The Despair of the Professor in the Age of A.I.
In my writing, and in my idle thoughts, I often return to Arjuna’s lament upon surveying the battlefield of Kurukshetra and finding that he must kill his friends and family. What is his duty in that extraordinary moment? What is my duty, then, in far more ordinary and less harrowing circumstances?
This question, which unfolds throughout a conversation with Krishna, appears in the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, a book I somehow did not know existed until I took a Hinduism class in college. I was not a good student, routinely skipping class, but, worried that there would be a price to pay for my truancy and bad grades, I tried, sometimes. A few books got read, including the Gita, which I didn’t really understand until my professor—the sort of charming, gray-haired stoic found in religion departments of liberal-arts colleges across New England—explained, in a capacious and friendly way, that one should do their duty without considering the outcome. And, even though I don’t remember doing particularly well in that class, I have spent the last twenty-five years thinking about Arjuna’s despair and Krishna’s command.
When I think about whether my nine-year-old will need to go to college, I mostly hope she won’t, because I don’t think this country should rely so heavily on a credentialling system that’s far too expensive, inaccessible, and time-consuming to be worth it. But I do worry that she will miss out on experiences like mine, when a nineteen-year-old was forced to read something he wouldn’t have otherwise and was guided toward a revelation, however banal or vain, by a patient professor. How do you place a value on something like that?
There will always be idealistic, ink-stained people who want to devote their lives to scholarly pursuits—their role to inspire young people to love ideas as they do. But this transfer, more than anything else in the academy, has been increasingly blocked by A.I. in the classroom. This past April, Jane Sloan Peters, a professor of religious studies, wrote a stirring Substack post in which she described a course she had designed, some years ago, about what people throughout history have been willing to endure for their faith. The class, called “Letters from Prison,” typically culminated in students trying to synthesize an overriding theme about what they had read. “When I began teaching this course four years ago, students struggled to come up with their own themes,” Peters wrote. But, through brainstorming and revision, the students would ultimately land on some understanding that both felt personal to them and proved they had grappled with the assigned texts.
