On the rot in higher education

A veteran professor explains how AI has brought a long-simmering crisis to a boil.

NOTE TO UT READERS:

The sad story of Jason Arday — who became the youngest black professor at the University of Cambridge despite a resume that turned out to be written on toilet paper— has spotlighted the damage academia has done itself with its endless journey into the intellectual desert of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

DEI has become an excuse for colleges and universities to leave free inquiry behind and flatten standards to protect unqualified students and faculty. (Some of you have noted that even medical schools have compromised their admissions and grading to increase diversity; I will explore that issue further shortly.)

But the crisis in higher education goes past its embrace of diversity at any cost. Tuesday’s article about Arday provoked many responses. One email, from a professor at a large public university, particularly stood out. With the professor’s permission, I am publishing it below. I am not naming him or his school, for reasons that will be obvious.

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(Honest work is harder than ever to find. I hope you’ll support mine.)

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The note is long (and disheartening) but worth reading in full. The growing use of AI may be a breaking point for a deepening and accelerating crisis in academia.

The annual cost for tuition, room, and board of many four-year colleges has risen far faster than inflation for a generation. It now approaches $100,000.

Not surprisingly, these schools face ever-heavier pressure to ensure students receive degrees they have paid vast sums to get — whether or not they have actually learned anything.

Yet many twenty-something college graduates are now under- or unemployed and “downwardly mobile,” suggesting employers are increasingly wary of the value of these degrees. At some point soon, these two trend lines will cross — and only a handful of the most prestigious and richest institutions will escape unscathed.

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The email follows. I have made only minor copy edits.

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Alex:

I wanted to respond to your piece because I think you are identifying something real, particularly the cynicism that now surrounds higher education. But from where I sit, I think the root problem goes considerably deeper than DEI, admissions standards, or even AI.

I teach at XXX University and have spent the better part of a 15-year-career around college students. I also remain closely connected to high school education and athletics. That gives me a view of the educational pipeline from a couple of different angles.

At XXX, I see the entire spectrum. I teach some extraordinarily bright, curious, hardworking students who want to be challenged. They are the students who remind you why teaching can be such a rewarding profession.

But I also see students for whom college has become almost entirely transactional. I’ve also overheard students say “I’m not afraid to use my trauma.”

The objective is not necessarily to learn something difficult, develop an intellectual skill, or wrestle with an idea. The objective is to accumulate enough points to receive the grade, accumulate enough credits to receive the degree, and then use the degree to obtain the job. AI fits perfectly into that worldview.

If the assignment is perceived merely as an obstacle between the student and the credential, using Claude or ChatGPT to complete it does not feel fundamentally different from using Chegg or Quizlet [so-called “homework help” companies], a fraternity test bank, or asking a friend for last semester’s answers. AI has simply reduced the cost of outsourcing the work to almost zero.

That is why I think AI cheating is less the disease than an extraordinarily powerful diagnostic tool. It is revealing a problem that has been developing for decades.

Some of this goes back well before today’s debates about diversity. Policies such as No Child Left Behind [a federal educational standards law enacted in 2002] reflected a broader shift toward measuring educational success through standardized outcomes and institutional metrics.

Whatever the intentions of those policies, education increasingly became organized around measurable performance, progression, graduation, retention, and credentials. It also stigmatized failure, and students couldn’t fail at any age regardless of the cascading effects.

Over time, we have created powerful incentives for almost everyone in the system to keep students moving forward.

• Students want the grade.

• Parents want their children to receive the grade.

• Teachers are evaluated, formally or informally, on student outcomes.

• Schools want graduation rates.

• Universities want retention.

• Administrators want satisfied students.

• And employers want the credential.

Almost nobody in that chain is rewarded for being the person who says, “This student has not learned the material and should not advance.”

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(On the B-side, the little-known track, “Then the Chinese Took Over”)

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In fact the incentives push back against this. I am not a tenured faculty member, but I envy my tenured colleagues who stand in meetings asking why this has become what it has. I used to be on a one-year contract. I wouldn’t just be fired because that opens legal avenues. I would simply just not be renewed.

The cultural change begins long before students arrive on a college campus.

Through my involvement with high schools and athletics, I have watched the relationship among parents, teachers, coaches, and students change dramatically. There was a time when a teacher calling home created a problem for the student. Increasingly, the teacher or coach is the person who must defend the decision.

I once had a parent argue to me that their child’s right to have a cell phone during class was protected by the Constitution. It is an amusing example, but it represents something larger. Authority has shifted. Teachers are often expected to manage classrooms while having fewer meaningful tools to enforce standards, and parents increasingly intervene to remove consequences rather than reinforce them.

Let’s not talk about how we can’t suspend kids to send them home as this creates an undue burden on parents. Instead we “in school” suspend them which doesn’t do anything.

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(The 2026 College Football National Championship. Hey, the education might be bad, but at least the football’s good!)

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I could also talk about shorter attention spans and increased rates of special education students and students with disabilities both real and used to get around testing.

Students learn from that environment. They learn that deadlines are negotiable. They learn that poor performance can be appealed. They learn that consequences can often be escalated to someone above the teacher. They learn that discomfort is evidence that something has gone wrong rather (usually someone else’s fault) than an unavoidable part of learning.

Then we send those students to universities and act surprised when they approach professors the same way. Look what Michigan is doing with grades [no longer recording them in the first semester of freshman year]. We can’t even grade because the snowflakes can’t handle it. Higher education has contributed plenty to the problem.

We market universities partly as transformational intellectual experiences but increasingly operate them like customer-service organizations. Students and parents are paying enormous amounts of money, they want pools, good bathrooms and soft beds along with social outlets which understandably creates consumer expectations. They are paying for this, after all, so they should get what they’ve paid for. Universities obsess over retention, student satisfaction, graduation rates, rankings, enrollment, and placement.

Those incentives inevitably affect the classroom. If a professor sets very demanding standards, fails students who do not meet them, and receives terrible student evaluations as a result, that professor may bear much more of the cost than the institution receives from maintaining the standard.

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The rational response is predictable. Just make the course a little easier. Extend the deadline. Offer another opportunity. Round the 89.6 to a 90. Avoid the fight. Get renewed.

None of these decisions individually destroys education. Collectively, over twenty or thirty years, they change its culture.

This is where I think the problem becomes larger than any particular political ideology.

DEI bureaucracy can absolutely become part of the institutional bloat and intellectual conformity you describe. Admissions policies can create legitimate questions about standards. But I actually like XXX’s mission of let anyone come to class.

The caveat is they should just as easily be allowed to fail, but the financial consequences of that failure then make for bad pr. I worry that focusing primarily on DEI issues allows the much larger educational establishment to avoid confronting the more uncomfortable truth. We have spent decades separating credentials from mastery.

The student who uses AI to write a paper is participating in the same incentive structure as the institution that lowers standards to improve retention, the administrator who creates another initiative to demonstrate institutional progress, the parent who fights a teacher over a failing grade, and the professor who decides it is easier to give the student a B than endure another argument. Everyone is optimizing. Very few people are asking whether the student actually learned anything and don’t get me started about accreditation.

And AI may finally make that arrangement impossible to ignore because it destroys the last assumption on which much of modern education rests: that the student actually did the work being evaluated.

If a machine can write the paper, solve the homework, summarize the reading, prepare the presentation, and increasingly take the exam, then universities are going to have to answer a question they have avoided for a long time: What exactly is the student paying us to learn, and how do we know they learned it?

To me, that is the revelation buried inside the AI crisis. We have to rediscover that education is supposed to involve effort, failure, accountability, intellectual discomfort, and demonstrated mastery.

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(My work — and yours. Never AI.)

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Your closing line [in the Arday piece] was: “When you begin to teach me, I will begin to learn.” I might add the other half of the bargain: When we begin requiring students to learn, we may discover some won’t cut it.

Best

XXX