> The elite research layer of higher education (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT) is still an AI accelerant. But across the country, as Scott Latham told me, “the vast majority of institutions are in a state of AI paralysis.”

Tbf, the vast majority of institutions also suck.

State flagships and some of their second rung, a couple ivies and ivy tier privates, and military academies provide the bulk of talent that you need. And these universities have dedicated pipelines for people who start off at community colleges.

These universities are also much larger - UC Berkeley's and UCLA's 2025 undergrad population is almost double it's 1960 population [0].

And those who had skill or educational deficiencies can remediate them via non-trad or working professionals masters like GT, UT Austin, and CU Boulder's OMSCS for less than $15k.

[0] - https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...

"Institution that assigns homework would prefer you not have a machine do your homework for you"

And for the good reason. I have yet to see 1 (one) reason how giving infinite cheat machine to students is of any benefit to them.

The secret to mastery remained unchanged for a thousand years: books, lectures and homework. All of this can be done with pen and paper level of technology.

>the two most reliable places to get an answer are the physical library and AI.

Uh in what universe? Obviously physical books are helpful but are not most of the new ones being written with the assistance of an LLM?

I'm not sure what to make of this? Is any healthy skepticism about AI now treated as motivated luddism?

Academics has its many issues but universities are hardly the only sources of criticism about AI, and for all its benefits AI is poorly understood and often applied in relatively half-assed ways, even when it's well-intended. I would worry if thoughtful individuals weren't skeptical at all about AI.

It also seems reasonable to, say, want to evaluate students on their own merits free of the influence of a "homework machine" (to borrow a phrase from Shel Silverstein).

I'm reluctant to make predictions, and wouldn't describe myself as "anti-AI" but this sort of piece reminds me uncannily of the dot-com bubble.

The primary use case of universities are to produce a generation that can contribute to the society in a meaningful and positive manner. Nowadays in-order to do that, AI literacy is a must for graduates just like it was 15 years ago when it was a must to have computer literacy.

AI is a tool like internet was and it's the responsibility of the curriculum to teach proper usage of that tool rather than fighting against it.

It is causing far more pain than benefit in the majority of institutions.

Particularly the cheating. Many students are flagrantly using it + the detection tools either aren't configured to check for it, or, if they do have something like TurnItIn, it doesn't work, and flags legitimately created content sans AI.

For people who teach through writing, there are great tools out there like MATCHA: https://matchawriter.com. It's a secure writing environment that verifies authorship by recording the full writing process and, when needed, can restrict copy-paste, automation, and access to other applications.

In my opinion, most of Academia's pains are wholly self-inflicted.

This author has a ton of axes to grind and a poor grasp of computing history or how industry works. Pretending like it’s strange or even bad that industrial datacenter builders with tens of billions of leveraged capital can outbuild the GPU capacity of chronically underfunded grant dependent universities whose mission is not to create industrial scale compute resources is like complaining local technical school auto-mechanic program isn’t out-producing Ford’s auto manufacturing numbers.

But then as soon as the author rolled out complaints about DEI and ethics, you knew what was going on. Okay, please leave higher ed and work for the industry you love. As you say, they are doing just fine.