the plusses and minuses of Gioiatopia

I don’t think Ted Gioia seriously means everything in this post about ending AI cheating, but let’s go through it as though he does — as though he is seriously outlining the Academic Gioiatopia. He makes five points about the AI-proof experience he had at Oxford:

(1) EVERYTHING WAS HANDWRITTEN — WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TYPEWRITERS.

A number of my colleagues in the Honors College here at Baylor are doing just this: using good old-fashioned blue books to administer in-class exams. Other colleagues are handing out spiral-bound notebooks — they buy them cheaply at Wal-Mart or Office Depot — and asking students to use them to keep commonplace books. But these are all seminar classes in the humanities, which are a tiny percentage of the overall offerings of a university. What would be the equivalents for Microeconomics, or Sociology 101, or Organic Chem?

(2) MY PROFESSORS TAUGHT ME AT TUTORIALS IN THEIR OFFICES. THEY WOULD GRILL ME VERBALLY — AND I WAS EXPECTED TO HAVE IMMEDIATE RESPONSES TO ALL THEIR QUESTIONS.

Again, while this makes sense for the humanities and some versions of the social sciences — and is basically the only way to teach musical performance and some of the other arts — it’s hard to see how it translates into many other disciplines. And to implement something like it across the university would be enormously costly.

Ted knows this, sort of: he says, “US colleges could replace their bloated administrative bureaucracies with more teachers. If they did that, there would be plenty of tutors, and every student could receive this individualized attention.” Yes, they could do this, but that would require enormous changes to the way universities function, and you can’t do it just by snapping your fingers. (Though I guess Thanos could get rid of half the deans and deanlets that way. Hmmm….) Many current employees would have to be given notice; administrators would have to be asked to return to the classroom, probably with pay cuts; new searches would have to be initiated, pursued, completed; offices would have to be converted to classrooms.

And of course many disciplines would be required to change everything about how they teach. Think of those Intro to Sociology classes now held in big lecture halls with 200 students, featuring lots of PowerPoint slides, students responding to polls on their laptops, etc. In the academic Gioiatopia, where instead of one 200-student section of SOC 101 we now have 10 20-student sections, there would no longer be any use for those lecture halls … but the department would now need ten seminar rooms. Are those lying around unused? No they are not. So an enormous investment would have to be made in redesigning existing buildings and perhaps building new ones. Oh, and also you now need several more people to teach SOC 101.

Multiply this situation by a factor of 50 or so in each university and you have an idea of what Gioiatopia would require. How many American universities could muster the cash needed to do it — even if they were sure of a significant return on investment?

One more note here: Ted says that “professors in the US would refuse to spend so much time face-to-face with students. They would complain that the Oxford approach is too labor intensive, too demanding on their precious time.” I know many professors who would strongly prefer to spend more face-to-face time with their students — if they could be delivered from the responsibilities of regular publishing. Their time is precious: professors who take their teaching responsibilities seriously, even in the current regime, and also do the amount of scholarship required for tenure and promotion don’t have a lot of time left over. A regime in which teaching was given greater priority and the treadmill of publication slowed or halted altogether would be welcome to a great many academics. But those who have suffered through the current system seem disinclined to reduce the sufferings of the people who succeed them.

(3) ACADEMIC RESULTS WERE BASED ENTIRELY ON HANDWRITTEN AND ORAL EXAMS. YOU EITHER PASSED OR FAILED — AND MANY FAILED.

(4) THE SYSTEM WAS TOUGH AND UNFORGIVING — BUT THIS WAS INTENTIONAL. OTHERWISE THE CREDENTIAL GOT DEVALUED.

I’m treating these two together because they depend on the same context: One in which the credential offered by the university is scarce and hence valuable; one in which far more people desire such a credential than can possibly receive it. Indeed, the credential is perceived as so valuable that one would risk failure and no credential at all rather than forego it for something less precious. Of how many universities today can that be said? If, say, Princeton were to implement such a system but the other elite American universities did not, how many prospective students would think a Princeton degree so much more valuable than any alternative that they would take the risk of attending Princeton rather than choose another elite university where, thanks to grade inflation, they could only with difficulty end up with a GPA lower than 3.5?

Now add to that the simple fact that, if once upon a time university places were scarce and prospective students plentiful, we now have precisely the opposite problem: too many universities competing for a shrinking pool of applicants. And no possibility of that ratio altering for the better anytime … well, any time.

Which takes me back to my point above on “return on investment.” No university in need of students would restructure its curricula and pedagogical structures in order to ensure that more people fail. Today’s universities think about little other than recruitment and retention, because they desperately need the money: you’re going to tell them to adopt a system with the express purpose of producing less retention? — and at the same time tell them to find tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to reinvent their infrastructure?

Even the richest universities would find those recommendations nuts, because they know that even their massive endowments could very quickly be depleted by such a strategy (especially when they’re faced with a Presidential administration determined to cut off their access to federal funding).

(5) EVEN THE INFORMAL WAYS OF BUILDING YOUR REPUTATION WERE DONE FACE-TO-FACE — WITH NO TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED.

I’m gonna ignore this one because it’s not about preventing AI cheating, but rather about the equally important but distinct matter of one’s university years as a time not just to make social connections but to learn social skills.

One final question, and then its answer: Do students want the kind of experience Gioiatopia would provide? Some would, certainly — but how many? I would guess considerably less than one percent of the pool of applicants. For the overwhelming majority Gioiatopia would be a dystopia. Why? 

Most young people today feel, with considerable justification, that they live in an economically precarious time. They therefore want the credential that will open doors that lead to a good job, either directly or (by getting them into good graduate programs) indirectly. Their parents want the same thing, and perhaps want it even more intensely because they tend to be making an enormous financial investment in their children’s education.

But those same young people also want to have a good time in college, a period of social experience and experimentation that they (rightly) think will be harder to come by when they enter that working world. Many people sneer at universities that build lazy rivers and climbing walls, and devote every spare penny to their athletic programs — I’ve curled my lip at such things a few times over the decades — but the fact remains that such amenities are significant factors in recruitment. Many students like them; they’re part of the [insert university name here] Experience. 

Here’s the key thing: what most people call AI but what I call chatbot interfaces to machine-learning corpora (yes, we’ve finally gotten around to that) do a great deal to facilitate the simultaneous pursuit of these two competing goods. Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything. But the acquisition of knowledge is a third competing good, and if they pursue that one seriously they may well have to sacrifice one of the other two, or even both. Right now they can have two out of three, and as Meat Loaf taught us all long ago, two out of three ain’t bad.

The people who run universities understand all this also, even if they have their own regrets; and they’re not going to impede their income stream any further than it’s been impeded already by demographic realities. They will make the necessary accommodations to a chatbot-dependent clientele, because, especially when customers are scarce, the customer is always right. Those departments and programs that push back will be able to to do so only imperfectly, and probably at the cost of declining enrollments. So it goes. 

And the kind of learning that Ted Gioia and I prize will still go on. However, it will primarily thrive outside the university system — as it did for many centuries before universities became as large a part of the social order as they are now.