Chicago University is laying down the law on AI

A spectre is stalking universities everywhere. It’s called AI and they don’t know what to do about (or with) it. That’s not surprising because, at base, the technology poses an existential question for them: what are universities for? Are they institutions for training students and issuing them with the credentials they supposedly need to get on in life? Or are they places for educating them? The first involves conditioning young people to fit a pre-existing task or role, while the other is about developing an autonomous mind that is capable of thinking for itself.

By this stage, I guess that most universities will have developed some kind of AI “strategy”. The most interesting one I’ve seen to date comes from an elite institution: Chicago University’s law school. It has three strands. The first involves developing what the school calls “AI-resilient teaching and assessment so that students still build genuine critical thinking and writing skills rather than outsourcing work to AI.” The second strand is to prioritise the “essential human” skills that students will need: oral advocacy, judgment and (hardest of all, if my legal friends are to be believed) dealing with clients. And the third is about teaching students to use AI responsibly and ethically, on the grounds that the technology is now unavoidable. The hope is clearly that no graduate of the school will ever lodge a lawsuit based on ChatGPT hallucinations.

The part of the strategy that has drawn most public attention is how it deals with first-year students who will probably be not only digital natives but also AI natives reared (God help them) on ChatGPT. For their core course, the rules are: no laptops, tablets or phones in class; in-person exams with no internet or device access; and continued emphasis on the Socratic method of teaching that has been de rigueur in law schools for ever.

As students progress through the school, the emphasis changes towards making sure that students become experienced – and critical – users of the technology. It’s when they get to graduate level and have to write a research paper (requirements: “substantial length, independent research, original ideas, incorporation of feedback from faculty, and iteration across drafts”) that things get really interesting. Each student is required to engage, face to face, in an oral discussion of their paper with their supervising professor, which will involve the student answering questions that “probe the reasoning of the paper and the implications of its arguments”. In other words, if you’ve become unduly dependent on AI, there’s nowhere left to hide. Which is as it should be.

None of this required rocket science. In fact, it’s mostly common sense. Underpinning it is an institutional acknowledgment that denialism about AI is not a strategy and that the arrival of the technology means things have to change. Universities have to rethink their pedagogy to make it both AI-resilient and to harness the capabilities of the technology to enhance learning.

Adaptation on this scale requires two things: resources and institutional will. Sceptics will point out that, while Chicago University has both, many cash-strapped universities in the UK and elsewhere do not.

This looks to me like a crisis for the sector. If universities do not act now, then they will cease to be universities in any meaningful sense. They will revert to being mere providers of credentials. After all, the entire point of a university education is not the production of correct answers but the formation of a mind capable of producing them. A short-staffed university department that looks the other way when a student uses AI to draft an essay, solve a set of maths problems, or synthesise a long article is not doing its educational job. It has allowed its students to skip the painful learning process that is the whole point of being there.

The arrival of AI does indeed represent an existential threat for universities unless they wake up. They are, by nature and constitution, slow-moving animals. Way back in 1995, the Columbia scholar Eli Noam wrote a seminal article: Electronics and the Dim Future of the University. “In the past,” he wrote, “people came to the information, and the information was at the university. In the future, the information will come to the people, wherever they are. What then is the role of the university? ... Will electronics do to the university what printing did to the medieval cathedral, ending its central role in information transfer? Have we reached the end of the line of a model that goes back to Nineveh, more than 2,500 years ago? Can we self-reform the university, or must things get much worse first?”

Noam is still waiting for an answer. So am I.

Big picture

Sketching the New Dysto-Utopian World With Massive Presence of Artificial Intelligence is a sobering long read on Substack by Branko Milanović.

Hot topic

An interesting Noema piece by Nathan Gardels is The Heated Debate in Europe Over Air Conditioning.

Cold turkey

The Scrolly Chair is a neat Substack blogpost on digital detoxing by Nicholas Carr.

Photograph by Agencja Fotograficzna Caro/Alamy