AI arrived on campus as a crisis but has since become banal. Students can now do basically all their schoolwork automatically with AI—answering scientific problem sets, writing computer code, and drafting essays. Professors like me have no idea whether we are really teaching or just LARPing for students who are also pretending to occupy their role. Worse, some of us are offloading the drudgery of writing recommendation letters, grant proposals, and even scientific papers to AI.
But at the same time that AI fouled up the student-teacher relationship, the technology benefited other corners of campus. Researchers quickly discovered that AI is enormously useful for knowledge production, especially in the natural and applied sciences: in protein-structure prediction, materials design, and drug discovery, for example. Pressured, in part, by donors, boards, employers, and parents, college administrators have announced AI initiatives, invested in AI infrastructure, and established AI degree programs.
These two forces—students using AI to their detriment and colleges using it to their benefit—might seem to be in conflict. Students are supposed to do everything longhand to preserve the sanctity of learning, but they are also urged to meet the new professional demands created by AI. Faculty and administrators are policing the classroom for AI, largely in vain, while also using AI liberally in their own work. Campuses are defending themselves against AI as an interloper while concurrently retooling themselves for the AI future. Colleges are racing toward and away from AI simultaneously. It feels like artificial intelligence is wresting higher education apart.
That’s what I thought at first too. But I’ve come to the conclusion that something bigger, stranger, and more damaging has been taking place for a long time. AI has combined with two other recent campus crises—the coronavirus pandemic and the research-funding cuts of the second Trump administration—to amplify a deeper truth: American college is incompatible with itself. Americans speak of “college” as if it is one coherent thing. That’s wrong. Higher education is a bundle of unrelated things held together by custom, history, and accident. The college bundle was always a tenuous one. It has little reason to remain together, even as the institutions inside it are too entrenched to separate.
College in America makes two promises. On the one hand, college is a credentialing service: It awards a degree that affirms knowledge and sends a graduate into a career. On the other hand, college is a coming-of-age service. It forms identity through social exploration and intellectual development. It is the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are. Partying, drinking, Greek life, sports, and other forms of college life always risked undermining the educational project—and vice versa. But the two categories coexisted well enough.
[Listen: Where do America’s colleges go from here?]
Now two things that got packaged together as “college” have begun to unbundle and disperse. The coming-of-age experience—friendships, independence, experimentation—has become less obviously dependent on the campus surrounding it, partly because college’s monopoly on exposure to a wider world weakened. Globalization and the internet bring much of that world to students long before they arrive on campus. Other aspects of college life have been moving off campus too. College football has gone national, abandoning regional affinities and local rivalries. Greek rush has become an outsourced industry. Campuses are hospital systems, major local employers, and real-estate-investment operations as much as, or more than, they are schools.
Optimizing college for professional preparation also began to pull the two purposes apart, and eroded the unrepeatable social experience that college is supposed to provide. The economy demanded more of students outside the classroom—internships, networking, publications, volunteering. In a brutal job-search environment, where entry-level gigs seem to demand nepotism, luck, and 10 rounds of interviews, today’s undergraduates may feel that their older professors do not fully understand the gap between the delivery of the credential and the career it promises.
Then COVID-19 revealed that the credentialing process could continue if campus life was reduced or even eliminated entirely. Considerable controversy and confusion accompanied this moment; some students tried to sue expensive universities on the grounds that a closed campus was not worth the full-freight price. But in the end, credentialing proved entirely possible with a compromised or absent version of campus life.
Now AI has separated the two purposes of college almost entirely. Writing an essay previously required doing something resembling the assigned academic work. Because AI makes it possible to complete coursework without much or any intellectual labor, AI has disconnected the output from the process (if students choose the shortcut). Suffering through a term paper no longer inherently affords opportunities to take a break to get a late-night coffee with your fellow students, to commiserate with hallmates over a difficult professor, or to reach an unexpected realization while drunk at a house party. Social and academic progress are no longer woven together. No particular quantity of shared time or deliberation is required to carry out one inside the other.
A combination of factors (among them shifting values, educational entrepreneurship, regulatory arbitrage, and the speed of technological change) has altered the meaning of a diploma. Yet schools have had no trouble continuing to award degrees to the students who spent their whole undergraduate careers on campuses that tout the same traditional look on quads and inside libraries, but that AI has hopelessly mangled beneath the surface.
Immediately after taking office, the second Trump administration embarked on a series of attacks against higher education. The attacks were politically motivated, but they were effective because they hit campuses where it hurt. Since World War II, the American research-university sector has become defined as an enormous, distributed, scientific-research industry. The Trump attacks undermined this project by disrupting the tens of billions of dollars of federal funding that pays for that research (which includes graduate education).
At the same moment that AI was widening the conflict between credentialing and coming of age, the Trump cuts exposed a different structural incompatibility, between education and research. The fact that big universities were driven by research was not a secret, but it was also not well understood by the American public, including parents and students. If you find out that a friend or neighbor is a university professor, you’d probably ask them, “What do you teach?” And if they squirm when asked, that’s because many faculty often do not see teaching as their primary job. Yes, a professor is expected to teach undergraduates and produce research, because a university’s mission entails education and scholarship. But national universities do not value or reward those activities equally.
Research brings grants, prestige, graduate students, rankings, and career advancement. At research universities, undergraduate teaching is seen, if not described, as a necessary act to keep the tuition dollars flowing and to maintain the appearance of undergraduate education as predominant—the thing that people think of first when they imagine what college is for.
University administrators often argue that the research and teaching missions bolster each other: A star researcher, the story goes, can bring the latest knowledge to the classroom. Basically every college tour on an American campus will include a schtick about how undergraduates can participate in faculty research. Universities have a strong incentive to make research and teaching appear to align. But in truth, those purposes sit more in tension than in unity.
A revealing term helps explain how tenuous this relationship really is. A researcher who gets a big grant can use part of those funds for a “teaching buyout,” paying their way out of the classroom. Success at one of the university’s missions literally purchases relief from the other. (There is no research buyout.)
Campuses such as mine, Washington University in St. Louis, take in $1 billion or more of research funding every year. That money pays for the work done in labs, but also for equipment, buildings, and staff. It forms the foundation for the metrics (grants won, and “research expenditures,” or money spent from those grants) that campuses use to compete against one another for faculty, graduate students, philanthropic gifts, and other forms of prestige. Threaten the flow of research money and you don’t merely endanger the labs; you destabilize the financial and organizational structure of the whole sector.
Every major college and university touts the liberal arts as the core of an undergraduate education, but the humanities in particular—fields of arts and letters such as literature and languages, which generally do not receive much, if any, federal research funding—enjoy mostly vestigial value that does not match the underlying economics of higher education very well. Universities are different from colleges in this regard. Small liberal-arts colleges focus almost exclusively on undergraduate education and are earnestly committed to the arts and letters. That’s one reason they are particularly well positioned to weather the Trump attacks. But these schools serve much smaller populations, and they are still tied to the broader American university system, from which they draw faculty and to which they send students on to grad school. And even at these schools, the humanities are particularly vulnerable to AI, because the intellectual labor that the technology can now eliminate—wrestling with the meaning of texts, figuring out how to express complex ideas—is the fundamental point of that type of education.
The AI crisis on campus, mated to the COVID-19 and federal-funding crises that flanked it, dismantled the pretense that everything happening on campus shared any kind of common project. AI might substantially improve scientific research while destroying the humanities. And AI might troublingly reduce the effort a student must exert to complete a degree while allowing a scientist to carry out experiments with reduced labor, uncontroversially.
Undergraduate education, credentialing, scientific research, professionalization, and coming of age still occupy the same campuses. But they are clearly no longer parts of the same enterprise. They have not been so for many years—probably many decades. Looking back at my own career, I can see clearly that every single term of it has taken place in the shadow of this family of mismatches. Teaching and research sometimes align, but not always. Becoming educated has little to do with becoming an adult, apart from taking place on the same campus. I used to understand a university as akin to a city—expansive, diverse, and necessarily host to multiple purposes. But now I wonder if even that generous account is a fantasy. I wonder if one organization can support all of these conflicting projects well—and if it ever did.
[Ian Bogost: Why college students are booing AI]
Now that these incompatibilities are harder to ignore, will the American collegiate project reinvent itself in a way that would resolve them? Perhaps, but also: I doubt it. Universities are purpose-built to resist change of almost any kind. College leaders have repeatedly adopted a “wait and see” or “keep our heads down” approach, treating disruption as mere interruption: The pandemic ended, AI will settle down, federal funding will resume, and all of this, whatever it is, will blow over. These are far more tolerable conclusions to reach than, say, the idea that credentialing has no business sharing a venue with coming of age, or that undergraduate education is at odds with the mission of a research institution.
Each recent crisis gave college an alibi. AI was an alien technology that corrupted an otherwise functional educational institution. The Trump funding cuts were an aberrant political attack on a healthy research enterprise. COVID-19 was an emergency that forced campuses to suspend campus life and education alike in the interest of public health. But surviving any one of these crises, let alone all of them together, changes nothing about the underlying circumstances that they exacerbated. The incompatible purposes of college carry on.
I see no reason to believe that the structural inconsistencies that have come to define higher education will resolve. The degree will become ever more a goal and less a process of self-discovery. The research and teaching missions will further retract from each other. College is at war with itself as much as it is with the public, or the government, or the private sector, or the technology industry.
As a degree or a ritual, college will continue to have value, and you or your kids may want to attend one for a credential or a coming-of-age experience (or both). The old names will persist, and the campus buildings will still stand. The coursework will continue whether humans or machines complete it (or assign it). The leaves will fall onto the quad in the autumn, and the caps will fly into the air in the spring. The appearance of college can endure, even as its spirit—a community organized for the education and formation of young people—comes undone.
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