The Once and Future College
The Once and Future College What was and what will be once more Librarian of Celaeno Everyone can sense it. Though it is a mighty edifice, the university has neglected its foundations, which have so thoroughly rotted away that the whole thing will collapse under its own weight. This is true of education more generally as well; the K-12 system with which we are all as familiar as the air has the same problem. While there are isolated pockets of excellence, they are few and far between and subject to the same pressures. There is a great fall coming. Many people point to AI as both problem and solution. As a nail in the coffin, it’s fairly plausible. I teach online classes, and Chat GPT has essentially made them meaningless. A huge percentage of my students simply do not do their own work at all. I have no way to prove that they’re cheating beyond the fact that it’s obvious to anyone who is a careful and experienced reader, but with no empirical way of demonstrating that, I am force...