https://archive.ph/6NspN
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By the late middle ages monasteries were spectacularly wealthy. They were immune from taxation, and possessed vast land holdings thanks to generous donations made over the centuries by nobles looking to assure themselves a comfortable place in the afterlife. Many of them performed economic functions, such as brewing beer or providing financial services; some performed charitable functions, distributing alms to the poor or operating hospitals; some performed spiritual functions, such as hosting holy relics or maintaining elaborate ritual vigils to intercede with God on behalf of the people. But their primary utility, from the perspective of the wider society, was as repositories, preservers, and disseminators of knowledge. Their scriptoria ensured that books were copied from one generation to the next, preventing knowledge from being lost. The monastic focus was naturally religious, but their monopoly on literacy and information reproduction meant that if you needed a secular work to be replicated for wider distribution, the monastery was the only place to go.
Emboldened by the cultural ferment of the Reformation, in 1534 the British Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, recognizing King Henry VIII as the head of the new Church of England following his break with Rome the year before on account of Pope Clement VII’s refusal to annual his marriage to Catherine of Aragorn. Immediately following this, the king dispatched his chief minister Thomas Cromwell (a distant ancestor of the Lord Protector) to visit England’s monasteries in order to gently remind them of their duty to submit to and obey their new religious authority, and more importantly, to inventory their finances. The monasteries of England and Wales held a quarter of the arable land, and their interiors were lavishly appointed with silver and gold; an English proverb held that if the Abbot of Glastonbury were to wed the Abbess of Shafetsbury, their heir would be richer than the king. This would of course have required both Abbot and Abbess to flout their vows of chastity, and perhaps this proverb was also a subtle dig at the widespread perception that monastic orders held their vows quite lightly. Thus, Cromwell’s delegates were also directed to investigate the moral state of the monasteries, examining the prevalence of superstitious practices such as the veneration of relics, the piety with which their monastic vows were being kept, and searching for evidence of dissolute sexual behaviour.
Cromwell’s visitations were of course a scouting expedition. In 1535, with Crowmell’s reports providing both a tally of monastic assets and a catalogue of monastic sins, the king had parliament pass the First Suppression Act. This dissolved over 400 lesser houses with incomes below an arbitrary £200 threshold. The holdings of these houses, both the lands endowed to them and the treasures within, were sold off. The crown took much of this wealth for itself, but provisions were made to pension off those monks willing to renounce their religious orders. Pensioning the monks was a clever move in that it both made the crown look reasonable and charitable, while also helping to defuse opposition from within the monasteries themselves. Pensions notwithstanding, this first round of dissolution led to a wave of popular discontent, particularly amongst the clergy, who began agitating against the king. A series of riots culminated with the Pilgrimage of Grace sweeping across the north of England in 1536 and 1537, as conservative elements re-occupied religious houses, re-established Catholic rites, and presented the king with an enumerated list of demands, which Henry was entirely uninterested in. The uprising was violently put down, and its leaders convicted of treason and executed. Those religious houses whose leaders had participated in the rebellion had their lands and treasure confiscated.
There is some historical debate over whether King Henry VIII intended the complete dissolution of the monasteries from beginning, or whether his initial desire was merely to reform them. In any case, these disturbances provided him with exactly the excuse he needed to pass the Second Suppression Act in 1539, by which time England’s first defender of the faith had already been excommunicated. This act empowered the crown to dissolve the remaining, larger monasteries, as before confiscating and selling off their land, and pensioning off, incorporating into the new Church of England, or executing the monks, depending on whether the monks chose to abandon their religious vows, cooperate with the new order, or fight.
It struck many at the time as an unthinkable outrage, but in retrospect dissolving the monasteries was almost the most obvious move that Henry VIII could make. They had made themselves his political enemies, the domestic allies of his adversaries abroad: thus, by dissolving them, he crushed a hostile power centre. They were fantastically wealthy: by plundering them, their wealth became his. They had, over the centuries, allowed their wealth and power to lead them towards luxury and corruption: humanist and Reformation critiques of their laxity, license, and loose morals abounded, as Henry has no doubt known quite well when he tasked Cromwell to catalogue their excesses. The monasteries were hostile, rich, and unsympathetic, and therefore a vulnerable and attractive target for liquidation, drawing Henry’s attention with the same inevitability that Lindisfarne attracted that of his viking (by way of Norman) ancestors.
Worse, however, was that the monasteries had become obsolete.
Almost exactly a hundred years before the closure of England’s last monastery, Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press, setting off a chain of events that would culminate, over the following century, with Martian Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to a church door, the Protestant Reformation’s explosion of ungovernable sects, and the dissolution of the monasteries. Before Gutenberg’s press the Church had a complete monopoly on information. Every book in existence was laboriously hand-copied by monks scribbling away by candlelight in the scriptoria, while literacy was largely confined to the clergy. The printing press meant that the ecclesiastical hierarchy could no longer gatekeep information. The price of books dropped, making it possible for ordinary people to obtain their own bibles, printed in the vernacular rather than Latin, which made it worth their while to learn to read, so that they could read and interpret the Bible for themselves.
Now that the world had the printing press, the monasteries’ primary reason for existence – the core justification for both their prestige and their accumulated wealth – no longer applied. They had outlived their usefulness, making them nothing more than an irritating thorn in the king’s side and a tempting concentration of loot. Henry VIII lost nothing whatsoever by dissolving them, and gained a great deal.
The English Dissolution of the Monasteries is particularly dramatic due to its scale, speed, and the systematic fashion in which it was carried out, but monastic closures were not confined to Britain. During the same period monasteries were being closed across Protestant Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, with kings, princes, and town councils confiscating their holdings in order to put them towards better secular use. While monasteries escaped closure in Catholic countries, they nevertheless steadily declined in influence over the centuries following the printing press. Once absolutely central to Europe’s cultural life, today only a relative handful of monasteries remain, as quaint spiritual retreats and tourist attractions.
Our own university system is on the cusp of a similar collapse. This may seem outrageous, given the size, wealth, and massive cultural importance of universities, but at the dawn of the 16th century, the suggestion that monasteries would be dismantled across Europe within a generation would have struck everyone – even their opponents – as absurd.
At the same time, universities have become engorged on tuition fees, research grants, and endowments, providing an easy and luxurious life for armies of well-paid and under-worked administrators, as well as for those professors who are able to play the social games necessary to climb the greased pole of academic promotion. Everyone knows that academia is in a bubble, and as with any bubble, correction is inevitable, and the longer correction is postponed by the thicket of interlocking entrenched interests that have dug themselves into the system, the uglier that correction was always going to be.
Just as the printing press rendered the monastic scriptoria entirely redundant, the Internet has placed universities under increasing threat of obsolescence. Libraries and academic publishing have already been rendered useless by preprint servers. It is no longer, strictly speaking, necessary to attend a university to learn things: the Internet has every tool an autodidact could desire, and insofar as it doesn’t – for instance, university presses and private journals charging outrageous fees for their books and papers – this is due to the academy jealously guarding its treasures with intellectual property law rather than any limitation of the technology. One can easily make the argument that academia has become an obstacle, rather than an organ, of information dissemination.
Still, universities have so far managed to hold on to their relevance due to their lock on credentialization: no one really cares how many How-To videos you watched at YouTube U, because – in theory – a university degree means that there was some level of human verification that you actually mastered the material you studied.
Large Language Models, however, are delivering the killing blow. Just as the printing press collapsed the cost of reproducing text, AI has collapsed the cost of producing texts. This is actually worse news for universities than Gutenberg was the monasteries: movable type made scriptoria unnecessary, but LLMs haven’t only made universities obsolete, they’ve made it impossible for universities to fulfil their function.
Universities rely on undergraduate tuition fees for a major part of their income. Large research schools derive a significant fraction from research grants, and the more prestigious institutions often receive substantial private donations, but for the majority of schools it is the fee-paying undergraduate that pays the bills. This is already a problem, because enrolment is already declining, partly for demographic reasons (the birth rate is low), and partly because academia has been increasingly coded as women’s work, leading to young men staying away.
In theory, undergraduate students are paying for an ‘education’. They are gaining essential professional skills that will make them employable in well-remunerated white collar professions, or they are broadening their minds with a liberal arts education that provides them with the soft skills – critical thinking, the ability to compose and parse complex texts, a depth of historical and philosophical understanding of intricate social and political issues – that prepare them for careers in elite socioeconomic strata.
Everyone, however, has long since understood that this narrative of ‘education’ is a barely-plausible polite fiction, like those little scraps of fabric exotic dancers wear on their nipples so everyone can pretend they aren’t showing their boobs. Students know it’s a lie, professors know it’s a lie, administrators know it’s a lie, and employers certainly know it’s a lie. What students are actually paying for is not an education, but a credential: they could not possibly care less about the ‘education’ they’re receiving, so long as they receive a piece of paper at the end of their four years which they can take to an employer as evidence that they are not cognitively handicapped, and are therefore in possession of the minimal level of self-discipline and intelligence required to handle routine tasks at the entry-level end of the org chart. Thus the venerable proverb among students that “C’s and D’s get degrees”. It doesn’t matter if you did well: employers don’t generally care about your GPA. All that matters is that you do the minimal possible level of work to squeak through. As a general rule, your time as a student is better spent grinding away in the library as little as possible while enjoying yourself to the maximum extent that you can in order to develop social networks you can draw upon later.
Until recently, graduate school ensured that there was still some vestigial motivation for genuine intellectual engagement. Corporate America might not care about your transcript, but if you wanted an advanced degree, graduate schools most certainly did. Those students with greater academic ambitions than a Bachelor’s degree could therefore generally be relied on to actually apply themselves, thereby making the professoriate’s efforts delivering lectures, preparing homework assignments, and grading exams somewhat less of a pantomime. DEI, however, was already eating its way through even this. As graduate school admission became more about protected identities and less about intellectual mastery, and as graduate programs were themselves rendered easier in order to improve retention of underqualified diversity admits, it started to become less important to study hard even if one wanted to enter grad school.
To the point. In 2022, ChatGPT became available. Almost overnight undergraduate students began using it to write their essays for them. Its abuse has now become essentially ubiquitous, and not only for essays: ChatGPT can write code or solve mathematical problems just as easily as it can generate reams of plausible-sounding text. It might not yet do these things well, but it doesn’t have to: remember, C’s and D’s get degrees.
Definitively proving that a student used AI is almost always impossible, because the tells are relatively subtle and subjective, and professors do not generally feel comfortable handing a student an F because they have a gut feeling, nor are the administrators who actually run the schools at all inclined to let them since, if every student is cheating, and cheating gets you expelled, they would have to expel everyone, and the school would go bankrupt. There have been some efforts to deal with the problem by returning to oral examination or hand-written, in-class essays, but these are stop-gaps at best. There’s no real replacement for a term paper that takes a solid week of deep research and careful editing. Well, there wasn’t a replacement for that kind of effort, until it turned out that ChatGPT could spit out the entire term paper in seconds, with the student’s task then reduced to some light polish to change hallucinated references in the bibliography and remove phrases such as ‘As an AI, I am trained to...’ from the introduction.
Do not take my word for it. Read through this extensive excerpt from a recent issue of New York Magazine, shared by Iain McGilchrist
in his piece Quantity Kills, which describes the rampant ChatGPCheating that’s eating the cooling corpse of the contemporary campus. Professors are despondent, demoralized, and looking for the exits. There’s nothing more depressing than ‘teaching’ students whom you know full well are ignoring every word you say because they’re just going to prompt their way through whatever assignments you give them, and then having to grade that homework as though it was something other than the sludge spat out by linear algebra matrices. Worse still is that one of the only ways they can tell that something probably wasn’t written by a robot is when it’s genuinely, humanly bad: all the A’s end up going to machine prose, with the humans determined to plow through the material using their own underpowered neurons collecting the C’s and D’s (thereby by getting their degrees, but at the cost of pointless effort).
The class of 2026 will have spent their entire undergraduate career in an academic setting in which the use of AI is so ubiquitous that it is simply assumed that every student has outsourced every assignment they were given to the context window. Students assume this, professors assume this, and naturally, employers assume this. That last factor is going to be decisive. Since employers will assume that every graduate of the class of 2026 ChatGPCheated their way through school, the value of their degrees will be exactly nothing. Bachelor’s degrees – or Master’s degrees, or Doctorates of Philosophy – will be assumed to demonstrate nothing more than the ability to write prompts, which is not a complicated skill. University credentials will therefore be completely worthless on the job market. Thus, the class of 2026 will find that, while they may perhaps have enjoyed themselves, they are now in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, in exchange for which they got to have fun for a few years (albeit not as much as they might have had before the administrative war on social life that marks the modern campus), enjoy access to some nice campus facilities, and nothing much else. It certainly won’t help them get a job.
Tens of thousands of dollars of debt for a useless scrap of paper is a very bad deal.
It doesn’t help matters that the doctrine of disparate impact is coming under fire. The Griggs v Duke Power supreme court decision made it illegal for employers to simply use IQ tests to identify the best candidates, since these tests tended to advantage whites over blacks. Corporations therefore began using university degrees as the next best indicator of intellectual aptitude. With disparate impact on the executioner’s table, corporations can simply return to applying their own aptitude tests ... which will be necessary in any case due to AI making university degrees completely worthless as a measure of ability.
It’s worth noting that a great deal of the work that happens within managerial environments is already fake and gay. David Graeber’s bullshit jobs comprise a great deal of the professional activities of the white collar classes. These have been for some time now essentially sinecures for regime loyalists, much as professorial positions have become: it doesn’t so much matter that they don’t do anything real, as their role is really to enforce ideological compliance. If there’s one thing that might save the class of 2026, it’s this: that employers won’t actually care that they don’t know how to do anything, that their degrees are entirely fraudulent, because the jobs they’re hiring for are entirely fraudulent as well.
But here, too, AI rears its catastrophic head. A very great deal of that white collar administrative work can be automated. This is already happening. The cost savings to be had will probably outweigh the political utility of maintaining a deep payroll of useless functionaries, in the same way that the development of home appliances destroyed the market for house-servants. Particularly if, as seems likely for other reasons, the world is going to enter into a period of fiscal crisis and economic contraction.
Assuming that the bullshit jobs are themselves on the way out, and that employers will once again begin to prioritize actual knowledge, skill, and talent, young people finishing high school will look at the firewall of aggressive disinterest with which the class of 2026 is greeted, conclude that there is no point whatsoever in attending an institution of higher prompting, and the class of 2030 could therefore evaporate before it is even enrolled. It’s also likely, in this scenario, that many of the those enrolled in the classes of 2027 through 2029 will also read the model output on the wall and cut their losses.
Enrolment, by the way, is already down 15% from 2010 through 2021, having declined by about 1% a year due to the demographic changes wrought by the fertility decline. Enrolment dropped sharply over COVID due to student disgust with Zoom school, and rather than recovering when the schools reopened, continued declining from that reduced level due to the same demographic factors. Demographics alone are projected to lead to an enrolment cliff in 2026, exacerbated by a declining fraction of high school graduates deciding to go to college.
All of the elements for a an implosion in enrolment are already in place. AI is will just push the already teetering system over the edge. The result will be a tsunami of insolvency.
Liberal arts colleges with small endowments and no graduate research programs to speak of will be the first to the slaughter-house, since their only function is undergraduate credentialization, and that function is now impossible to perform.
Research schools might have a somewhat easier time of it ... but with the US federal government becoming much more tightfisted with research funding as part of what looks like a deliberate strategy to lay fiscal siege to a Blue America power centre, that source of revenue will also be much more limited. Many of those universities will wither away, as well.
Trump has been making ominous – or hopeful, depending on your position – sounds about confiscating the endowments of universities found to have violated the Civil Rights Act in their zeal to enforce DEI upon their students and employees. Note again the similarity with the monasteries: the universities are a rich prize, which is a dangerous thing to be when you are simultaneously obsolete, unsympathetic to the people, and hostile to the king.
The initial consequences of this are going to be very ugly.
Across much of Middle America, the only economic bright spots amongst the sea of rural blight are the college towns, whose pleasant, bucolic, walkable environs with their cute little main streets dotted by hipster cafes and gourmet grilled cheese sandwich gastropubs are propped up by the fiscal engine of the local university sluicing tuition fees and federal research grant money through the local service economy. Everywhere else you tend to find depopulated ghost towns full of boarded up buildings and fentanyl, the wreckage left by the great deindustrialization of the petrodollar era’s offshoring. When the universities go belly up, the college towns will die, succumbing to the same malaise that destroyed the factory towns.
Professors will find themselves unemployed and, with very few exceptions outside of STEM, unemployable. There is no organic market demand for ‘researchers’ specializing in queering the depictions of gendered masculinities in third century Roman lyric poetry. Such specialties are entirely a function of the captive market that universities, as the gatekeepers to good jobs, formerly enjoyed: you must agree with your professor to get a good enough grade to pass, so (since nothing real was being taught anyhow) professors have made something of a sport of making students agree with the most absurd things they can come up with. Many graduates were brain-fried by this indoctrination with insanity, but many others – probably most others – simply endured it as they pushed on to the promised good life. Without the universities to make their offerings mandatory, the army of ideologues with scholarly titles will find that there are very few who are willing to pay for their sermons on the open attention market. Many will no doubt try to reinvent themselves as public intellectuals on YouTube or TikTok or Substack or whatever, but very few will succeed.
As for administrators, already corporate America is finding that many such jobs can be handled reasonably well by AI already. Not, to be sure, perfectly, but often well enough, and unlike the kinds of midwits who tend to flock to middle management, AI is continually improving. It’s likely that, as universities close and a wave of suddenly unemployed mid-level admin hit the job market alongside a flood of unemployable alumni, they will find that there is far less demand for their professional services than existed even a few years before.
The dissolution of England’s monasteries may have been inevitable, but a great deal of baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Libraries were burned, and irreplaceable records were lost. “A great nombre of them whych purchased those supertycyous mansyons, resrved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes [outhouses], some to scoure candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and soapsellers.” The universities may not have produced much that is worth knowing for many years now, but their archives are extensive and priceless. We should ensure that we do not repeat the English crown’s mistake.
There is a narrow path that universities can take to survive this storm, but it is not wide enough to accommodate all of them, and it is completely incompatible with higher education in its current form.
That path is to become more like fitness centres.
People do not usually attend gyms because being fit is an economic necessity, but because of vanity: they want to look good. We are now generations into a largely automated industrial economy which has made it quite possible for the majority of us to live an entirely sedentary existence, which, it turns out, is accompanied by a host of health problems and distasteful aesthetic side-effects. No one likes a fatass. Since not being a fatass requires a certain degree of self-discipline, and moreover looks better than being a fatass, going to the gym has become a high-status activity. This was not the case a hundred years ago. No one ‘worked out’ in the year of our Lord 1900. Daily life was physically demanding enough that everyone was in shape by default.
Artificial Intelligence promises to rot our brains in the same way that automobiles and labour-saving appliances rotted our bodies. It will be the easiest thing in the world to let the AI do all of our thinking for us, and because we are by default a lazy species, most of us will do just that. This will very rapidly turn the brains of much of the population into overboiled instant ramen, capable of little more than doomscrolling and writing the occasional prompt. Grok, is this true?
The only possible way to keep our minds stay nimble and sharp is to deliberately engage in challenging intellectual pastimes, without the aid of machines ... or, at least, without using the machines in the wrong way: barbells and exercise bikes are also machines, but they are machines specifically designed to strengthen the body. Doing this requires self-discipline. You can’t force anyone to study, just as you can’t force anyone to work out. Since it requires self-discipline, and since the cognitive differences between the deep-fried masses and the self-selected amateur philosophers will be as immediately apparent as the difference in physique between the gym rat and the couch potato, study will become a high-status activity. But it will not be a high-status activity in the sense that it is mandatory to find a high-status job. It won’t be the credential that matters. It will be high-status because the activity itself is high status. ‘Going to school’ will be high-status because that is a thing high-status people do, just as they also go to the gym.
At intellectual fitness schools organized on this model, preventing cheating will of course be every bit as impossible as it is under the current model. But if you cheat, you miss the point, as you won’t get the cognitive benefits of deep study and contemplation. It would be like riding a motorcycle instead of a bicycle: you’ll get there faster but to no benefit to your cardiovascular endurance. Cheating won’t be so much of an issue because the majority of students will be those who choose to attend for the sake of the material they wish to learn, for the sake of the experience of learning itself. Others of course will attend just to be seen attending – high-status leisure activities always attract the status-hungry who care more for the status than the activity. Whatever: they’ll be a source of revenue, and might actually learn something along the way.
‘Graduation’ and the awarding of ‘degrees’ will probably be phased out entirely as both obsolete and beside the point. Rather than paying through the nose for a few years of drunken partying in a hermetically sealed theme park with a cheap piece of paper at the end as memento and participation trophy, such schools will simply offer monthly memberships, for as long or as short a period as students wish to renew them. It will be more like a private club in which topics of interest are debated, intellectual competition is encouraged, and experimentation is facilitated. Think a makerspace with a salon attached.
There is almost no point here in ‘courses’ as we usually think of them, or in ‘grading’, because personalized AI tutors can perform all of these functions. An LLM is essentially a talking library that has read every encyclopedia, novel, monograph, philosophical tract, poem, holy book, essay, scientific journal article, legal document, and op-ed piece ever written in any language back to beginning of recorded history, and which is happy to discuss that vast body of accumulated human knowledge at whichever level of sophistication the user is capable of, drawing whatever connections within it the user is interested in, in whichever language, idiom, and style the user finds most congenial, and doing so with inexhaustible patience. There are already elementary schools, such as the private Alpha School chain in Texas, using AI to provide children with personalized instruction. The results are apparently excellent: students are able to learn the entire Common Core curriculum in two hours a day (and yes I know Common Core is terrible, but that is not the point), with the rest of their time available for whatever projects and activities their adult supervisors – referred to as ‘guides’ rather than ‘teachers’ – can come up with. The students are learning more quickly and efficiently, with more time for play, with the result that learning itself becomes a form of play rather than a hateful chore. Every kid – and every adult – is about to have the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age.
Schools as places of instructing and evaluation have become obsolete. Even something like Alpha is a transitional form: there’s no particular reason that AI tutors must be used during school hours, and therefore no reason that school hours can’t be devoted entirely to open, free-form, creative exploration in which students apply the knowledge and skills they’ve learned on their own time as they pursue whatever projects they please together with their friends.
Professors, in this model, become more like personal trainers. Their job will be to help students learn to learn, to engage in Socratic dialogues with them, to guide them through material, to help them think of questions or directions of inquiry that they might not have thought of on their own ... and which the professors themselves might not think of until they engage with the student. This is more or less the Oxbridge tutorial model used at Oxford: the tutor doesn’t lecture the students, he suggests reading material for them, and then discusses it with them in depth in order to teach them how to deepen their own understanding on their own. That’s probably the only model that makes any sort of sense in a world with AI tutors ... though even here, the AI can do much of the work.
Colleges will return to their original function as communities of scholars, which is to say: places of leisure devoted to the life of the mind. The entire point will be to spend time in conversation with other interesting, intelligent, knowledgeable, curious people, not so much with any final goal in mind, not to ‘pass a test’ or ‘get a good grade’ or ‘submit a paper to a peer-reviewed journal’, but simply because it is fun. Insofar as one advances within such a system, it will necessarily be informally. One’s rise will be driven by the opinions of one’s peers, who might not be able to prove that you’ve been using AI to pretend you’re more knowledgeable than you are, but if they widely suspect that this is so, you won’t get far in their esteem. With no grade structure, no degree structure, no quantification at all, all that will remain is the direct evidence of a given person’s intellectual acumen and scholarly mastery, as revealed through direct personal interaction. Students will simply be junior scholars, who will not chase grades, but cultivate reputation.
This very informality, this vagueness, this focus on improvement of the mind for the sake of it, will serve as an insurance against cheating. Why do students cheat? Because they’re told to write essays on topics they don’t care about, for no other reason than that they must jump through a series of hoops like sad little circus animals before they get their treats at the end. In this model there’s no point to any of that. Intellectual creation or knowledge production will be engaged in because you want to, and status gained – or not – by sharing it with others. If others find your ‘work’, although that is not the right word, impressive, your reputation will be enhanced. You will be seen as intelligent, not because you got an A+ on the final exam, but because you did something that other smart people agree is impressive. Which is really a return to how things were done until a hundred years ago or so, before the factory model of education was imposed everywhere.
This model is not one that can be used to salvage the bulk of the present university system, which is entirely unsalvageable. The reason it has become so hypertrophied is the same reason that it has become so corrupt and insincere: because young people must attend, the vast majority of those who attend are doing so without any genuine interest in the subjects they are supposedly learning. Without that economic compulsion, attendance will certainly collapse, and with it the finances of the system as a whole. What will emerge from the wreckage will be much smaller, much more modest ... but it will also be purer, more honest, more earnest. Today’s monasteries have none of the wealth or power they enjoyed in their heyday, but the result is that those who enrol in monastic life are those who want to be there, and they execute their vows and their faith, presumably, with greater seriousness and joy, in an environment relatively free of those who are there for all the wrong reasons.
Thank you for taking the time out of your busy life to read this. With so much stimuli competing for your attention, it means a great deal to me that you judged this to be worthy of paying some attention to. I hope you found it worthwhile.
My greatest thanks, as always, is reserved for my patrons, whose munificence makes it possible for me to spend my days writing for all of you. Of course, this essay, as everything I write, is available to everyone, free of charge. Supporters receive nothing more than the moral satisfaction of knowing that their generosity in supporting my writing is what makes it available for everyone, and this only sharpens my own appreciation.
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By the late middle ages monasteries were spectacularly wealthy. They were immune from taxation, and possessed vast land holdings thanks to generous donations made over the centuries by nobles looking to assure themselves a comfortable place in the afterlife. Many of them performed economic functions, such as brewing beer or providing financial services; some performed charitable functions, distributing alms to the poor or operating hospitals; some performed spiritual functions, such as hosting holy relics or maintaining elaborate ritual vigils to intercede with God on behalf of the people. But their primary utility, from the perspective of the wider society, was as repositories, preservers, and disseminators of knowledge. Their scriptoria ensured that books were copied from one generation to the next, preventing knowledge from being lost. The monastic focus was naturally religious, but their monopoly on literacy and information reproduction meant that if you needed a secular work to be replicated for wider distribution, the monastery was the only place to go.
Emboldened by the cultural ferment of the Reformation, in 1534 the British Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, recognizing King Henry VIII as the head of the new Church of England following his break with Rome the year before on account of Pope Clement VII’s refusal to annual his marriage to Catherine of Aragorn. Immediately following this, the king dispatched his chief minister Thomas Cromwell (a distant ancestor of the Lord Protector) to visit England’s monasteries in order to gently remind them of their duty to submit to and obey their new religious authority, and more importantly, to inventory their finances. The monasteries of England and Wales held a quarter of the arable land, and their interiors were lavishly appointed with silver and gold; an English proverb held that if the Abbot of Glastonbury were to wed the Abbess of Shafetsbury, their heir would be richer than the king. This would of course have required both Abbot and Abbess to flout their vows of chastity, and perhaps this proverb was also a subtle dig at the widespread perception that monastic orders held their vows quite lightly. Thus, Cromwell’s delegates were also directed to investigate the moral state of the monasteries, examining the prevalence of superstitious practices such as the veneration of relics, the piety with which their monastic vows were being kept, and searching for evidence of dissolute sexual behaviour.
Cromwell’s visitations were of course a scouting expedition. In 1535, with Crowmell’s reports providing both a tally of monastic assets and a catalogue of monastic sins, the king had parliament pass the First Suppression Act. This dissolved over 400 lesser houses with incomes below an arbitrary £200 threshold. The holdings of these houses, both the lands endowed to them and the treasures within, were sold off. The crown took much of this wealth for itself, but provisions were made to pension off those monks willing to renounce their religious orders. Pensioning the monks was a clever move in that it both made the crown look reasonable and charitable, while also helping to defuse opposition from within the monasteries themselves. Pensions notwithstanding, this first round of dissolution led to a wave of popular discontent, particularly amongst the clergy, who began agitating against the king. A series of riots culminated with the Pilgrimage of Grace sweeping across the north of England in 1536 and 1537, as conservative elements re-occupied religious houses, re-established Catholic rites, and presented the king with an enumerated list of demands, which Henry was entirely uninterested in. The uprising was violently put down, and its leaders convicted of treason and executed. Those religious houses whose leaders had participated in the rebellion had their lands and treasure confiscated.
There is some historical debate over whether King Henry VIII intended the complete dissolution of the monasteries from beginning, or whether his initial desire was merely to reform them. In any case, these disturbances provided him with exactly the excuse he needed to pass the Second Suppression Act in 1539, by which time England’s first defender of the faith had already been excommunicated. This act empowered the crown to dissolve the remaining, larger monasteries, as before confiscating and selling off their land, and pensioning off, incorporating into the new Church of England, or executing the monks, depending on whether the monks chose to abandon their religious vows, cooperate with the new order, or fight.
It struck many at the time as an unthinkable outrage, but in retrospect dissolving the monasteries was almost the most obvious move that Henry VIII could make. They had made themselves his political enemies, the domestic allies of his adversaries abroad: thus, by dissolving them, he crushed a hostile power centre. They were fantastically wealthy: by plundering them, their wealth became his. They had, over the centuries, allowed their wealth and power to lead them towards luxury and corruption: humanist and Reformation critiques of their laxity, license, and loose morals abounded, as Henry has no doubt known quite well when he tasked Cromwell to catalogue their excesses. The monasteries were hostile, rich, and unsympathetic, and therefore a vulnerable and attractive target for liquidation, drawing Henry’s attention with the same inevitability that Lindisfarne attracted that of his viking (by way of Norman) ancestors.
Worse, however, was that the monasteries had become obsolete.
Almost exactly a hundred years before the closure of England’s last monastery, Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press, setting off a chain of events that would culminate, over the following century, with Martian Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to a church door, the Protestant Reformation’s explosion of ungovernable sects, and the dissolution of the monasteries. Before Gutenberg’s press the Church had a complete monopoly on information. Every book in existence was laboriously hand-copied by monks scribbling away by candlelight in the scriptoria, while literacy was largely confined to the clergy. The printing press meant that the ecclesiastical hierarchy could no longer gatekeep information. The price of books dropped, making it possible for ordinary people to obtain their own bibles, printed in the vernacular rather than Latin, which made it worth their while to learn to read, so that they could read and interpret the Bible for themselves.
Now that the world had the printing press, the monasteries’ primary reason for existence – the core justification for both their prestige and their accumulated wealth – no longer applied. They had outlived their usefulness, making them nothing more than an irritating thorn in the king’s side and a tempting concentration of loot. Henry VIII lost nothing whatsoever by dissolving them, and gained a great deal.
The English Dissolution of the Monasteries is particularly dramatic due to its scale, speed, and the systematic fashion in which it was carried out, but monastic closures were not confined to Britain. During the same period monasteries were being closed across Protestant Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, with kings, princes, and town councils confiscating their holdings in order to put them towards better secular use. While monasteries escaped closure in Catholic countries, they nevertheless steadily declined in influence over the centuries following the printing press. Once absolutely central to Europe’s cultural life, today only a relative handful of monasteries remain, as quaint spiritual retreats and tourist attractions.
Our own university system is on the cusp of a similar collapse. This may seem outrageous, given the size, wealth, and massive cultural importance of universities, but at the dawn of the 16th century, the suggestion that monasteries would be dismantled across Europe within a generation would have struck everyone – even their opponents – as absurd.
The Class of 2026
The rot in academia is already proverbial. Scholarly careerism, declining curricular standards, the replication crisis, a demented ideological monoculture, administrative bloat ... a steady accumulation of chronic cultural entropy has built up inside the organizational tissue of the academy, rendering universities less effective, less trustworthy, less affordable, and less useful than ever before in history. We see a parallel here with the moral laxity of 16th century monastic life, where religious vows were more theoretical than daily realities for many monks. Does anyone truly think that Harvard professors take Veritas at all seriously?At the same time, universities have become engorged on tuition fees, research grants, and endowments, providing an easy and luxurious life for armies of well-paid and under-worked administrators, as well as for those professors who are able to play the social games necessary to climb the greased pole of academic promotion. Everyone knows that academia is in a bubble, and as with any bubble, correction is inevitable, and the longer correction is postponed by the thicket of interlocking entrenched interests that have dug themselves into the system, the uglier that correction was always going to be.
Just as the printing press rendered the monastic scriptoria entirely redundant, the Internet has placed universities under increasing threat of obsolescence. Libraries and academic publishing have already been rendered useless by preprint servers. It is no longer, strictly speaking, necessary to attend a university to learn things: the Internet has every tool an autodidact could desire, and insofar as it doesn’t – for instance, university presses and private journals charging outrageous fees for their books and papers – this is due to the academy jealously guarding its treasures with intellectual property law rather than any limitation of the technology. One can easily make the argument that academia has become an obstacle, rather than an organ, of information dissemination.
Still, universities have so far managed to hold on to their relevance due to their lock on credentialization: no one really cares how many How-To videos you watched at YouTube U, because – in theory – a university degree means that there was some level of human verification that you actually mastered the material you studied.
Large Language Models, however, are delivering the killing blow. Just as the printing press collapsed the cost of reproducing text, AI has collapsed the cost of producing texts. This is actually worse news for universities than Gutenberg was the monasteries: movable type made scriptoria unnecessary, but LLMs haven’t only made universities obsolete, they’ve made it impossible for universities to fulfil their function.
Universities rely on undergraduate tuition fees for a major part of their income. Large research schools derive a significant fraction from research grants, and the more prestigious institutions often receive substantial private donations, but for the majority of schools it is the fee-paying undergraduate that pays the bills. This is already a problem, because enrolment is already declining, partly for demographic reasons (the birth rate is low), and partly because academia has been increasingly coded as women’s work, leading to young men staying away.
In theory, undergraduate students are paying for an ‘education’. They are gaining essential professional skills that will make them employable in well-remunerated white collar professions, or they are broadening their minds with a liberal arts education that provides them with the soft skills – critical thinking, the ability to compose and parse complex texts, a depth of historical and philosophical understanding of intricate social and political issues – that prepare them for careers in elite socioeconomic strata.
Everyone, however, has long since understood that this narrative of ‘education’ is a barely-plausible polite fiction, like those little scraps of fabric exotic dancers wear on their nipples so everyone can pretend they aren’t showing their boobs. Students know it’s a lie, professors know it’s a lie, administrators know it’s a lie, and employers certainly know it’s a lie. What students are actually paying for is not an education, but a credential: they could not possibly care less about the ‘education’ they’re receiving, so long as they receive a piece of paper at the end of their four years which they can take to an employer as evidence that they are not cognitively handicapped, and are therefore in possession of the minimal level of self-discipline and intelligence required to handle routine tasks at the entry-level end of the org chart. Thus the venerable proverb among students that “C’s and D’s get degrees”. It doesn’t matter if you did well: employers don’t generally care about your GPA. All that matters is that you do the minimal possible level of work to squeak through. As a general rule, your time as a student is better spent grinding away in the library as little as possible while enjoying yourself to the maximum extent that you can in order to develop social networks you can draw upon later.
Until recently, graduate school ensured that there was still some vestigial motivation for genuine intellectual engagement. Corporate America might not care about your transcript, but if you wanted an advanced degree, graduate schools most certainly did. Those students with greater academic ambitions than a Bachelor’s degree could therefore generally be relied on to actually apply themselves, thereby making the professoriate’s efforts delivering lectures, preparing homework assignments, and grading exams somewhat less of a pantomime. DEI, however, was already eating its way through even this. As graduate school admission became more about protected identities and less about intellectual mastery, and as graduate programs were themselves rendered easier in order to improve retention of underqualified diversity admits, it started to become less important to study hard even if one wanted to enter grad school.
To the point. In 2022, ChatGPT became available. Almost overnight undergraduate students began using it to write their essays for them. Its abuse has now become essentially ubiquitous, and not only for essays: ChatGPT can write code or solve mathematical problems just as easily as it can generate reams of plausible-sounding text. It might not yet do these things well, but it doesn’t have to: remember, C’s and D’s get degrees.
Definitively proving that a student used AI is almost always impossible, because the tells are relatively subtle and subjective, and professors do not generally feel comfortable handing a student an F because they have a gut feeling, nor are the administrators who actually run the schools at all inclined to let them since, if every student is cheating, and cheating gets you expelled, they would have to expel everyone, and the school would go bankrupt. There have been some efforts to deal with the problem by returning to oral examination or hand-written, in-class essays, but these are stop-gaps at best. There’s no real replacement for a term paper that takes a solid week of deep research and careful editing. Well, there wasn’t a replacement for that kind of effort, until it turned out that ChatGPT could spit out the entire term paper in seconds, with the student’s task then reduced to some light polish to change hallucinated references in the bibliography and remove phrases such as ‘As an AI, I am trained to...’ from the introduction.
Do not take my word for it. Read through this extensive excerpt from a recent issue of New York Magazine, shared by Iain McGilchrist
in his piece Quantity Kills, which describes the rampant ChatGPCheating that’s eating the cooling corpse of the contemporary campus. Professors are despondent, demoralized, and looking for the exits. There’s nothing more depressing than ‘teaching’ students whom you know full well are ignoring every word you say because they’re just going to prompt their way through whatever assignments you give them, and then having to grade that homework as though it was something other than the sludge spat out by linear algebra matrices. Worse still is that one of the only ways they can tell that something probably wasn’t written by a robot is when it’s genuinely, humanly bad: all the A’s end up going to machine prose, with the humans determined to plow through the material using their own underpowered neurons collecting the C’s and D’s (thereby by getting their degrees, but at the cost of pointless effort).
The class of 2026 will have spent their entire undergraduate career in an academic setting in which the use of AI is so ubiquitous that it is simply assumed that every student has outsourced every assignment they were given to the context window. Students assume this, professors assume this, and naturally, employers assume this. That last factor is going to be decisive. Since employers will assume that every graduate of the class of 2026 ChatGPCheated their way through school, the value of their degrees will be exactly nothing. Bachelor’s degrees – or Master’s degrees, or Doctorates of Philosophy – will be assumed to demonstrate nothing more than the ability to write prompts, which is not a complicated skill. University credentials will therefore be completely worthless on the job market. Thus, the class of 2026 will find that, while they may perhaps have enjoyed themselves, they are now in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, in exchange for which they got to have fun for a few years (albeit not as much as they might have had before the administrative war on social life that marks the modern campus), enjoy access to some nice campus facilities, and nothing much else. It certainly won’t help them get a job.
Tens of thousands of dollars of debt for a useless scrap of paper is a very bad deal.
It doesn’t help matters that the doctrine of disparate impact is coming under fire. The Griggs v Duke Power supreme court decision made it illegal for employers to simply use IQ tests to identify the best candidates, since these tests tended to advantage whites over blacks. Corporations therefore began using university degrees as the next best indicator of intellectual aptitude. With disparate impact on the executioner’s table, corporations can simply return to applying their own aptitude tests ... which will be necessary in any case due to AI making university degrees completely worthless as a measure of ability.
It’s worth noting that a great deal of the work that happens within managerial environments is already fake and gay. David Graeber’s bullshit jobs comprise a great deal of the professional activities of the white collar classes. These have been for some time now essentially sinecures for regime loyalists, much as professorial positions have become: it doesn’t so much matter that they don’t do anything real, as their role is really to enforce ideological compliance. If there’s one thing that might save the class of 2026, it’s this: that employers won’t actually care that they don’t know how to do anything, that their degrees are entirely fraudulent, because the jobs they’re hiring for are entirely fraudulent as well.
But here, too, AI rears its catastrophic head. A very great deal of that white collar administrative work can be automated. This is already happening. The cost savings to be had will probably outweigh the political utility of maintaining a deep payroll of useless functionaries, in the same way that the development of home appliances destroyed the market for house-servants. Particularly if, as seems likely for other reasons, the world is going to enter into a period of fiscal crisis and economic contraction.
Assuming that the bullshit jobs are themselves on the way out, and that employers will once again begin to prioritize actual knowledge, skill, and talent, young people finishing high school will look at the firewall of aggressive disinterest with which the class of 2026 is greeted, conclude that there is no point whatsoever in attending an institution of higher prompting, and the class of 2030 could therefore evaporate before it is even enrolled. It’s also likely, in this scenario, that many of the those enrolled in the classes of 2027 through 2029 will also read the model output on the wall and cut their losses.
Enrolment, by the way, is already down 15% from 2010 through 2021, having declined by about 1% a year due to the demographic changes wrought by the fertility decline. Enrolment dropped sharply over COVID due to student disgust with Zoom school, and rather than recovering when the schools reopened, continued declining from that reduced level due to the same demographic factors. Demographics alone are projected to lead to an enrolment cliff in 2026, exacerbated by a declining fraction of high school graduates deciding to go to college.
All of the elements for a an implosion in enrolment are already in place. AI is will just push the already teetering system over the edge. The result will be a tsunami of insolvency.
Liberal arts colleges with small endowments and no graduate research programs to speak of will be the first to the slaughter-house, since their only function is undergraduate credentialization, and that function is now impossible to perform.
Research schools might have a somewhat easier time of it ... but with the US federal government becoming much more tightfisted with research funding as part of what looks like a deliberate strategy to lay fiscal siege to a Blue America power centre, that source of revenue will also be much more limited. Many of those universities will wither away, as well.
Trump has been making ominous – or hopeful, depending on your position – sounds about confiscating the endowments of universities found to have violated the Civil Rights Act in their zeal to enforce DEI upon their students and employees. Note again the similarity with the monasteries: the universities are a rich prize, which is a dangerous thing to be when you are simultaneously obsolete, unsympathetic to the people, and hostile to the king.
The initial consequences of this are going to be very ugly.
Across much of Middle America, the only economic bright spots amongst the sea of rural blight are the college towns, whose pleasant, bucolic, walkable environs with their cute little main streets dotted by hipster cafes and gourmet grilled cheese sandwich gastropubs are propped up by the fiscal engine of the local university sluicing tuition fees and federal research grant money through the local service economy. Everywhere else you tend to find depopulated ghost towns full of boarded up buildings and fentanyl, the wreckage left by the great deindustrialization of the petrodollar era’s offshoring. When the universities go belly up, the college towns will die, succumbing to the same malaise that destroyed the factory towns.
Professors will find themselves unemployed and, with very few exceptions outside of STEM, unemployable. There is no organic market demand for ‘researchers’ specializing in queering the depictions of gendered masculinities in third century Roman lyric poetry. Such specialties are entirely a function of the captive market that universities, as the gatekeepers to good jobs, formerly enjoyed: you must agree with your professor to get a good enough grade to pass, so (since nothing real was being taught anyhow) professors have made something of a sport of making students agree with the most absurd things they can come up with. Many graduates were brain-fried by this indoctrination with insanity, but many others – probably most others – simply endured it as they pushed on to the promised good life. Without the universities to make their offerings mandatory, the army of ideologues with scholarly titles will find that there are very few who are willing to pay for their sermons on the open attention market. Many will no doubt try to reinvent themselves as public intellectuals on YouTube or TikTok or Substack or whatever, but very few will succeed.
As for administrators, already corporate America is finding that many such jobs can be handled reasonably well by AI already. Not, to be sure, perfectly, but often well enough, and unlike the kinds of midwits who tend to flock to middle management, AI is continually improving. It’s likely that, as universities close and a wave of suddenly unemployed mid-level admin hit the job market alongside a flood of unemployable alumni, they will find that there is far less demand for their professional services than existed even a few years before.
The dissolution of England’s monasteries may have been inevitable, but a great deal of baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Libraries were burned, and irreplaceable records were lost. “A great nombre of them whych purchased those supertycyous mansyons, resrved of those lybrarye bokes, some to serve theyr jakes [outhouses], some to scoure candelstyckes, and some to rubbe their bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and soapsellers.” The universities may not have produced much that is worth knowing for many years now, but their archives are extensive and priceless. We should ensure that we do not repeat the English crown’s mistake.
There is a narrow path that universities can take to survive this storm, but it is not wide enough to accommodate all of them, and it is completely incompatible with higher education in its current form.
That path is to become more like fitness centres.
Love and Leisure
The etymological root of ‘scholar’ derives from the Greek skholē or ‘leisure’. Scholarship is meant to be something that one does in one’s spare time, for fun, as an amateur – which derives from the Latin amator, or ‘lover’. An amateur scholar is literally one who learns something in their spare time, as a leisure activity, for no other reason than the love of it. Nothing could be further from the joyless professionalization of the modern academy, but a return to this is the only way that academia can survive.People do not usually attend gyms because being fit is an economic necessity, but because of vanity: they want to look good. We are now generations into a largely automated industrial economy which has made it quite possible for the majority of us to live an entirely sedentary existence, which, it turns out, is accompanied by a host of health problems and distasteful aesthetic side-effects. No one likes a fatass. Since not being a fatass requires a certain degree of self-discipline, and moreover looks better than being a fatass, going to the gym has become a high-status activity. This was not the case a hundred years ago. No one ‘worked out’ in the year of our Lord 1900. Daily life was physically demanding enough that everyone was in shape by default.
Artificial Intelligence promises to rot our brains in the same way that automobiles and labour-saving appliances rotted our bodies. It will be the easiest thing in the world to let the AI do all of our thinking for us, and because we are by default a lazy species, most of us will do just that. This will very rapidly turn the brains of much of the population into overboiled instant ramen, capable of little more than doomscrolling and writing the occasional prompt. Grok, is this true?
The only possible way to keep our minds stay nimble and sharp is to deliberately engage in challenging intellectual pastimes, without the aid of machines ... or, at least, without using the machines in the wrong way: barbells and exercise bikes are also machines, but they are machines specifically designed to strengthen the body. Doing this requires self-discipline. You can’t force anyone to study, just as you can’t force anyone to work out. Since it requires self-discipline, and since the cognitive differences between the deep-fried masses and the self-selected amateur philosophers will be as immediately apparent as the difference in physique between the gym rat and the couch potato, study will become a high-status activity. But it will not be a high-status activity in the sense that it is mandatory to find a high-status job. It won’t be the credential that matters. It will be high-status because the activity itself is high status. ‘Going to school’ will be high-status because that is a thing high-status people do, just as they also go to the gym.
At intellectual fitness schools organized on this model, preventing cheating will of course be every bit as impossible as it is under the current model. But if you cheat, you miss the point, as you won’t get the cognitive benefits of deep study and contemplation. It would be like riding a motorcycle instead of a bicycle: you’ll get there faster but to no benefit to your cardiovascular endurance. Cheating won’t be so much of an issue because the majority of students will be those who choose to attend for the sake of the material they wish to learn, for the sake of the experience of learning itself. Others of course will attend just to be seen attending – high-status leisure activities always attract the status-hungry who care more for the status than the activity. Whatever: they’ll be a source of revenue, and might actually learn something along the way.
‘Graduation’ and the awarding of ‘degrees’ will probably be phased out entirely as both obsolete and beside the point. Rather than paying through the nose for a few years of drunken partying in a hermetically sealed theme park with a cheap piece of paper at the end as memento and participation trophy, such schools will simply offer monthly memberships, for as long or as short a period as students wish to renew them. It will be more like a private club in which topics of interest are debated, intellectual competition is encouraged, and experimentation is facilitated. Think a makerspace with a salon attached.
There is almost no point here in ‘courses’ as we usually think of them, or in ‘grading’, because personalized AI tutors can perform all of these functions. An LLM is essentially a talking library that has read every encyclopedia, novel, monograph, philosophical tract, poem, holy book, essay, scientific journal article, legal document, and op-ed piece ever written in any language back to beginning of recorded history, and which is happy to discuss that vast body of accumulated human knowledge at whichever level of sophistication the user is capable of, drawing whatever connections within it the user is interested in, in whichever language, idiom, and style the user finds most congenial, and doing so with inexhaustible patience. There are already elementary schools, such as the private Alpha School chain in Texas, using AI to provide children with personalized instruction. The results are apparently excellent: students are able to learn the entire Common Core curriculum in two hours a day (and yes I know Common Core is terrible, but that is not the point), with the rest of their time available for whatever projects and activities their adult supervisors – referred to as ‘guides’ rather than ‘teachers’ – can come up with. The students are learning more quickly and efficiently, with more time for play, with the result that learning itself becomes a form of play rather than a hateful chore. Every kid – and every adult – is about to have the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age.
Schools as places of instructing and evaluation have become obsolete. Even something like Alpha is a transitional form: there’s no particular reason that AI tutors must be used during school hours, and therefore no reason that school hours can’t be devoted entirely to open, free-form, creative exploration in which students apply the knowledge and skills they’ve learned on their own time as they pursue whatever projects they please together with their friends.
Professors, in this model, become more like personal trainers. Their job will be to help students learn to learn, to engage in Socratic dialogues with them, to guide them through material, to help them think of questions or directions of inquiry that they might not have thought of on their own ... and which the professors themselves might not think of until they engage with the student. This is more or less the Oxbridge tutorial model used at Oxford: the tutor doesn’t lecture the students, he suggests reading material for them, and then discusses it with them in depth in order to teach them how to deepen their own understanding on their own. That’s probably the only model that makes any sort of sense in a world with AI tutors ... though even here, the AI can do much of the work.
Colleges will return to their original function as communities of scholars, which is to say: places of leisure devoted to the life of the mind. The entire point will be to spend time in conversation with other interesting, intelligent, knowledgeable, curious people, not so much with any final goal in mind, not to ‘pass a test’ or ‘get a good grade’ or ‘submit a paper to a peer-reviewed journal’, but simply because it is fun. Insofar as one advances within such a system, it will necessarily be informally. One’s rise will be driven by the opinions of one’s peers, who might not be able to prove that you’ve been using AI to pretend you’re more knowledgeable than you are, but if they widely suspect that this is so, you won’t get far in their esteem. With no grade structure, no degree structure, no quantification at all, all that will remain is the direct evidence of a given person’s intellectual acumen and scholarly mastery, as revealed through direct personal interaction. Students will simply be junior scholars, who will not chase grades, but cultivate reputation.
This very informality, this vagueness, this focus on improvement of the mind for the sake of it, will serve as an insurance against cheating. Why do students cheat? Because they’re told to write essays on topics they don’t care about, for no other reason than that they must jump through a series of hoops like sad little circus animals before they get their treats at the end. In this model there’s no point to any of that. Intellectual creation or knowledge production will be engaged in because you want to, and status gained – or not – by sharing it with others. If others find your ‘work’, although that is not the right word, impressive, your reputation will be enhanced. You will be seen as intelligent, not because you got an A+ on the final exam, but because you did something that other smart people agree is impressive. Which is really a return to how things were done until a hundred years ago or so, before the factory model of education was imposed everywhere.
This model is not one that can be used to salvage the bulk of the present university system, which is entirely unsalvageable. The reason it has become so hypertrophied is the same reason that it has become so corrupt and insincere: because young people must attend, the vast majority of those who attend are doing so without any genuine interest in the subjects they are supposedly learning. Without that economic compulsion, attendance will certainly collapse, and with it the finances of the system as a whole. What will emerge from the wreckage will be much smaller, much more modest ... but it will also be purer, more honest, more earnest. Today’s monasteries have none of the wealth or power they enjoyed in their heyday, but the result is that those who enrol in monastic life are those who want to be there, and they execute their vows and their faith, presumably, with greater seriousness and joy, in an environment relatively free of those who are there for all the wrong reasons.
Thank you for taking the time out of your busy life to read this. With so much stimuli competing for your attention, it means a great deal to me that you judged this to be worthy of paying some attention to. I hope you found it worthwhile.
My greatest thanks, as always, is reserved for my patrons, whose munificence makes it possible for me to spend my days writing for all of you. Of course, this essay, as everything I write, is available to everyone, free of charge. Supporters receive nothing more than the moral satisfaction of knowing that their generosity in supporting my writing is what makes it available for everyone, and this only sharpens my own appreciation.
