Jenny Trinitapoli is a professor of sociology and master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago.
My colleagues and I think of the seminar as a garden — a space to nurture and protect.
All students at the University of Chicago spend a year in that garden, taking one of eight sequences to fulfill our social sciences core requirement. We think students should do their own work in these small seminar-style classes, but personal devices and artificial intelligence can create distractions and stunt intellectual growth. So this academic year, my colleagues and I, who teach the social science core, decided our seminars should be analog courses.
By this we mean that students will read difficult texts without relying on AI summaries or secondary sources, discuss those texts in a classroom setting without the distractions of clicking keyboards or flashing screens, and speak knowing they are not being recorded. They will be trusted to complete their homework, exams and essays without help from AI. We also reassured students that faculty will still be grading their work ourselves.
This was never intended to be news. But within days of our memo’s release in August, news outlets, media commentators and fellow academics were discussing it on at least five continents. Our expectations, however, are hardly radical.
It is difficult to focus on Adam Smith when the student next to you is adding shoes to her shopping cart. The free exchange of ideas is stifled when an embarrassing question might be recorded by a classmate wearing Meta glasses and shared on social media. When a fellow student recites a Claude-level summary of Hobbes, it’s hard to build on such a comment.
Faculty need a coordinated approach to preserving the garden. Device-free defaults support the atmosphere needed for a productive seminar — the full attention of everyone in the room and a shared understanding that anything less is disrespectful. In addition, students want clarity on what professors expect. “I don’t want you to use AI, but I won’t forbid it, and it better not sound like AI, but if you want to brainstorm with it, that’s probably okay” is woefully unclear.
All over the country, college instructors have been told to go it alone — to design and enforce their own policies. But this atomized approach is no way to organize a curriculum. It’s confusing for students, bad for learning and especially hard on junior colleagues, who wonder if there will be institutional backup for the standards they set. A cohesive set of analog classroom norms allows faculty to focus on substance rather than policy and policing.
Our weekly staff meetings were once almost entirely devoted to discussion of the texts to be taught that week. But out of necessity during the pandemic, we shifted a large proportion of our time to discussing the practicalities of teaching in an emergency. Then came the superficially competent large language models, and we found ourselves stuck in a different spiral of logistics.
After five years of deliberations about policies, our social science core instructors want their staff meetings back. Instructional meetings are a vital part of faculty life; this is where we hone our teaching to ensure that each time we read Aristotle or explain experimental logics, we do so with an eye on the students we find before us.
This is also where faculty spend time learning about learning. From these conversations we know that the scientific record about reading, attention and young-adult development points in a clear direction: eliminate distractions.
Our decision-making can be a model for faculty governance of AI elsewhere. Small groups of faculty can be selective and clear about the role of technology in different parts of a curriculum. This localized approach grows out of the University of Chicago’s broader commitment to teaching and learning “with, without, and about AI.” After years of careful, systematic attention to the complaints, experiments and successes of the instructors who teach our sequences, we looked at our garden — composed of these required year-long sequences — and decided the best way to protect it is to develop a unified message to students: Your classmates are worthy of your full attention, for 80 minutes at a time, twice a week.
No guidance document will turn back time. But what the reaction to ours has made clear is that faculty everywhere are hungry for direction as we continue to teach and learn in the era of unregulated AI. The temptation to outsource one’s thinking is real. As long as there is a social sciences core curriculum at the University of Chicago, our students will still be asked to read, write and think on their own.
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