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The End of the Glorified Adulescent Childcare? On the Future of Universities after the AI Apocalypse
The License is Revoked
The university started in the medieval era as a sort of guild. Universitas meant a corporation of masters and students, and the privilege it extracted from popes and emperors was the licentia ubique docendi: a license to certify, to say who counts as qualified to teach. The authority to separate the expert from the layman. It later evolved closer to its modern form through a bargain that still shapes how academics think about themselves. The state funds researchers, protects their academic freedom and independence, and in exchange they inherit the duty to share the fruit of their research by teaching the next generation.
AI is going to put incredible pressure on this model. The obvious angle is that AI can teach, cheaply, at any hour, and without the weariness of a lecturer facing three hundred students. The other issue is evaluation. Essays, problem sets and take-home exams were all proxies for effort and understanding, and they have stopped working as proxies. Certification depends on measurement, and the measurement has gone. The oldest privilege of the university guild, the right to certify experts, rests on an assessment model that is now obsolete, with nothing available to replace it at scale.
This matters because mass higher education was never really a market only for teaching. It was a market for the credential, which employers relied on because assessing candidates themselves was expensive (Collins' The Credential Society, 1979; & Caplan's The Case Against Education, 2018). It was also, perhaps more bluntly, a solution to a scheduling problem, in that it gave society somewhere to put eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds during the increasingly long transitional years when they are neither children nor quite fully independent adults. A glorified adulescent childcare with a library attached. And even that was already threatened, and many report that the "uni experience" never recovered to pre-COVID times.
Viva Voce
What will survive, maybe, is whatever requires being in a room with other people. The written exam displaced the oral one in the nineteenth century largely for reasons of scale, because there were suddenly far too many candidates to examine individually and prose on paper was the industrial solution. If the scale requirement disappears, there is no strong reason for the written form to stay. The viva, the thesis defence and the seminar where someone interrupts you and you have to answer immediately are the forms of assessment that cannot be faked, and they are also the forms of teaching that cannot be outsourced. Being physically present becomes valuable precisely because it is expensive and hard to counterfeit.
That points towards a university closer to the thing it was before it industrialised: small, oral, tutorial, and populated by people who are not there in order to be qualified. Something nearer to Bildung - intellectual formation through sustained engagement with other minds - than to vocational training. You enrol at forty because you want to be argued with by someone who knows more than you do, in front of people who will notice if you are bluffing, and what you are paying for is the experience rather than the paper.
Parts of this are genuinely appealing from where I sit as an academic: smaller cohorts, less paperwork, more direct engagement with students... and a return to the things that were sold to us as academia: time for reading, arguing, supervising someone closely, and first and foremost, less bureaucratic and managerial nonsense busywork that we waste hours doing. But the maths is unforgiving. Such a newly old university cannot materialise without drastic cuts to the number of staff, and as someone who would quite like to get a mortgage, that makes me a bit uneasy. It is difficult to argue in good faith for a model whose main obstacle is that I might not be in it.
It's not good news for access, either. AI widens access to content while this kind of university narrows access to formation. Everyone gets the library, and a small number of financially secure people get the seminar, and this creates a déjà-vu of the old elitist model. That arrangement already existed about a century ago, and we spent a long time trying to get away from it.
Aside of this smaller-scale Bildung-focused aspect, what other roles for the university remain? If they are not needed in order to teach the population, or make knowledge advances, potential leftovers roles are verification and responsibility. When claims are cheap and unattributable, the valuable thing is no longer knowledge itself but knowledge that someone is willing to stand behind, at some cost to themselves if it turns out to be wrong.
Writing this does not put it me in a very cheerful mood, but universities already survived a few revolutions: the printing press, the Reformation and the internet, and they will probably survive this as well. Though I doubt they will keep their present shape.
