Shaping Souls to Stay Afloat

Artificial Intelligence (AI) looks to upend higher education—all education—in no end of ways. The advantage it gives to cheaters by itself is upending the practice of teaching. But AI poses its greatest threat to the liberal arts, to the studia humanitatis, by getting rid of the basic function of this education: to prepare recipients for a job serving the state.

At its best, this kind of education also prepares students to govern the state—to converse about the ends of government and to decide prudently how to achieve them as citizens of a democratic republic, as the leaders of an aristocratic regime, or as counselors of a monarchy. But the money return for a liberal-arts education has been to qualify a graduate for a government job: bureaucrat, officer, teacher, policeman, social worker, or any job at public expense.

Liberal-arts education already has declined in tandem with the decline of democratic governance. The job market for bureaucrats in private corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) registers the dispersal of sovereignty to these parastate institutions. An ambitious state servant may use his education to strive to become part of the more elite governing classes, but the ultimate reward is money to pay for a house, a spouse, and a good life for the kids.

What reward is there in acquiring a liberal education in a managerial regime? American liberal-arts education already has declined in tandem with the decline of democratic governance: Our elites increasingly prefer functionaries and manageable subjects to sovereign citizens, and what reward is there in acquiring a liberal education in a managerial regime? But AI poses an even graver threat to our educational system. What if AI can do most or all government jobs better than human beings? Secretary, soldier, social worker: Perhaps AI, married to robotics, can perform all of those functions more successfully than we can.

Consider the humble policy wonk, who contributes to democratic governance by providing opinions for citizens to consider as they determine the republic’s policies—an employee of the National Association of Scholars, say, writing an op-ed on AI. If AI cannot already write an op-ed as good as this one, there’s a reasonable chance that it will be able to do so next year.

And why should my boss not decide to invest in a subscription to PolicyWonkChatBot instead of continuing my salary? PolicyWonkChatBot may, I fear, cost less than I do and produce a superior product. And so may LegislativeAssistantChatBot, ScienceGraduateStudentChatBot, WallStreetBondTraderChatBot, BalletReviewerChatBot, and all the other AI programs set to replace every profession for which education once provided a prerequisite.

What future then for higher education? If AI replaces the state servants, our colleges and universities lose a majority of their enrollment. Most of our public university systems disappear. If AI replaces human governance, we lose much of the justification for a liberal-arts education at all, whether in democratic, aristocratic, or monarchical mode. The Harvards, and even the Hillsdales, might lose their raisons d’être.

The Woke deformation of education is, in some sense, a practical short-term response to the computerization challenge now headlined by the AI revolution. If education qualifies one for no job that actually serves the public good, then secure employment redistributing wealth by a complex and arbitrary system of “equity” may bridge the gap. A therapeutic bureaucracy dedicated to making people feel better is a function AI, as yet, is less equipped to handle.

Wokeness at least creates a make-work bureaucracy to substitute for the dole. Woke education’s fancy dress as a necessary initiation rite for those who want to enter the communion of the radical saints, or as a transmitter of the cultic wisdom of Michel Foucault and Kimberlé Crenshaw, may also convince a continuing body of devotees to pay tuition.

But aside from the active harm that Woke bureaucrats impose on America, ultimately they don’t create anything of value—even by the standards of government jobs. American parents and taxpayers already have begun to move their money away from education for the Woke career track. Woke bureaucratic employment can delay but not halt AI’s challenge to higher education.

Woke bureaucratic employment can delay but not halt AI’s challenge to higher education. I do not have a long-term answer for how to save higher education from the AI challenge. No one can, since we do not yet know what AI’s capacities will be. If AIs truly can outthink men at every level, well, either we sever the power cord to every computer or we learn how to hew coal to feed the power plants that provide energy for our silicon successors. But if AIs cannot do everything men can …

If higher education is to survive, it must prove that it can provide preparation for a superior governance than AI can achieve. If higher education is to survive—if liberal education is to survive—it must prove that it can provide preparation for a superior governance than AI can achieve. It must be able to educate college graduates whose conversations provide better ends for the republic than do the text recombinations of AI, and whose prudential judgment is superior to that of an AI algorithm.

We might call this an education in the academic virtues, a preparation necessary for the civic virtues needed to govern a republic.

Students must be self-reliant: They must learn to read, reason, and write for themselves without relying on AI (or even computerized) assistance.

Students must be honest: They must have a character that will not cheat by relying on AI when there is no other human to monitor them.

They must be self-governing: They must not rely on university administrators or AI algorithms to treat them as the objects of a managerial-therapeutic regime. They must learn about Western civilization because that is our history, our tradition, our experience that is prerequisite for the exercising of prudence. We poor humans cannot hope to challenge AI by ourselves, without our forefathers’ wisdom to draw upon.

They must have the humility, the wisdom, to know that they are in college to learn these virtues, to improve themselves, and to learn how to govern themselves so that they may govern others—not to become ungoverned “activists” who mistake license for liberty.

Nor must students alone exhibit these virtues. So, too, must professors and academic administrators. The entire academic community must incarnate these academic virtues. Quakers once succeeded mightily in business because all the world knew that a Quaker’s word, unsupported by vain oaths, was good. Academics, too much departed from their monastic and clerical roots, must also reform themselves and make these academic virtues their second nature.

The university’s practical men have, for centuries, scanted or scoffed at this sort of moralizing program—antiquated, behind the times, beside the point. But the AI revolution threatens to end the funding for “practical” higher education—save, perhaps, for the trade schools necessary to train wire-dusters for the AI server banks. Practical-minded leaders of colleges and universities may discover that the best bet for their institutions’ survival is to reorient them around the academic virtues, as an education for the civic virtues needed to govern our republic.

Or perhaps not. To repeat: No one yet knows what AI’s capacities will be, or how deep a challenge they will pose to our colleges’ and universities’ bottom lines. Furthermore, this counsel aligns well enough with what I might advise colleges and universities to do anyway, even if there were no AI revolution.

But I do not think that the current business model of higher education will endure. The market for semi-literates who rely on AI to do their work is likely to contract sharply. I suspect that the academic virtues are likely to be, at the very least, an essential branding point for colleges and universities facing a painful reduction in their consumer base. And colleges will not ultimately be able to assume a virtue if they have it not. Even if AI only poses a sharp challenge to higher education and not an existential threat, I think many colleges and universities would be well advised to turn toward virtue education.

And if AI does pose an existential threat to higher education as it currently exists? Then I think only the colleges and universities that focus on virtue education have a chance to survive.

David Randall is executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars.