I’ve been on the faculty at Duke University for five years now, and this past one has been the most challenging and the strangest by far.
That’s not about Duke. It’s about higher education. It’s about America. It’s about dynamics — chiefly, this country’s tilt toward authoritarianism and the rapidly accelerating advances of A.I. — that render our tomorrows even hazier than usual. None of us knows what we’re in for and up against, and that confusion crystallizes on college campuses, which are by definition gateways to the future. They’re supposed to leave students with maps, routes, a destination. Not with compasses whose needles gyrate this way and that.