Bass-Ackwards

yet another person goes behind the veil and comes out looking special

My old friend Tyler goes full Straussian and points us to the wit and wisdom of Hollis Robbins on the future of Universities.

Some snippets:

“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?”

So HR believes she is safe from ruthless efficiency of AI because she is the queen of the African-American Sonnet (AAS). Yes, people, that will pack ‘em in at the old state U.

“College, Robbins believes, should be more bespoke; schools should cultivate their own character based on the charisma of professors, the novelty of their inquiries, and the quality of their instruction.”

Yes, I see it now, come to the University of Utah we have AI and HR on AAS.

Alfred Marshall invented the scissors of Supply and Demand. And even if it’s true that HR clowns AI on the AAS, literally no one cares.

By the way, her most cited publication is actually a book by Harriet Beecher Stowe that HR somehow has “edited”. Her second most cited publication is about listening to music while dropping acid (I am not making this up), and I’d advise her that’s a better plan than dropping acid and giving an interview to the New Yorker!

I agree that AI is going to render obsolete the instructional deadwood, phone-it-in, professors. But it is not because, as HR claims, they do not know things that AI does not know. It’s because they are not teaching things! Students aren’t learning when AI can do all their “work”.

The problem is not that professors lack mega-niche expertise. It’s that too many professors have stopped requiring students to do the things humans need to do to learn.

AI disrupts the whole lazy equilibrium where students pretend to write, professors pretend to grade, administrators pretend this is assessment, and everyone calls it education. But esoteric knowledge no matter the subject is not going to fix anything.

So yes, universities need to differentiate themselves. But the sales pitch can’t be that our faculty know obscure things the robot does not know (that’s pretty much impossible anyway). The sales pitch has to be: here, you will actually be made to learn.

In my undergrad classes, you have to write your exams on paper in the classroom. You have to answer questions on the fly. There are online reading quizzes that AI can do, but at least you have to download the reading and interrogate AI about it. And I make you come to class (20% of your grade is attendance). Do I know more about public choice than AI? I know a lot, but probably not. That’s not the point. My job is not to be more encyclopedic than the robot. My job is to make students do the work the robot would otherwise do for them (out figure out how to get them to learn while using the robot).

The future of the university is not professors hiding at the edges of knowledge and hoping AI cannot find them. The future, if there is one, is professors getting students to actually learn.