant provosts and associate provosts, and an impressive number of vice presidents at many universities.

 Some of the bloat is due to burdens imposed by the state, such as assessment and various education laws. Some of it is due to the obsession with remaking colleges into businesses. In addition to having well-compensated executives, schools now have marketing departments who talk about “the brand.” There is also the tendency of bureaucrats to expand their bureaucracy. Currently, schools have entire cadres of administrators with no direct connection to education. Despite, or perhaps because of, the increased number of administrators, more administrative tasks are assigned to faculty. This can require hiring more people to teach as their teaching time is devoured by administrative work.

In addition to the ever-increasing number of administrators there has also been a significant increase in their salaries, especially at the higher levels. University presidents can have salaries close to a million dollars and bonuses are common. This is also a result of the business model: high pay “management” ruling over lower pay “workers.” While administrators make the tired old arguments that top money is needed to attract top talent from the private sector (usual business), the same arguments rarely apply to faculty and other employees. Presumably because faculty are not as important to the mission of the university as administrators.

Third, there is the cost of facilities and amenities. Some of this expense is reasonable: smart classrooms are more expensive than the traditional classroom. Other luxury items mainly serve to drive up costs.

Since college provides a way to go up the ladder or at least get a strong grip on a rung, it is important to address the problem of high costs. While one solution has been to make colleges “free”, this runs into the obvious problem that there is no such thing as free college. “Free” college just shifts the cost. This shift can, however, be morally and economically justified—but the discussion needs to be honest about who is paying.

A less drastic solution is for states to return to investing in education. This was once seen as a good idea s as money spent on students was returned many times over as taxes and had many non-economic positive returns on the investment. Valuing helping people upwards does run against current trends, which is to funnel money upwards towards those who already have the most money

It would also help if the state reduced some of the imposed administrative burden on colleges. While this would have a negative impact on those employed in these administrative offices, it would help reduce the cost of education. The challenge is, however, sorting out which administrative burdens to lessen. Reducing administrative positions and salaries would also help.

The number of administrators could be brought back to the older ratios of administrators to everyone else and their salaries could be reduced to more closely match those of faculty. While it could be argued that this would cut down on the top talent, there are some obvious responses. One is that education attracts top talent faculty who are willing to work for relatively low salaries compared to what they could get in the private sector. While detractors of professors often think that people teach or engage in research at colleges because they are unable to get jobs in the private sector, most faculty chose the academic life. This is for a variety of reasons, ranging from the love of teaching to the difference in culture between the academy and the corporation (although this difference is shrinking). So, if the administrator’s argument about having to pay top dollar for top talent were good, then faculty would be terrible. Another is that various scandals and problems have shown what these top dollars sometimes buy.

Finally, schools can also cut their spending on facilities and things that are not relevant to their educational mission. There are, of course, other possibilities but these would be a good start to make college more affordable.

Supporters and critics of AI claim it will be taking our jobs. If true, this suggests that AI could eliminate the need for certain skills. While people do persist in learning obsolete skills for various reasons (such as for a hobby), it is likely that colleges would eventually stop teaching these “eliminated” skills. Colleges would, almost certainly, be able to adapt. For example, if AI replaced only a set of programming skills or a limited number of skills in the medical or legal professions, then degree programs would adjust their courses and curriculum. This sort of adaptation is nothing new in higher education and colleges have been adapting to changes since the beginning of higher education, whether these changes are caused by technology or politics. As examples, universities usually do not teach obsolete programming languages and state schools change their curriculum in response to changes imposed by state legislatures.  

If AI fulfils its promise (or threat) of replacing entire professions, then this could eliminate college programs aimed at educating humans for those professions. Such eliminations would have a significant impact on colleges and could result in the elimination of degrees and perhaps even entire departments. But there is the question of whether AI will be successful enough to eliminate entire professions. While AI might be able to eliminate some programming jobs or legal jobs, it seems unlikely that it will be able to eliminate the professions of computer programmer or lawyer. But it might be able to change these professions so much that colleges are impacted. For example, if AI radically reduces the number of programmers or lawyers needed, then some colleges might be forced to eliminate departments and degrees because there will not be enough students to sustain them.

These scenarios are not mutually exclusive, and AI could eliminate some jobs in a profession without eliminating the entire profession while it also eliminates some professions entirely. While this could have a significant impact on colleges, many of them would survive these changes. Human students would, if they could still afford college in this new AI economy, presumably switch to other majors and professions. If new jobs and professions become available, then colleges could adapt to these, offering new degrees and courses. But if AI, as some fear, eliminates significantly more jobs than it creates, then this would be detrimental to both workers and colleges as it makes them increasingly irrelevant to the economy.

In dystopian sci-fi economic scenarios, AI eliminates so many jobs that most humans are forced to live in poverty while the AI owning elites live in luxury. If this scenario comes to pass, some elite colleges might continue to exist while most others would be eliminated because of the lack of students. While this scenario is unlikely, history shows that economies can be ruined and hence the dystopian scenario cannot be simply dismissed.

In utopian sci-fi economic scenarios, AI eliminates jobs that people do not want to do while also freeing humans from poverty, hardship, and drudgery. In such a world of abundance, colleges would most likely thrive as people would have the time and opportunity to learn without the pressure of economic necessity. Or perhaps colleges would be largely replaced by personal AI professors.

 But it is also worth considering that this utopia might devolve into a dystopia in which humans slide into sloth (such as in Wall-E) or are otherwise harmed by having machines do everything for them, which is something Issac Asimov and other sci-fi writers have considered.

In closing, the most plausible scenario is that AI has been overhyped and while colleges will need to adapt to the technology, they will not be significantly harmed, let alone destroyed. But it is wise to be prepared for what the future might bring because complacency and willful blindness would prove disastrous for the academy.

Socrates, it is claimed, was critical of writing and argued that it would weaken memory. Many centuries later, it was worried that television would “rot brains” and that calculators would destroy people’s ability to do math. More recently, computers, the internet, tablets, and smartphones were supposed to damage the minds of students. The latest worry is that AI will destroy the academy by destroying the minds of students.

There are two main worries about the negative impact of AI in this context. The first ties back to concerns about cheating: students will graduate and get jobs but be ignorant and incompetent because they used AI to cheat their way through school. For example, we could imagine an incompetent doctor who completed medical school only through their use of AI. This person would present a danger to their patients and could cause considerable harm up to and including death. As other examples, we could imagine engineers and lawyers who cheated their way to a degree with AI and are now dangerously incompetent. The engineers design flawed planes that crash, and the lawyers fail their clients, who end up in jail. And so on, for all other relevant professions.

While having incompetent people in professions is worrisome, this is not a new problem created by AI. While AI does provide a new way to cheat, cheating has always been a problem in higher education. And, as discussed in the previous essay, AI does not seem to have significantly increased cheating. As such, we can probably expect the level of incompetency resulting from cheating to remain relatively stable, despite the presence of AI. It is also worth mentioning that incompetent people often end up in positions and professions where they can do serious harm not because they engaged in academic cheating, but because of nepotism, cronyism, bribery, and influence. It is unlikely that AI will impact these factors and concerns about incompetence would be better focused on matters other than AI cheating.

The second worry takes us back to Socrates and calculators. This is the worry that students using technology “honestly” will make themselves weaker or even incompetent. In this scenario, the students would not be cheating their way to incompetence. Instead, they would be using AI in accordance with school policies and this would have deleterious consequences on their abilities.

A well-worn reply to this worry is to point to the examples at the beginning of this essay, such as writing and calculators, and infer that because the academy was able to adapt to these earlier technologies it will be able to adapt to AI. On this view, AI will not prevent students from developing adequate competence to do their jobs and it will not weaken their faculties. But this will require that universities adapt effectively, otherwise there might be problems.

A counter to this view is to argue that AI is different from these earlier technologies. For example, when Photoshop was created, some people worried that it would be detrimental to artistic skills by making creating and editing images too easy. But while Photoshop had a significant impact, it did not eliminate the need for skill and the more extreme of the feared consequences did not come to pass. But AI image generation, one might argue, brought these fears fully to life. When properly prompted, AI can generate images of good enough quality that human artists worry about their jobs. One could argue that AI will be able to do this (or is already doing this) broadly and students will no longer need to develop these skills, because AI will be able to do it for them (or in their place). But is this something we should fear, or just another example of technology rendering skills obsolete?

Most college graduates in the United States could not make a spear, hunt a deer and then preserve the meat without refrigeration and transform the hide into clean and comfortable clothing. While these were once essential skills for our ancestors, we would not consider college graduates weak or incompetent because they lack these skills.  Turning to more recent examples, modern college graduates would not know how to use computer punch cards or troubleshoot an AppleTalk network. But they do not need such skills, and they would not be considered incompetent for lacking them. If AI persists and fulfills some of its promise, it would be surprising if it did not render some skills obsolete. But, as always, there is the question of whether we should allow skills and knowledge to become obsolete and what we might lose if we do so.

Microsoft’s Copilot AI awaits, demon-like, for my summons so that it might replace my words with its own. The temptation is great, but I resist and persist in relying on my own skills. But some warn that others will lack my resolve, and the academy will be destroyed by a deluge of cheating.

Those profiting from AI, including those selling software promising to detect AI cheating, speak dire warnings of the dangers of AI and how it will surpass humans in skills such as writing and taking tests. Because of this, the regulations written by the creators of AI must become law and academic institutions must subscribe to AI detection tools. And, of course, embrace AI themselves. While AI does present a promise and a threat, there is the question of whether it will destroy the academy as we know it. The first issue I will address is whether AI cheating will “destroy” the academy.

Students, I suspect, have been cheating since the first test and plagiarism has presumably existed since the invention of language. Before the internet, plagiarism and detecting plagiarism involved finding physical copies of works. As computers and the internet were developed, digital plagiarism and detection evolved. For example, many faculty use Turnitin which can detect plagiarism. It seemed that students might have been losing the plagiarism arms race, but it was worried that easy access to AI would turn the battle in favor of the cheating students.  After all, AI makes cheating easy, affordable and harder to detect.  For example, large language models allow “plagiarism on demand” by generating new text with each prompt. As I write this, Microsoft has made Copilot part of its office subscription and as many colleges provide the office programs to their students, they are handing students tools for cheating. But has AI caused the predicted flood of cheating?

Determining how many students are cheating is like determining how many people are committing crime: you only know how many people have been caught or admitted to it. You do not know how many people are  doing it. Because of this, inferences about how many students are cheating need to be made with caution so as to  avoid the fallacy of overconfident inference from unknown statistics.

One source of data is Turnitin’s AI detection software. Over the course of a year, the service checked 200 million assignments and flagged AI use in 1 in 10 assignments while 3 in 100 were flagged as mostly AI. These results have remained stable, suggesting that AI cheating is neither a tsunami nor increasing. But this assumes that the AI detection software is accurate. Turnitin claims it has a false positive rate of 1%. But we need to worry about AI detection software generating false positives and false negatives.

For false positives, one concern is that  “GPT detectors are biased against non-native English writers.” For false negatives, the worry is that AI detectors can be fooled. As the algorithms used in proprietary detection software are kept secret, we do not know what biases and defects they might have. For educators, the “nightmare” scenario is AI generated work that cannot be detected by software and evades traditional means of proving that cheating has occurred.

While I do worry about the use of AI in cheating, I do not think that AI will significantly increase cheating and that if the academy has survived older methods of cheating, it will survive this new tool. This is because I think that cheating has and will remain consistent. In terms of my anecdotal evidence, I have been a philosophy professor since 1993 and have a consistent plagiarism rate of about 10%. When AI cheating became available, I did not see a spike in cheating. Instead, I saw AI being used by some students in place of traditional methods of cheating. But I must note that this is my experience and that it is possible that AI generated papers are slipping past Turnitin. Fortunately, I do not need to rely on my experience and can avail myself of the work of experts on cheating.

Stanford scholars Victor Lee and Denise Pope have been studying cheating, and past surveys over 15 years showed that 60-70% of students admitted to cheating. In 2023 the percentage stayed about the same or decreased slightly, even when students were asked about using AI. While cheaters might lie about cheating, Pope and Lee use methods to address this challenge. While cheating remains a problem, AI has not increased it and hence reports of the death of the academy are premature. It will, more likely, die by another hand.

This lack of increase makes intuitive sense as cheating has always been easy and the decision to cheat is more a matter of moral and practical judgment rather than being driven by technology. While technology provides new means of cheating, a student must be willing to cheat, and that percentage seems stable. But it is worth considering that there might have been a wave of AI cheating but for efforts to counter it, to not consider this would be to fall for the prediction fallacy.

It is also worth considering that AI has not lived up to the hype because it is not a great tool for cheating. As Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor have argued, AI is most useful at doing useless things. To be fair, assignments in higher education can be useless. But if AI is being used to complete useless assignments, this is a problem with the assignments (and the professors) and not AI.

 But large language models are a new technology and their long-term impact in cheating needs to be determined. Things could change in ways that do result in the predicted flood and the doom of the academy as we know it. In closing, while AI cheating will probably not destroy the academy, we should not become complacent. Universities should develop AI policies based on reliable evidence. A good starting point would be collecting data from faculty about the likely extent of AI cheating.