The diminishing status of science and the academy

Jessica Hullman, What stories should we tell about science now? Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, August 28, 2026.

The opening paragraphs:

This is Jessica. Like many academics, I am concerned about what sort of new steady state U.S. universities will find themselves in after the dust settles on recent transitions. Namely, the last few years have brought funding cuts, targeted visa policy, reduced demand for grad degrees, and a general brain drain to industry (particularly noticeable in AI and computer science). It’s disorienting to think that academia has already peaked, and that the prestige ranking of the R1 faculty job over the top industry research positions (at least in computer science) might be inverting. But things feel very different than they did even a year ago. The reality of there being less money available to pay for basic aspects of research really started to hit me in the last six months. Post-covid, working on campus became less lively, but now it also feels like our collective attention is anxiously focused on Silicon Valley or Washington D.C. We hold faculty meetings where we discuss things like, Is there any way we can help local faculty members who were laid off from tenure track jobs? How will we ensure we can fund all of our own PhDs, given that TA quotas stay fixed but faculty are running out of funding runway?

To some, this is an overdue rebalancing. Nate Silver, for example, calls getting a PhD a “much worse value proposition than 20 years ago”, and predicts that elite higher ed will become “~50% less relevant in the new steady state,” which is in his eyes a good recalibration.

But it’s worth reflecting on what is lost exactly, if this dwindling of minds and resources continues. How should we think about the value of what universities provide over industry, like intellectual autonomy, or training on how to think scientifically? As a professor, I could make a list of the things that have kept me in academia–being free to work on the problems I find most important, the diversity of topics I can work on at any given time, grad students who care about doing deep work, having time to think about the best solution to a problem. But at an aggregate level, it’s less clear what the equation is.

The article then goes on to sketch out a number of specific issues. The first: “In search of the mysterious fruits of basic science.” Thus:

I’ve been reading the work of philosopher Heather Douglas, who has traced and critiqued the basic versus applied science distinction, the linear model as justification, and the idea of scientific freedom as limited social responsibility (see, e.g., here and here, or her book on the value-free ideal). Popularized by Vannevar Bush after WWII, in a report prepared for President Roosevelt, basic science is a reframing of pure science, presented as “scientific capital,” providing the principles and conceptions to power new products and processes years into the future. Bush called for deliberate policy to guard against the otherwise inevitable scenario where applied science drives out the pure. One of the eventual outcomes of his report was the creation of the NSF.

But despite the pragmatic nature of basic science espoused by Bush, as a derivation of pure science, it is hard to separate from less tangible values. One is that scientific understanding is a good outside of practical application, at both the individual and societal level. The earliest advocates of pure science associated it with being closer to God. Post-Enlightenment, this view gave way to a more secular superiority complex, which implied the strong character of the pure scientist, who chose to eschew wealth. “The highest occupation of mankind”, Henry Rowland called it in his Gilded Age era essay, “A Plea for Pure Science,” which bemoaned the vulgarity of attributing scientific greatness to the applied scientist rather than the pure.

One specific case: AI:

If we take our intuitions from the linear model, we might protest that innovation will suffer if universities’ research purposes are deprioritized. The post WWII science-industrial complex expanded the presence of basic research in industry, but studies suggest that the knowledge generating role of corporate R&D has been on the decline for years. To the extent that basic research is the supplier of downstream applications, it would seem we need universities more than ever.

But the distinction between basic and applied science that’s become synonymous with how we envision science has never been airtight. Critics questioned how an institution could be built around a distinction that seemed to amount to little more than a difference in intention, since applied research sometimes produced important new general knowledge, and pure science contributions sometimes had direct applicability.

AI research is a recent example. Not only is serious money being made without necessarily requiring advanced degrees, research positions do not require PhDs. By some accounts, passing 30 years old puts one in the older demographic of researchers at frontier AI companies. Yet much of the visible innovation in frontier model development has been heavily concentrated in industry labs, including transformer models, scaling laws, and AlphaFold.

Of course, AI owes much to academia. The amazing thing about deep learning and LLMs, to anyone who was paying attention to NLP before these developments, is that after many years of AI research contributing interesting questions but lackluster results, the technology finally seemed to work. Would we have had the foundations for deep learning if perceptrons had not been stubbornly pursued by academics like Frank Rosenblatt at Cornell early on, picked up again in the 1980s by Rumelhart and McClelland’s Parallel Distributed Processing group, despite multiple periods during which consensus said connectionist approaches were unlikely to pay off?

Other issues taken up: “Indulgence, autonomy, and social responsibility,” and “The problem with defining progress as prediction and control.” There’s much more at the link, including fairly extensive commentary.

Colleges are already trade schools

Jessica Grose, Even Elite Colleges Have Become Trade Schools, NYTimes, Aug. 12, 2026.

As the new school year begins, it’s worth pointing out how students and administrators treat colleges — even elite universities — as a catapult to a “good job” above all else.

Which is to say: Colleges are already trade schools.

The top two majors for students at four-year institutions as of 2022 are business and health professions. In June, the Department of Education issued its “earnings accountability” rule, which states that undergraduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a high school diploma, and graduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a college diploma, or they risk losing access to federal loans.

Nathan Heller, in a 2023 New Yorker article about the death of the liberal arts major, offered a history of the competing aims of the American university. In the 1960s, our institutions of higher ed were described by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, as a multiversity that “incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone.” The pursuit of knowledge and beauty, scientific research, and pre-professional studies were all bound together, even if it was never a harmonious union.

That fractious union was breaking apart long before the second Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the federal funding of research across disciplines. But the effort to put higher education in its place started much earlier. Over the past 30 years, there has been a concerted effort by mostly conservative politicians to diminish trust in the value of college, and to provide less federal funding for it. They paint America’s colleges and universities as foolish, progressive hotbeds of ethnic studies departments where impressionable young people get expensive Marxist indoctrination rather than marketable, useful skills.

There's more at the link.

NYTimes Opinion: Don't Stress about AI; Don't Bring Back the Tests; A New Generation of Creatives

Three from The New York Times, June 22, 2026.

Robert J. Shiller, We Have to Stop Freaking Out About A.I.

Like many others, I believe A.I. could lower employment. But unlike most, I don’t necessarily blame the technology itself. Instead, I worry about the potency of the fear it is generating.

Our brains are wired to respond to stories. Narratives floating in a population can affect individuals’ economic decisions about whether to buy a big house, or whether to send their kids to an expensive private school or even whether to have kids at all. When millions of people make millions and millions of decisions based upon negative expectations, there is a risk that fear can actually help birth the reality.

The idea that something like artificial intelligence will replace many human jobs goes back thousands of years. Aristotle envisioned a powered loom and a self-playing lyre someday replacing human servants. In the 19th century, groups of textile workers (the Luddites) destroyed the new machines they believed were replacing them. In the 1920s, the play “R.U.R.” — the letters stand for “Rossum’s Universal Robots” — depicted a war of the robots against humans. [...]

...the British mathematician I.J. Good wrote an essay that imagined a new technology that could continue improving itself until its abilities would surpass those of humans. The idea, which came to be known as the “singularity,” would quietly circulate until 2005. That’s when the futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote “The Singularity Is Near,” a book arguing that human-level A.I. would arrive by 2029. Either we would merge with machines and transcend our biological limits, or the machine would grow so powerful it could end all of humanity.

The theory captured the imaginations of tech titans, and even the top A.I. researchers and executives, who warned of a range of alarming scenarios, from job losses to widening inequality or even the eradication of humanity itself. While the job market has slowed for a host of reasons, there are reports that fear of an A.I. apocalypse is worsening the freeze and contributing to record lows in consumer sentiment.

There’s only so much Washington can do about these narratives. And, suffice to say, Donald Trump is no Franklin Roosevelt.

As such, perhaps the best we can do is to appeal directly to the leaders of Silicon Valley who have been promoting these negative narratives with such vigor. Surely the resulting media attention highlighting how dangerously powerful your A.I. model is may help you sell more wares, but it may be far harder to do so in a period of recession. Try not to forget the critical lessons taught by our past.

Ross Wiener, I Thought ‘No Child Left Behind’ Would Fix Public Schools. I Was Wrong.

The new data is emboldening calls to restore something like the No Child Left Behind Act, the stringent, test-based accountability policy that defined American education from 2002 to 2015 and imposed penalties on schools whose students did not meet proficiency requirements on state standardized tests. The Atlantic captured that impulse in a 2025 podcast episode titled “Bring Back High-Stakes School Testing.” In it, Margaret Spellings, a secretary of education under President George W. Bush and now president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, argues we need to restore “the muscle of accountability, the muscle of assessment.” Rahm Emanuel, exploring a 2028 presidential run, said in April that Democrats have abandoned standards and accountability and must return to them.

It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers. Reading and math are profoundly important and improving instruction must be part of any serious agenda. But test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now. [...]

Over time, I became convinced that, with the best of intentions, I and many others in the education reform community had transferred our moral commitment to children over to the standardized tests. We had done this earnestly, not cynically, but we still did damage.

In 2023, 40 percent of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. One in five had seriously considered suicide; nearly one in 10 had attempted it. Research from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins found that 40 percent of Gen Z believes political violence can be justified, compared with 11 percent of baby boomers. Too many students experience school as an obligation with few opportunities for agency or meaning; recent survey data indicates that large shares of students find school boring and irrelevant and are struggling with engagement in the classroom. The academic crisis and the human crisis are not entirely separate phenomena. [...]

Taking their priorities seriously would mean broadening what we expect from the classroom. Schools should put what students can do on equal footing with what they know, embedding real skills in academic learning rather than leaving them to chance or sequencing them to later in life. Schools should reconnect with the communities they serve, so young people learn through and about the places where they live. And they should reanimate the character-forming, developmental mission a pluralistic democracy requires.

Tom Rothman, Hollywood Needs Regular Jolts of Creativity. It Just Got One.

In the last month, “Backrooms,” a horror movie directed by Kane Parsons, a YouTube creator who just turned 21, opened to an astounding $81.5 million in America. A second horror film, “Iron Lung,” made and self-distributed by Mark Fischbach, another online creator, has grossed over $50 million worldwide. Perhaps most significant of all, “Obsession,” a horror film directed by Curry Barker, a 26-year-old YouTube creator, crossed $200 million at the box office this weekend and surpassed the latest “Star Wars” film.

“Backrooms,” “Iron Lung” and “Obsession” each has its own unique origin story. But what they have in common is that they’re all fueled by an avid young audience — exactly the demographic that gloomy industry pundits have repeatedly declared will never return to movie theaters.

Wrong.

Is this YouTube-fueled youthquake simply a coincidental confluence of events? Or does it portend an upending of the Hollywood status quo? Actually, it’s a bit of both. Indeed, for any fear of YouTube barbarians at the gates, this is instead a great opportunity for traditional Hollywood. [...]

Rothman then goes on the list changes in taste following Altman's M*A*S*H in 1970 and Soderberg's Sex, Lies, and Videotape in 1989.

This kind of moment is happening again. Mr. Barker, with a background in short films and YouTube sketch comedy, tells a story in “Obsession” that is so powerfully relatable to Gen Z audiences that the word of mouth has caused the box office to defy gravity.

When Mr. Parsons expanded his YouTube short films into the feature-length “Backrooms,” the aesthetic he’d honed as a teenager on the internet captured an underlying anxiety in his audience, with whom he’d already developed a direct relationship online. These filmmakers are very young, but what matters is not chronological age so much as an iconoclastic spirit, an instinct for what the audience is wanting but not getting and, of course, talent. [...]

“Backrooms” and “Obsession” are also the beneficiaries of expensive and savvy studio marketing campaigns. Reminiscent of how the New Hollywood directors made a lot of money for the old studios in the ’70s — think Francis Ford Coppola and “The Godfather” — and how the indie darlings of the ’90s did the same, these YouTube-born phenomena have ultimately prospered handsomely inside the system.

For perfect symmetry, note that the No. 1 film at the box office when it debuted two weekends ago, one spot ahead of “Obsession,” was “Disclosure Day,” made by Steven Spielberg, the greatest artistic and commercial director in history. “Disclosure Day” is his 37th film. His first was the ’70s New Hollywood anti-authoritarian film “The Sugarland Express,” which he made when he was not much older than Mr. Barker and Mr. Parsons.

The integration of independent creativity with industry influence is a good thing all around. It offers exposure for, and help to, new voices, giving them more visibility and opportunity, and it promotes the kind of originality that Hollywood desperately needs.

Needless to say, there's more at the links.

A toy to think with: The Erector Set

What Happened to the Erector Set? | The Toy That Taught Every Boy in America to Build

From the YouTube page:

For generations, the Erector Set wasn’t just a toy — it was a hands-on introduction to engineering, creativity, and real-world building.

Long before modern STEM kits and digital learning tools, children across America learned how to think, design, and construct using metal beams, bolts, and gears. Created by A. C. Gilbert in the early 1900s, the Erector Set became a symbol of innovation and imagination, inspiring future engineers and inventors.

In this video, we explore the complete story of the Erector Set — from its invention and rise during the golden age of American toys, to its cultural impact and eventual decline in a rapidly changing world of plastic toys and digital entertainment.

Discover how it competed with brands like LEGO, why its popularity began to fade, and what ultimately happened to one of the most educational toys ever created.

From steel structures to childhood dreams, this is the story of the toy that taught a generation how to build.

If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the legendary Erector Set… this nostalgic deep dive reveals it all.

Hollis Robbins in AI and Education

Episode page:

This week on The Hope Axis, Hollis Robbins joins me to talk about her dense career and what it actually means to build a life dedicated to the humanities today.

Hollis, a dear friend of Interintellect and one of the first hosts, is stepping back from her role as Dean of Humanities at the University of Utah to focus on writing three upcoming books, including one with the incredible title, “Do Not Go to College Unless.”

We get into her journey, and finding room for hope and leisure in the middle of it all. Hope you enjoy!

00:00 Intro
00:38 Introduction
02:50 College, dropping out, intellectual ideals and AI
08:00 The state of universities and colleges in the time of information abundance 
15:39 Intellect and technology
29:38 Anti-AI and pro-intellectual discourse is missing the point
34:17 America's higher (mid) education doesn't compete with AI
43:23 Reinventing tutoring
48:42 How is Hollis Robbins surviving in the humanities?
54:37 The process of ""dumbing down"" of the American University
01:04:41 If a specialist won't be teaching you at the university - don't go there.
01:08:02 Intellectual labour in scale economy.
01:10:40 Final thoughts

The role of the public university in the emerging AI world

Amarda Shehu, What the University Is Now For, Amarda Shedu, Apr. 27, 2026.

There's a bunch of introductory stuff about how universities have conceptualized their role and how AI is forcing massive changes.

The difference between wealthy private universities and public universities:

The university has told one story to its trustees, its accreditors, and the public, which is the story of the holistic education, the formation of citizens, the cultivation of judgment, the well-rounded life of the mind. It has told a different story to its students and their families and the labor market, which is the story of the credential, the ticket, the signal, the return on investment. The two stories were never quite compatible. They were held in suspension by an institution wealthy enough, slow enough, and culturally trusted enough that no one had to choose. Faculty believed they were doing the first thing while students were paying for the second. The institution measured itself by the first and collected tuition for the second. The gap between the two was absorbed by prestige, by endowment where it existed, and by a social consensus that the degree was worth what it cost regardless of the mechanism. The well-resourced privates can extend this hedge for another decade. The public access institutions cannot.

What the future holds:

If a job is a task that can be fully digitized, it is done. The tempo at which it is done is not in our hands. It is set by capital, by investment cycles, by regulatory response, by the appetite of firms for the disruption itself, and none of these are forces the family or the institution controls. No one can tell you which careers will be safe in three years or in ten. Anyone who claims to is guessing. The question parents are asking, what should my child major in, has been the wrong question for some time. The institution has been letting them ask it because answering the right one would have required a redesign the institution was unwilling to undertake.

What an education should provide:

The right question is what habits of mind, what kinds of relationships, what capacity for judgment under uncertainty, what tolerance for slow understanding, will let a person remain economically and humanly viable across a working life in which the specific tasks they were trained for will be repeatedly absorbed into machines on a tempo no one can predict. Some disciplines build these capacities better than others. Some build them well in some hands and badly in others. Some programs nominally in safe disciplines build none of them, and some programs in disciplines now considered doomed build them in abundance. The discipline name on the diploma is not the unit of analysis. The formation the student undergoes inside it is.

An ecology of growth and learning:

It is the formation of people who can do the work that resists automation, which is not the cognitive work the machines are absorbing but the judgment, the relational capacity, the slow understanding, the tolerance for ambiguity, and the practiced humility that emerge only from sustained encounter with hard things and with other people doing the same. This formation is not a curriculum. It is an institution. It requires faculty who are present to students rather than performing for them, advising relationships that persist over years, mentoring that does not appear in workload calculations, and a tempo of learning that the dashboard cannot capture and that the institution has been quietly disinvesting in for a generation because the disinvestment did not show up in the metrics it was tracking. The redesign is not a redesign of the curriculum. It is a redesign of what the institution treats as its actual product, and a willingness to charge tuition for that product honestly rather than for a credential whose market value is being revised in front of us.

There is more at the link.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Stanford as a hatchery for future tech overlords [Book Review]

Anand Giridharadas, The Secret Elite One Freshman Discovered at Stanford, NYTimes, May 18, 2026.

Book Review: How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, by Theo Baker.

Theo Baker arrived at Stanford in 2022 and pursued two somewhat different paths, junior tech bro, and student journalist. His freshman year included:

(1) Losing your grandparent. (2) Losing your girlfriend. (3) Losing your virginity. (4) Bringing down a university president. (5) Overdosing. (6) Winning a George Polk Award. (7) Partying on yachts and socializing with billionaires. (8) Fending off legal threats. (9) Becoming a meme. (10) Neglecting to complete your homework.

Giridharadas observes:

There are two questions people ask as much as any other: “How can I belong?” and “Who runs the world?” They differ in tenor and aim. The former is vulnerable, often unspoken; the latter fuels two-thirds of Reddit.

What gives Baker’s book its power is that, in this setting, these inquiries strangely dovetailed. By trying to answer what it takes to fit in — the freshman question — he Forrest Gumps his way into answering a question about the attitudes and pretensions overlording mankind. In coming of age as a young man, he travels to the heart of a dehumanizing age.

And so:

Stanford through Baker’s eyes is a foreign country with its own customs, religion, mores and language. Some students are “high-agency” super-builders or super-thinkers — techie Übermenschen expected to make billions. There is the “Coupa circuit,” where shady, tech-adjacent adults spend their days at a coffee shop with students, hoping to get in early on start-ups. There are the NGMIs, who are not going to make it. And there are the “plucked,” highly bright students who form a Stanford within Stanford, with access to Big Tech slush funds and parties. (The liberal arts majors and others with no prospects in technology are largely irrelevant.) [...]

The Stanford-within-Stanford Baker exposes matters to you even if this exclusive core feels impossibly distant. The university has let technology firms and venture capitalists worm so deeply into it that it now functions, in Baker’s telling, as a talent-scouting system for future unicorns. Everyone else is window dressing. And this campus elite betrays attitudes — captured by Baker — so contemptuous of non-Übermenschen, not to mention those far outside this world, that one gets a feel for the kinds of mentalities designing A.I. and presuming to rewire our societies.

Silicon Valley has long promoted itself as more meritocratic than elite circles past. Baker perforates this story. As always, connections, access, shadowy brokers and whims decide who gets the keys. Many students are smart. But those who rise fastest often seem the most ruthless and maniacal. [...]

“Teenagers like me were a commodity,” Baker observes. “We were to be protected and preserved, cosseted and buttered up, exploited, manipulated, funded, bribed and cultivated. We were business.”

There's much more to the review, mostly the story of how Baker joins the school newspaper and pursues an investigation that helps topple Stanford's president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne.

Taking notes by hand is more effective than by laptop (?)

This is a 12-year-old study that has failed replication three times. And the underlying claim is still probably right.

The paper is Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014. 67 students at Princeton. Longhand note-takers scored higher on conceptual questions. Became the most cited paper in… https://t.co/VXTNfQAuvt

— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) March 18, 2026

Among universities, the Chinese are moving up, USA is moving down

Just think, a century ago most Americans thought of Charlie Chan, a movie detective, when they they thought on the Chinese. And Chinatown, of course. In the 1960s a character named "Hop Sing" appeared as comic relieve in the hit TV program Bonanza. He was the house boy for the wealthy Cartwright family – note the word "boy." And then came the war in Vietnam along with Chairman Mao and his Red Book. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s I took a course on radical approaches to literature, taught be Art Efron. We read a collection of essays on aesthetics written by Mao.

Mark Arsenault, Chinese Universities Surge in Global Rankings as U.S. Schools Slip, NYTimes, Jan 15, 2026. The article opens:

Until recently, Harvard was the most productive research university in the world, according to a global ranking that looks at academic publication.

That position may be teetering, the most recent evidence of a troubling trend for American academia.

Harvard recently dropped to No. 3 on the ranking. The schools racing up the list are not Harvard’s American peers, but Chinese universities that have been steadily climbing in rankings that emphasize the volume and quality of research they produce.

The reordering comes as the Trump administration has been slashing research funding to American schools that depend heavily on the federal government to pay for scientific endeavors. President Trump’s policies did not start the American universities’ relative decline, which began years ago, but they could accelerate it.

“There is a big shift coming, a bit of a new world order in global dominance of higher education and research,” said Phil Baty, chief global affairs officer for Times Higher Education, a British organization unconnected to The New York Times that produces one of the better-known world rankings of universities.

In the middle of this long article:  

The number of international students arriving in the U.S. in August 2025 was 19 percent lower than the year before, a trend that could further hurt the prestige and rankings of American schools if the world’s best minds choose to study and work elsewhere.

China has been pouring billions of dollars into its universities and aggressively working to make them attractive to foreign researchers. In the fall, China began offering a visa specifically for graduates of top universities in science and technology to travel to China to study or do business.

“China has a boatload of money in higher education that it didn’t have 20 years ago,” said Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Toronto education consulting company.

Mr. Xi has made the reasons for the country’s investments explicit, arguing that a nation’s global power depends on its scientific dominance.

There's much more in the article.

College and University: Change the system, drastically!

Hollis Robbins has published an interesting thought experiment: The Claude Test, Anecdotal Value, August 6, 2025.

She asks, "would happen if an AI tried to enroll in a university this fall, complete the work, and earn a degree?" and walks us through the exercise. I won't try to summarize. Instead, I want to jump directly to her conclusion:

The Claude diagnostic shows that most of the current requirements (particularly gen ed courses delivered asynchronously online) are performing neither information transfer nor human development. Claude succeeds best at what universities do on the cheap: online courses requiring reading assigned works, discussing assigned topics, writing assigned papers, solving assigned problems, with the minimum of human oversight.

Where Claude stumbles are moments where he needs to show human cognitive development. Just getting admitted to college is all about demonstrating potential, trajectory, growth, a future self; potential contribution to campus life, participation on athletic teams, clubs, tailgates. Claude is at a disadvantage. [...]

What the Claude diagnosis tells us is that universities should get out of the online asynchronous course business, and double down on mentorship, community, ethical development, and a trusted, human-centric environment for personal and intellectual transformation. This probably won’t happen anytime soon because human teaching is expensive while online is profitable.

So I am proposing something even more radical: unbundle general education from universities entirely. State legislatures: this is for you. Contract with AI firms to handle standardized content delivery for the general education content you’re mandating. Do it at the high school level, better yet. Let universities focus exclusively on educating students directly, with mentorship and community. The “magic dust” of a college degree would then only sanctify genuine human transformation, not completed coursework.

The ubiquity of online asynchronous courses demonstrates that universities haven’t actually internalized their own rhetoric about human development. They’re still operating on an industrial model of content delivery while claiming to be in the human transformation business. AI poses an existential threat to university’s process more than its product.

Here's my response:

Color me sympathetic, Hollis. I've always thought that the push for "everyone gets a college degree" was a mistake. In practice it seems to me the result of this expansion is a lot of gen ed, poorly delivered, along with vocational training, also poorly delivered. So I agree, shift the gen ed to the high school level (which is the level it's at anyhow). Education beyond that should be direct and personalized, whether it's hands-on skills with a large physical component, or more abstract intellectual skills.

That's one thing. And then there's writing. Since my degree is in English and my one faculty post was in an omnibus department in a tech school (Language, Literature, and Communications at RPI) I've had to teach composition, one of the most thankless educational jobs in the world. It's always seemed me that writing needs to be taught the way musical performance is taught, one-on-one. That's how I learned to play the trumpet, and a bit of piano, between the ages of 11 and 17 (plus a semester of trumpet at Peabody in my early 20s). But assigning every student their own writing tutor is just too expensive. But it would get the job done, and all students need it, the good writers as well as the deficient.

Finally, a thought that's sort of tangential to your essay here, but I've been thinking about it. I've been hearing that students are using AI on their term papers etc. and "they're not learning to think!" (Duh!), as though learning to think was important to what colleges and universities actually do. In a system that's organized to assign and receive grades, and the grades are inflated (my graduating 3.3 at JHU back in 69 was well above average; now it's what, a badge of shame?) letting the AI get the grades is the thing to do, lowest possible opportunity cost. But it's clear that that smarter and more knowledgeable you are, they more effective you can be in using even the best AI. It seems to me that in a genuinely competitive environment that should matter. And if somehow you manage to get students interested in something, they learn to think even while making extensive use of AI.

People don't like being turned into IBM punch-cards through industrial education, but if that's the system you put them into, they'l be punched and try to create some room for themselves elsewhere. Change the system, drastically.

Looking back on my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins, I worked it to get as much individual attention as I could. I took advantage of office hours, and did an independent study or two. I'm thinking particularly of a semester I spent with Mary Ainsworth learning about attachment behavior and primate ethology and all the hours I spend with Dick Macksey.

Also, as I recall (this is an idealization no doubt) when a course was going good, I'd find something that interested me about 2/3rds of the way through and concentrate on that. Oh, I didn't completely abandon the assigned course material (I still wanted a decent grade) but I devoted more time to my new-found interest.

Alpha School combines AI for "raw" skills with PBL for practical skills

Pooja Salhotra, A.I.-Driven Education: Founded in Texas and Coming to a School Near You, NYTimes, 7.27.25.

In Austin, Texas, where the titans of technology have moved their companies and built mansions, some of their children are also subjects of a new innovation: schooling through artificial intelligence.

And with ambitious expansion plans in the works, a pricey private A.I. school in Austin, called Alpha School, will be replicating itself across the country this fall.

Supporters of Alpha School believe an A.I.-forward approach helps tailor an education to a student’s skills and interests. MacKenzie Price, a podcaster and influencer who co-founded Alpha, has called classrooms “the next global battlefield.”

“I’ve seen the future,” she wrote on social media, “and it isn’t 10 years away. It’s here, right now.”

To detractors, Ms. Price’s “2 Hour Learning” model and Alpha School are just the latest in a long line of computerized fads that plunk children in front of screens and deny them crucial socialization skills while suppressing their ability to think critically.

“Students and our country need to be in relationship with other human beings,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, a teachers’ union. “When you have a school that is strictly A.I., it is violating that core precept of the human endeavor and of education.”

But it’s not strictly A.I.

Alpha officials and guides say the various A.I. programs they use tailor instruction to each child’s level instead of teaching to the average student. That frees teachers to attend to students’ emotional needs.

It is not a “screen school,” argued Ms. Price, who had grown dissatisfied with her daughter’s public school education. Students at Alpha spend the majority of their school day in workshops where they collaborate with other students, Ms. Price said in an interview. The A.I.-led lessons free up guides to focus on motivating students instead of on time-intensive tasks like lesson planning and grading, several guides said.

Much later in the article:

But Alpha isn’t using A.I. as a tutor or a supplement. It is the school’s primary educational driver to move students through academic content.

In the afternoons, students focus on projects that require interaction with other students, such as wilderness training, cooking and sports. For example, fifth and sixth graders last year decided to create a food truck. To accomplish their goal, they learned how to budget, form a business plan — with the help of a chatbot — and to cook eggs.

“When we were all in the kitchen, it would get really stressful,” Byron said. “Working through that calmly and together is something I really improved on.”

Resistence:

To the tech weary, Alpha’s pitch is shopworn. Education technology companies and philanthropists have pushed computers in classrooms for decades. Those experiments have had mixed results and proved difficult to scale. For example, a Silicon Valley-based program called Summit Learning, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, has been resisted by public school students from New York to Kansas.

Alpha’s endeavor for Unbound Academy has been met with skepticism. State boards of education in Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Arkansas and North Carolina all rejected the program, some citing a lack of evidence that it works.

“The artificial intelligence instructional model being proposed by this school is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards,” the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s decision read, citing “multiple, significant deficiencies.”

Although Alpha says it offers students opportunities to collaborate, some have decided to leave after middle school to embrace a high school experience with team sports, student council and prom night. Byron, the rising seventh grader at Alpha, said he was not sure whether he wants to go to high school at Alpha.

“If you think of the purpose of schools as to prepare people for the roles of citizenship and democracy, there’s lot of places where you aren’t trying to get kids to race as fast as they can,” said Justin Reich, director of the Teaching Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book “Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education.”

Masterpieces:

Several Alpha high school students said their favorite part about the school was working on what Alpha calls their “masterpieces,” a time-intensive project coinciding with the student’s passion. For such projects, students have built a chatbot that offers dating advice, an emotional support teddy bear and a 120-acre mountain bike park, now the largest in Texas.

To complete the projects successfully, students said, they must surpass A.I.’s knowledge base and come up with a “spiky point of view,” or unexpected and novel perspectives.

“To be a useful person in the age of A.I., you have to have unique insights that A.I. doesn’t really agree with,” said Alex Mathew, 16, a rising senior at Alpha High School. “That’s the real differentiator,” he continued. “We are trying to beat A.I.”

Project-Based Learning (PBL) and AI

Here’s how Wikipedia characterizes project-based-learning:

Project-based learning is a teaching method that involves a dynamic classroom approach in which it is believed that students acquire a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world challenges and problems. Students learn about a subject by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, challenge, or problem. It is a style of active learning and inquiry-based learning. Project-based learning contrasts with paper-based, rote memorization, or teacher-led instruction that presents established facts or portrays a smooth path to knowledge by instead posing questions, problems, or scenarios.

Around the corner Hollis-Robbins has outlined a program to use AI in teaching the general education requirements of the California State University system (where she was a dean for a number of years). PBL is part of the program. It’s worth taking a look at.

Arnold Kling picks up on it in a post, Project Learning in the age of AI. He talks about how he has used PBL:

When I taught AP economics in high school and “Economics for the Citizen” at George Mason, I liked giving students a project to outline a business. I told them to think in terms of a “strip-mall business,” to avoid anything too complex or online. An ice cream store. A barber shop. A video game arcade.

I wanted the students to calculate costs in terms of the main factors of production: labor, land, and capital. I wanted them to identify key ratios that would determine success or failure of the business. Sales per hour is a good example. I wanted them to identify key roles and responsibilities. I wanted them to think about issues related to marketing, including location. I wanted them to identify key unknowns, such as local demographics or potential competition. I wanted them to think about inventory management.

He used it as a group project at the high school and undergraduate levels. Today, however...

I would give the assignment to students individually. They would not need other students with whom to brainstorm, because they could use AI. I could handle thousands of students, because assessment would be done by AI. If necessary, we can assign a monitor to be present to make certain that the student is not cheating by using an AI during the assessment.

I would have the AI interview each student about that student’s business idea. The AI would assign a grade and offer feedback based on a rubric that I would provide.

The other day I had a conversation about PBL with ChatGPT in which I focused on writing, making a distinction between sentence-level sentence craft and the overall process of thinking things through. I’ve appended that conversation below.

* * * * *

Project-based learning, basics

Tell me about project-based learning. Where is it used, what are the advantages claimed for it, what are the criticisms.

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is an educational approach in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to complex, real-world questions, problems, or challenges. Rather than passively receiving information, students actively construct it through experience, collaboration, and reflection.

---

Where is Project-Based Learning Used?

PBL is used across a wide range of educational settings:

1.     K–12 Education:

o   U.S. public and charter schools (e.g., High Tech High, Expeditionary Learning Schools).

o   International schools with progressive curricula (e.g., International Baccalaureate programs).

o   STEM-focused initiatives like Project Lead The Way.

2.     Higher Education:

o   Engineering and design programs (e.g., Olin College, MIT) often use PBL to simulate professional contexts.

o   Medical and business schools sometimes employ it under the label of problem-based learning, a close cousin.

3.     Informal and After-School Settings:

o   Maker spaces, robotics clubs, environmental programs, and community service learning often use PBL approaches.

4.     Workforce Development and Corporate Training:

o   Used in team-based professional development, particularly where practical, hands-on solutions are valued.

---

Advantages Claimed for Project-Based Learning

1.     Deeper Understanding:
Students develop a more thorough and lasting understanding of content because they apply knowledge to real-world problems.

2.     21st-Century Skills:
PBL emphasizes skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, creativity, and self-management.

3.     Intrinsic Motivation:
Working on meaningful problems tends to increase student engagement and ownership of learning.

4.     Cross-Disciplinary Learning:
Projects often integrate multiple subject areas—e.g., combining math, science, and writing in a climate change project.

5.     Preparation for the Real World:
Mimics how learning and problem-solving happen in workplaces and life outside of school.

6.     Equity and Inclusion:
Advocates argue that when well-designed, PBL can allow students of diverse backgrounds to showcase talents not captured by traditional testing.

---

Criticisms and Challenges of Project-Based Learning

1.     Inconsistent Implementation:
Poorly designed projects can become aimless or superficial, with little academic rigor. “Projects” may be bolted onto a traditional curriculum rather than driving the learning.

2.     Assessment Difficulties:
Measuring individual learning outcomes can be complex. There's ongoing debate over how to assess process vs. content, group vs. individual work.

3.     Teacher Preparation and Workload:
PBL demands high-level planning, cross-disciplinary coordination, and new forms of evaluation. Many teachers lack the training or support to do it well.

4.     Equity Risks:
Without careful scaffolding, PBL can exacerbate achievement gaps, as students with stronger background knowledge or support networks are better positioned to succeed.

5.     Curricular Constraints:
In highly standardized education systems (e.g., U.S. states with heavy testing mandates), PBL can be difficult to integrate without sacrificing coverage of tested content.

6.     Superficial Engagement:
There's a risk of “fun but fluffy” projects where students build models or presentations without deep conceptual learning.

---

Conclusion

Project-Based Learning is a powerful approach with the potential to transform education by making it more experiential, relevant, and skill-oriented. But it’s not a magic bullet. Its success depends on thoughtful design, skilled facilitation, and structural support. At its best, PBL can align school with the way people naturally learn and solve problems in the real world; at its worst, it can become performative, shallow, and inequitable.

Would you like examples of successful PBL implementations or a comparison with traditional teaching models?

Attention is what we really need [AI in the school]

Meghan O’Rourke, The Seductions of A.I. for the Writer’s Mind, NYTimes, July 18, 2025. 

I’m skipping over a lot of stuff, more than half the article, about how students use it, O’Rourke has used A.I., useless for some purposes, but also about how it’s become her constant intellectual companion, about coming to use the internet as an undergraduate, administrator’s enthusiasm. I found this nugget, “The context here is that higher education, as it’s currently structured, can appear to prize product over process,” which aligns with this quick post of mine: Stop blaming students, a quick note about AI in the schools. And more and more. But this is what I wanted to capture:

The conscientious path forward is to create educational structures that minimize the temptation to outsource thinking. Perhaps we should consider getting rid of letter grades in writing classes, which could be pass/fail. The age of the take-home essay as a tool for assessing mastery and comprehension is over. Seminars might now include more in-class close reading or weekly in-person “writing labs,” during which students can write without access to A.I. Starting this fall, professors must be clearer about what kinds of uses we allow, and aware of all the ways A.I. insinuates itself as a collaborator when a student opens the ChatGPT window.

As a poet, I have shaped my life around the belief that language is our most human inheritance: the space of richly articulated perception, where thought and emotion meet. Writing for me has always been both expressive and formative — and in a strange way, pleasurable.

I’ve spent decades writing and editing; I know the feeling — of reward and hard-won clarity — that writing produces for me. But if you never build those muscles, will you grasp what’s missing when an L.L.M. delivers a chirpy but shallow reply? What happens to students who’ve never experienced the reward of pressing toward an elusive thought that yields itself in clear syntax?

This, I think, is the urgent question. For now, many of us still approach A.I. as outsiders — nonnative users, shaped by analog habits, capable of seeing the difference between now and then. But the generation growing up with A.I. will learn to think and write in its shadow. For them, the chatbot won’t be a tool to discover — as Netscape was for me — but part of the operating system itself. And that shift, from novelty to norm, is the profound transformation we’re only beginning to grapple with. [...]

One of the real challenges here is the way that A.I. undermines the human value of attention, and the individuality that flows from that.

What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.

Attention is what we really need:

When I write, the process is full of risk, error and painstaking self-correction. It arrives somewhere surprising only when I’ve stayed in uncertainty long enough to find out what I had initially failed to understand. This attention to the world is worth trying to preserve: The act of care that makes meaning — or insight — possible. To do so will require thought and work. We can’t just trust that everything will be fine. L.L.M.s are undoubtedly useful tools. They are getting better at mirroring us, every day, every week. The pressure on unique human expression will only continue to mount.

One quick thought, subject to reconsideration, it's not the crafting of individual sentences that's important, not for most of us. To be sure, a few people value style and work hard to cultivate it. I suspect that, even in the age of AI, those people will be able to do that. That is, they'll recognize that style interests them and they'll work on it. But for the vast majority of writers, style is a rough and ready business, anything will do, really, as long as the result is clear.

What we need to be concerned about is the overall thought process. How one works with facts and ideas, pulling them from this place and that, kneading them together. How will AI affect that? For I believe that it's in this overall process that humans can, and perhaps always will, outpace any AI. I discuss this in "Searching the Space" at the beginning of this post: ChatGPT evaluates my work over the last two months + a note on search [what AIs can't do]. 

It's one thing to use AI to flesh out things within a space you are familiar with. Can you learn to use it to move beyond that space, to range over the knowledge sphere in such a way that you make new connections which in turn allows you to lead the AI to new conjunctions? 

Big Tech to fund AI training for teachers

Natasha Singer, OpenAI and Microsoft Bankroll New A.I. Training for Teachers, NYTimes, July 9, 2025.

The tech industry’s campaign to embed artificial intelligence chatbots in classrooms is accelerating.

The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest U.S. teachers’ union, said on Tuesday that it would start an A.I. training hub for educators with $23 million in funding from three leading chatbot makers: Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.

The union said it planned to open the National Academy for A.I. Instruction in New York City, starting with hands-on workshops for teachers this fall on how to use A.I. tools for tasks like generating lesson plans.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the A.I. academy was inspired by other unions, like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, that have worked with industry partners to set up high-tech training centers.

The New York hub will be “an innovative new training space where school staff and teachers will learn not just about how A.I. works, but how to use it wisely, safely and ethically,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview. “It will be a place where tech developers and educators can talk with each other, not past each other.”

The industry funding is part of a drive by U.S. tech companies to reshape education with generative A.I. chatbots. These tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, can produce humanlike essays, research summaries and class quizzes.

However:

But some researchers have warned that generative A.I. tools are so new in schools that there is little evidence of concrete educational benefit — and significant concern about risk.

Chatbots can produce plausible-sounding misinformation, which could mislead students. A recent study by law school professors found that three popular A.I. tools made “significant” errors summarizing a law casebook and posed an “unacceptable risk of harm” to learning.

Outsourcing tasks like research and writing to A.I. chatbots may also hinder critical thinking, a recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found.

“I do think that there is a risk,” said Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, noting that he frequently cited the critical thinking study to employees. He added that more rigorous academic research on the effects of generative A.I. was needed. “The lesson of social media is don’t dismiss problems or concerns.”

Of course:

“It’s a long-game investment by companies to turn young people into consumers who identify with a particular brand,” said Dr. Griffey, a vice president of University Council-A.F.T. Local 1474, a union representing University of California librarians and lecturers.

Ms. Weingarten said that she was aware of the concerns and that her union, which represents 1.8 million members, had developed A.I. school use guidelines to address some of them.

One of her main goals is to ensure that teachers have some input on how A.I. tools are developed for educational use, she said. In 2023, she began discussing the idea with Microsoft’s Mr. Smith.

There's more at the link. (H/t Tyler Cowen)

My own quick and dirty take: Of course, teachers need to know how to use AI. It's right up there with reading, writing, and 'rithmatic. But I don't trust the AI companies with the primary responsibility for providing such training. Moreover, as I briefly indicated yesterday, I think we need to revamp our approach to education from top to bottom. I don't trust the teacher's unions with this either. It's a big job. It will take a generation or more to get it done, with the current incumbents in the educational system kicking and screaming all the way. Big tech too.

Stop blaming students, a quick note about AI in the schools

I don’t know how many complaints I’ve read about how AI is ruining education because students use it to write their papers and thus bypass the valuable process of thinking for themselves. Yes, I see that that is a problem. Learning to write is an important part of education. It’s not just the skill of writing, but the process of THINKING that effective writing requires. If you want to learn, you have to do the work. You aren’t going to learn by farming it out to an AI.

But: DON’T BLAME THE STUDENTS. They’re only doing what we taught them to do. We created the problem and now it’s up to us to fix it.

The problem is that we’ve created an educational system that focuses on a superficial measure of outcomes, the grade. How often to teachers in primary and secondary schools “teach to the test”? That is, how often do they skew instruction in a direction that results in higher student scores on the standard tests used by administrators and bureaucrats to evaluate schools? Students pick up on that mentality. Nor is the whole corrupt game confined to primary and secondary schools. It continues in colleges and universities, even the best ones.

THAT’s the problem, that whole Industrial Age production-line model for education. That’s the culprit. That’s what needs to be changed. AI is forcing us to rethink education from the bottom up. How do we create an educational environment where students use AI got get the routine stuff that the need to do something interesting. What a novel idea, have students do something interesting.

What happens to kid's minds when they use LLMs to complete writing tasks? What can we do about it?

From a recent NYTimes column by David Brooks (Are We Really Willing to Become Dumber?):

A group of researchers led by M.I.T.’s Nataliya Kosmyna recruited 54 participants to write essays. Some of them used A.I. to write the essays, some wrote with the assistance of search engines (people without a lot of domain knowledge are not good at using search engines to identify the most important information), and some wrote the old-fashioned way, using their brains. The essays people used A.I. to write contained a lot more references to specific names, places, years and definitions. The people who relied solely on their brains had 60 percent fewer references to these things. So far, so good.

But the essays written with A.I. were more homogeneous, while those written by people relying on their brains created a wider variety of arguments and points.

That's consistent with recent discussions I've had with my colleague, Ramesh Viswanathan, who remarked that, when given a prompt, a chatbot will return with a modal response. What's that mean, modal? It's a statistical team meaning the most frequent (as opposed to the mean and the median – look it up). For example, in an experiment I conducted in 2023 I gave ChatGPT a one-word prompt, "story," to which it responded with a simple story (note: it no longer responds in this way). In ten independent trials it gave almost the same story each time. Then I conducted a session where I gave it that prompt ten times in a row. It responded with a story each time and, while the stories were highly similar, there was more difference among them than among those elicited in individual sessions. This is a modal response. You can move it away from the mode by requesting specific kinds of stories.

Back to Brooks, who continues:

Later the researchers asked the participants to quote from their own papers. Roughly 83 percent of the A.I. large language model, or L.L.M., users had difficulty quoting from their own papers. They hadn’t really internalized their own “writing,” and little of it had sunk in. People who used search engines were better at quoting their own points, and people who used just their brains were a lot better.

Almost all the people who wrote their own papers felt they owned their work, whereas fewer of the A.I. users claimed full ownership of their work. Here’s how the study authors summarize this part of their research:

The brain-only group, though under greater cognitive load, demonstrated deeper learning outcomes and stronger identity with their output. The search engine group displayed moderate internalization, likely balancing effort with outcome. The L.L.M. group, while benefiting from tool efficiency, showed weaker memory traces, reduced self-monitoring and fragmented authorship.

In other words, more effort, more reward. More efficiency, less thinking.

Brooks then reports some work the researchers did measuring EEG response of the students: "The researchers conclude, “Collectively, these findings support the view that external support tools restructure not only task performance but also the underlying cognitive architecture.”

So, the use of LLMs by students is deeply problematic. I've been hearing about this for over two years. Here's a remark I recently made to Bryan Alexander, a futurist and consultant to higher education:

A quick thought. I’m aware that there’s this MASSIVE problem about LLMs and creating in school, but I haven’t thought much about it because it’s not my problem. I don’t have a university post and don’t have to teach students many of whom mostly want grades and don’t much care about learning. Isn’t THAT the problem, though? By the time they get to college they’ve spent 12 years in an education factory that’s about results, grades, not process. LLMs give them a way to get the results they want without having to work and as for learning, who needs it?

They do, obviously. But the damage has been done. So we’ve got two problems: 1) Given the ubiquity of LLMs, what do we do with these damaged kids? 2) How do we revamp the primary and secondary schools so kids aren’t intellectually damaged?

While I'm inclined to believe that, on the whole, AI can benefit education, we're going to have to work hard to discover and support those benefits. We may actually have to change the way we go about eduction. And that's a good thing.

Why many (most, all?) of us are afflicted with some degree of sexual shame

I thought this discussion was excellent, and useful. It’s hosted by Marni Kinrys and Kristen Carney; each of them has her own YouTube channel and both have businesses coaching men about women and about dating. I’m somewhat familiar with Marni Kinrys’ channel (she brands herself as Your Persona Wing Girl), but not Kristen Carney’s.

Marni’s advice seems reasonable and useful. But, like much self-help advice, it’s not usable right “out of the box,” as it were. It’s the sort of advice that must be internalized to be useful; that takes practice. She offers courses, which may take one closer to internalization, and one-on-one coaching, which may be even better. But I don’t know, as I’ve not done either; I’ve only listed to some videos.

In any event, while this video is presented as yet more advice for (hapless) men, it makes more sense to think of it as a conversation between women that is interesting in and of itself. I would think it interesting to other women as well as to men. Marni and Krystin have Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers as their guest. She’s an educator and sex therapist, and seems quite sensible to me.

Their topic is shame, which interests me a great deal. A couple of months ago I had a conversation with Claude about it. For what it’s worth, Schermer’s remarks are consistent with a number of things in that conversation. She’s interested in and advocates a practice of childhood sexual education that starts in toddler-hood and continues into the teens. What she says in the podcast strikes me as being quite sensible, and, alas, utterly foreign to my own experience growing up and,  I’m sure, to many others as well. Her remarks give me hope for the future, that there really is a better way. But we’ve got lots of harmful cultural practices to jettison.

Three guys on Harvard and elite universities: Bruni, Douthat, and Summers

Frank BruniRoss Douthat and Lawrence H. Summers, ‘Are We Past Peak Harvard?’: 3 Writers Mull Higher Education’s Woes, NYTimes, June 22, 2025. About half-way in:

Summers: Frank, I am less optimistic than you about self-repair. Of the good changes — enhanced discipline of disrupters, scale backs of absurd identity politics, curtailment of academic centers engaged in propaganda and so forth — a disproportionate share of what has happened since Oct. 7, 2023, has happened in the last few months. I’ve never had any problem with students, even when I’ve been supercritical of ideas like divesting from fossil fuels or chanting “from the river to the sea.” 98 percent of students are curious and open minded. The problem is much more with faculty in humanities and the less quantitative social sciences and with the noncommercial professions like public health, divinity and education.

Still, institutions don’t become the oldest continuous entities in a society — Harvard at around almost 400 years — without the ability to adapt. Yes, the moves are way too slow. I tried to accelerate the process as Harvard president, and the antibodies were enormous. But if trustees do their job, this can be fixed. I am on the left’s 40-yard line in America and the right’s 10 at Harvard. It should not be that way.

Douthat: Exactly. Larry’s point about where he stands ideologically at Harvard — for readers who aren’t football fans, as the far-rightward flank of the university even though he’s himself a centrist Democrat — gets at the reasonable demand that American conservatism can make, which is that if you have a set of elite universities that are deeply entangled with the American government, with a profound and ancient relationship with the American people, they should make an effort to contain within themselves the actual diversity of ideas and worldviews that define America today. Not in the sense that 50 percent of every department needs to be Republican, but in the sense that actual conservatism — not just a mild libertarianism in the economics departments — should not be represented by a tiny handful of faculty members at a sprawling and powerful school.

Bruni: Ross, it’s clear that Trump and his allies actually don’t want sweeping protections for free speech. They correctly called out intolerance on the left but are now replacing it with intolerance from the right. When you’re essentially banning any mention of D.E.I., detaining students for political viewpoints they’ve articulated, putting institutions on notice that you’ll punish them for any deviation from just-two-genders orthodoxy, well, Trump is swapping one cancel culture for another. No?

Douthat: It’s completely fair to say that the Trumpist critique of elite universities isn’t actually sure what it wants. Does it want sweeping protections for free speech — or does it want universities to crack down harder on speech that seems to justify terrorism and anti-Semitism? Does it want a recommitment to academic freedom — or does it want universities to micromanage their departments to ensure ideological balance? And all of this reflects the fact that the Trumpist coalition is itself diverse and internally contradictory. [...]

Summers: I cannot follow the logic of the Trump attacks. But there is hypocrisy on both sides. When the subject is underrepresented groups, there is a set of arguments about the importance of merit, the danger of discrimination and so forth that are invoked by the right and in just the same form by the left when the idea is to achieve more ideological balance. My view is that soft tilts are warranted in both cases, but when you start mandating and using quotas and judging outcomes by litmus tests it’s problematic always.

There is certainly stuff happening at state schools, where they are mandating curricula or forcing books out of libraries that is stifling free speech. And there is some chilling of speech by those on temporary visas. That is terrible. But the overwhelming inhibition on Ivy League campuses remains of chilling conservative speech. Among students and faculty you have to be brave to support the Supreme Court’s judgments on affirmative action.

Somewhat later:

Summers: The Democrats acted with due process and circumspection, engaged in dialogue and did not summarily cancel funding. Even on the harshest judgment of the Ivy League on anti-Semitism, it is not Bob Jones University on race. When American companies make unwise decisions, government does not replace their management or change their taxation. Government should not be imposing strategy on universities. I don’t think government should start controlling things. There is a big difference between what is wrong with universities and what government power should legitimately be used to correct.

Bruni: Although Trump’s fusillade of provocative, puerile and just plain preposterous statements is such that we soon forget most of them, I remember clearly when he proclaimed: “I love the poorly educated!” I think he meant it. And I don’t think his assault on academia is primarily about squelching antisemitism or countering ideological conformity and liberal bias, though the latter at least is certainly relevant. But the attacks are more a cornerstone of his larger push to delegitimize — to vilify — experts and expertise, which get in the way of his complete control of the narrative and his twisting of truth. Am I too cynical?

Douthat: Certainly Trump is interested in delegitimizing institutions that challenge his claims about reality. (Though he’s still pretty happy to invoke Ivy League credentialism when he’s self-promoting — just get him started on his uncle who was a professor at M.I.T.!) But for people inside these institutions, the key lesson of Trump’s political success is that they already weren’t taken seriously as disinterested truth-seeking enterprises, and that the populist critique was pushing on an open door.

There's more at the link.