To the Editors:
AI is going to be very time and labor-intensive for faculty to deal with, regardless of whether you embrace it, reject it, or fall somewhere in between (“Caught Off Guard by AI,” The Chronicle, June 13). It cannot be dealt with through a few training sessions that faculty will be expected to attend on their own time, of course. Faculty are going to have to retrain themselves and rethink how they teach and, especially, assess learning. Students, too, are going to have to be trained, not only about appropriate uses of AI, but also about what learning really means, in a world where machines can help you avoid using your own mind altogether, and thus short-circuiting learning entirely.
The impact on general education especially will be profound. Why? My 35 years of experience teaching gen-ed, as well as majors and graduate students, indicates to me that students will only choose to invest their time and energy in courses that they think “matter,” primarily advanced courses in their own majors. They already resist investing in their gen-ed courses. I once discussed with my students, in a gen-ed class so they were from many different majors, what sorts of courses they would accept to take online. They almost all stated that they would take online courses for general education, and some “less important” courses for their majors, but not for the really “important courses.” I think AI use will be the same. Some students will bypass learning by using AI in their advanced courses, but it will really be gen-ed that will bear the brunt of AI.
What a university education looks like is bound to change profoundly as a result. I am fortunate in that my teaching career is winding down, and I won’t have to be on the front lines of this. But I think that if administrators (and trustees and legislatures, who really hold the purse strings for many universities and colleges) don’t step up and do what they are supposed to do, and claim they earn the “big bucks” for doing, i.e. leading, the result is going to be the collapse of higher education, or a hollowing out where, to borrow the old joke from the Soviet Union, teachers pretend to teach and students pretend to learn, while AI really does most of both.
Gayle K. Brunelle
Professor Emeritus of History
California State University at Fullerton