Zombifying the universities
- Joanne Jacobs
- May 17
- 2 min read
AI use on college campuses "threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons," writes Owen Yingling, a University of Chicago philosophy major, in The Great Zombification. "It will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training," he argues in The New Critic.
Elite universities are spending millions of dollars to figure out how to "integrate" AI in the classroom, Yingling writes. What it really means is substituting AI "for learning, teaching, and conversing."
Some will wait for the university system to crumble, hoping to build something new from the ashes, he writes. The ivied halls "will remain, to be observed and treated respectfully — like old cathedrals, mainline Protestant churches, and most of the European continent."
Yingling hopes it can be saved, however imperfect. "If schools took a harder line on AI — limiting pedagogical integration and cracking down on cheating — it would not solve any of the problems that stem from the tension (between training a mind for the workforce and the good life) that every real university grapples with," he writes. But, at least, students wouldn't be zombies.
Yes, it's a rant. I enjoyed it. Perhaps it's a bit over the top, but I don't see how universities will survive if students don't learn anything, because they offloaded the thinking to a chatbot, and they can't demonstrate any sort of work ethic, because they didn't do the work.
Update: Theo Baker, weeks away from his Stanford graduation, was part of the first college class of the AI era, he writes in the New York Times. Cheating has become the norm, he writes. "One could get ahead, quickly, by cutting corners, by focusing on self-presentation."
Like Princeton, Stanford no longer relies on the honor code to prevent cheating on exams. This spring, students are writing in blue books under the eye of proctors.
"Relying on A.I. for cognitive tasks can reduce one’s own intellectual capacity and resilience," writes Baker. Students know this. But they're addicted to it.
Baker has published his first book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University.
Back in the 1970s we had similar rants about computers in the academy. There were great fears that they would “dehumanize” us. I don’t know about the future of AI, but the present capabilities of AIs don’t seem to turn people into drooling idiots. You can’t, for example, expect real creativity out of current AI models, so humans still have to rely on their own creativity. I often, however, use an AI to vet my serious text, to make sure I haven’t left out arguments, been too repetitive, or logically inconsistent. Does this make me stupider?
It seems to me that about 80 percent of current AI use is just a faster alternative to Google. If I ask an A…
You can hardly expect a student to take a class seriously when the "hack" for the class is not having a differing opinion than the professor. The goal of schooling is to get good grades, not real learning. And the knowledge is freed from the prison of the campus now, leaving the gatekeepers guarding....what?
Most colleges now promote leaning into your emotions, not learning to regulate them. Must less learning to discipline your intellect so it is less manipulatable by "experts" and "influencers. Outside the sciences, even established principles are compromised rather than established.
Some faculty and Higher Ed administrators have a tendency toward plagiarism as we’ve seen the last few years in remarkable settings. This is just a continuation along the path of laziness and unseriousness.