AI didn't kill college...

it was already dead

Ever since the rise of ChatGPT a few years ago, the end of college has been obvious—if you can have a machine generate good-enough essays for your assignments, then you don’t have to do any thinking or work to get a passing grade in your college classes. Lately there have been some articles echoing that idea—here are just a few of the many that have been written (written I assume by humans typing with their fingers). The solution is, for some, extremely obvious: professors have to do more work in the AI era. Grading should be based on students doing in class handwritten assignments, as well as oral examinations. This would seem to solve the problem of students using AI to generate their written assignments—have them write it out by hand or talk it out with their mouths.

This would mean a lot more work for professors—and probably would require learning new evaluation methods and skills, since oral examinations haven’t been practiced in any volume for a long time.

But that’s fine, right? Professors can do more work, and learn new evaluation methods—students can adjust to new evaluation methods too, although most of them probably are barely capable of writing anything by hand at this point (that, along with oral communication, is fast becoming a vanishing skill). But anyway this could be done, so why not do it? Why just seemingly allow AI to destroy the entire concept of college?

One big problem is that most professors are what’s called adjuncts—very low paid instructors who teach five, six, seven courses per semester (often more, and often at several different schools, to make ends meet, spending much of their time traveling long distances). They will have hundreds and hundreds of students per semester across all their courses at all the different schools they’re teaching at.

The point is that fighting against AI, and preserving some basic human things like college education, does require more work, done by humans, in a human way. This requires time, energy, and resources—but these are precisely the things that have been systematically hollowed out over the last few decades of neoliberalism and corporatism devouring everything. Society has been completely transformed into a corporate state, with anything human being marginalized, with everyone forced to hustle insanely, stretching their capacities to the limit in order to eke out survival. These are not good conditions for saving humanity from total takeover by AI. Humanity and society are especially ripe for being taken over by AI precisely because the possibility conditions of resisting it—such as instituting AI-proof measures in college education, like hand-written in-class exams and oral exams—require a level of humanity that has been intentionally destroyed and made impossible to exist for decades, all in the name of profit. It has been much more profitable for colleges to employ adjuncts, who don’t have any benefits, who make very little money, and who have no job security—so, in accordance with the profit-maximizing logic of neoliberal capitalism, adjuncts have come to dominate higher education: at least 70% of all college classes are taught by adjuncts. Such a hollowed out work force has no potential for staging a heroic resistance to the rise of the machines.