If it doesn’t matter who’s teaching your course—especially at public universities where the quality of teaching has gone way, way, way down over the past twenty years—then we have created an environment where many classes might as well be taught by A.I., and many of the students know it.
I’m not a car person, but I have friends who have fancy BMWs, and they have to go to their fancy BMW place to fix their car, because BMW parts are often very specific to BMWs. So what does it mean for higher ed when all the parts are interchangeable? Almost forty per cent of students transfer at least once from institution to institution, and that places additional pressure to make everything the same. What happens is that colleges make it easier for their students to transfer, because parents want to have some backup plan. The high number of transfers leads to more fungibility and commodification.
In a Substack post from last year, you suggested that sixty to seventy per cent of faculty will ultimately lose their jobs once generative A.I. starts to hit the classroom, and that those who survive will need to explain why they’re still needed. How do you think they should be proving their worthiness?
Higher education and professors can differentiate themselves from all this sameness by teaching at the edges of knowledge. My expertise, for example, is in the African American sonnet tradition. There are probably three people on the entire planet who know as much as I do about this tiny little thing, and so I’ve spent a lot of my time experimenting with these large language models to just see what they know about my field, and where the edges are. Specialists are going to be key to selling education as something the A.I. can’t do. When your daughter is going to go to school, in eight years, you are not going to want, for any money, to have her learn standard educational product that A.I. knows—and A.I. will know so much, right?
I’m not sure about that, because I do think that there’s value in her learning things that a computer knows. Human beings still play chess, even though a human being hasn’t beaten the best chess computers in twenty years—and I would think there’s still value in her understanding the basic theories and foundations of, say, chemistry. Even if A.I. knows all of that, she should probably know it, too, if she wants to understand what those edges of knowledge are, no?
So, in my ideal vision of the academy, you’re going to be in class with a mentor who isn’t going to have to teach you Chemistry 101 but will want to quickly move to where the edges are, to do something new. Maybe they would decide together to 3-D-print some new material that has never been printed before, or what have you. Whatever they decide together will not be something every university is going to be able to do. It will be what’s particular at this place.
When I was in the Cal State system, I was trying to get Native American studies to be a major at Sonoma State. I was trying to figure out what the curriculum would look like, and was having lunch with this really amazing faculty member from another university, and she said part of the problem with Native American studies is that we can’t standardize it. She was telling me about an important local Native American woman from a hundred years ago. And I said something about Harriet Tubman and told her that I didn’t know the Native American Harriet Tubman. She said that’s because there are a thousand Native Harriet Tubmans.
I bring this up as an example of that which cannot be scaled and commodified and transferred. This is the type of inquiry that will be possible in the university I’m envisioning.
Does that lead to a kind of obscurity? It would seem to encourage the esoteric sort of inquiry that the public sometimes resists.
Well, I won’t use the word “obscurity.” I would say “specialization.”
Let me make a couple of predictions and distinctions. Social science is going to matter so much less when your daughter goes to college. It is already on its way out. A.I. can do it. And here’s an example of the type of inquiry I’m talking about: I have a weird, funny Twitter group about life on Mars. Someone will ask, for instance, if it’s true that you’re going to need kidney dialysis on the way back from Mars. Another person is theorizing about a 3-D printer that’s going to use Mars soil, which will allow people to build on Mars using its materials instead of shipping everything there. These sorts of inquiries are obscure, specialist, niche, at the edge.
