On diversity, equity, AI cheating, and the cynicism destroying higher education (from students, professors, and administrators alike)

Academia's emperor has dreadlocks (and likely a Claude account). Otherwise he's naked as a jaybird. No wonder students view their six-figure educations as a joke.

Back in those halcyon days before the Berlin Wall fell, the good citizens of the Soviet Union had a saying: When they begin to pay us, we will begin to work.

I remembered those words as I wrote of the farce of Jason Arday, a recently resigned black professor at the University of Cambridge whose own writing suggests he is barely literate. In fact, Arday looks to have used an artificial intelligence engine for his resignation letter.

Then again, why should he be different from his students?

Nothing exposes the crisis in elite academia more clearly than the student rush to use AI to cheat.

Universities like Duke have admissions rates in the low single digits. By definition, their students are smart and motivated. Yet a huge number of them now use AI tools to write their papers and take-home exams.

This trend reveals a disturbing lack of honor among young people seeking to join the top ranks of American business and civic life. But it also reflects a profound student cynicism about the value of the education these schools provide — at a cost that is now roughly six figures per year.

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(In Lenin we trust!)

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And nothing drives that cynicism like the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies that have spread like ivy for a generation and choked out their hosts.¹

For college students to use an AI engine to “read” assignments or write papers or take tests is to say:

You hired professors and administrators who are patently unqualified because of the color of their skin, and we all know it, and none of us can say anything because we’ll be shouted down as racist.

You admitted students who are patently unqualified because of the color of their skin, and we all know it, and none of us can say anything because we’ll be shouted down as racist. (By the way, you have essentially destroyed grading, because those unqualified students cannot compete. So everyone gets As, all the time.)

You’ve filled our days with nonsense “initiatives” designed to keep these folks busy and happy, from “land acknowledgements” to questionnaires about “allyship” to highly paid consultants chasing “systemic racism” that hasn’t existed in decades, and we all know it, and none of us can say anything because we’ll be shouted down as racist.

You have turned the purpose of higher education — free inquiry, free debate, the steeling of young minds on difficult ideas and debate — into a bureaucratized joke.

Guess what? We get it. And since diversity now means that everyone gets As, all the time (see above), we might as well spend these four years doing what we like and letting AI handle the coursework.

Your quest for diversity uber alles means that instead of an education, you are offering me four years of credentialing and babysitting and extracurriculars that hopefully will win me a job on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley — and if not, into a medical or law school where I can start the process over again.

It is to say:

When you begin to teach me, I will begin to learn.

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Support the perspectives you won’t get anywhere else (especially not from AI!)

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Will the schools hear their students?

And if they do, will they care?

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(Yesterday’s piece, if you missed it)

1. Technically ivy does not actually choke the trees it encircles, blah blah blah, tell it to Google.