One of the more persistent modern promises of education is that students should become more capable and adaptable humans. That said, we are familiar with how those terms are shaped by social, economic, and institutional conditions. Certainly this has been the case with the impact on higher education not only of AI as a technology but also as a marketplace discourse.

Along these lines, Forbes Councils Member and Arizona State professor Sethuraman Panchanathan has published some views on “Reinventing Higher Education For The AI Age.” The arguments are familiar, and tbh, I think the main point was to market some project ASU is doing, so you can read about that if you want.

The familiar arguments are not only familiar in the context of AI but also echo neoliberal arguments about higher education that are 30-40 years old. These are matters one could read about in Bill Readings University in Ruins for example. In the Forbes piece, the operative term is “mindset.” Panchanathan offers “curiosity-driven research,” “working in practical environments,” “an entrepreneurial mindset,” and “global engagement.” If you are wondering, yes, the example he gives of how to develop a mindset is to start with an entrepreneurial one. What is that?

“This is broader than just starting a business. It’s about getting attention and resources for something before there is proof that it will work. Students in all disciplines need to develop this mindset, and the curriculum must support every student in taking risks and understanding how to learn from failure.”

To begin, assigning these qualities to entrepreneurialism, as if that was their origin, is weak intellectual sauce. As if business leaders taught us the value of taking risks and learning from failure. What a great bunch of guys! I guess that’s the kind of thing they write in Forbes.

The neoliberalization of higher education includes the increasing social and political demand that universities compete in a capitalist marketplace. That’s why contemporary universities are largely organized around how they can make money through tuition, research, and other investments. I don’t say that to suggest some prior golden age, but simply that these market-driven pressures increased in the Reagan era and have never stopped increasing.

There are historical-material reasons why student subjectivity became a significant site of contention in rhetoric and composition from Mina Shaughnessy into the post-process pedagogies of the 1990s. Universities became defined as places where individual subjects developed their “human capital.” This is the fundamental justification for making individuals pay for their college educations.

In my 2000 Theory & Event article “Free Action or Resistance: Cultural Critique in the Classroom,” I discussed how pedagogies from different political perspectives held in common the practice of defining students in terms of a lack. (E.g. “students can’t write.”). I come around to an idea, also forwarded in Byron Hawk’s A Counter-History of Composition, on developing pedagogies without predetermined endpoints. Later, in the final chapter of The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition, I put these concerns into technological matters.

This book began with Derrida’s question, “Where is to be found the
communitary place and the social bond of a ‘campus’ in the cyberspatial age of the computer, of tele-work, and of the World Wide Web?” (2002, p. 210). It is a question of technology and of the future of higher education, but more fundamentally it is a question of space and time and community. The “university without conditions,” as Derrida terms the institution he investigates, must deconstruct the cybernetic simulation of knowledge, individuality, and institutional community in order to allow the unfolding of the event, the unpredictable, even impossible, becoming of the materiality of distributed cognition. Only through such a process, as unlikely (indeed impossible) as it may be, will the humanities move beyond its allegiances to enlightenment and modernity and participate in the coming community of singular beings, whatever they may be.

[I was more optimistic twenty years ago.]

My main point though is that this conversation isn’t new to AI. That said, AI discourse might present the maximal assertion of human lack. The discourse says humans are too slow, inattentive, cognitively limited, unable to process enough information, etc. AI becomes the prosthesis required not only to remain economically viable but to remedy our lack. It’s not just students. AI discourse attempts to organize all human subjects by their intellectual lack and then regulate subjectivity through the technologies that provide palliative care for our doomed minds. However, here I am reminded of a joke Katherine Hayles retells in How We Became Posthuman that goes something like “I used to believe my brain was the most important part of my body, but then I realized ‘Who’s telling me that?’”

In this context, it is the neoliberal marketplace that tells us our intelligence is inadequate. Inadequate for what? Serving its neoliberal ends of maximal capitalization and profit of course. Universities find themselves in exactly the same position. They also find themselves situated as inadequate without AI. But who is telling the universities that? Within a discourse that has already situated human subjects, cultures, histories, and forms of knowledge as lacking in the face of AI, Panchanathan offers adaptability as the appropriate mindset. This is the same argument that was being made in the 80s (sans AI).

It is also the same argument that instills AI+X degrees and related curricular efforts that ground themselves on the assertion that we must prepare students for an AI-shaped future of some kind. In the meantime though, the shape of that future is aligned to market demands rather than anything that is intrinsic to AI. In fact, there is nothing intrinsic to AI that dictates an educational response.

That is to say, educating students to participate in a society where AI systems are having powerful naturalcultural effects is plainly an academic responsibility given that we are in such a situation. Framing that future in neoliberal terms is not necessary though, unless one is already beholden to the marketplace.

Indeed, in the manner that such emerging curricula separate themselves from existing disciplines, they free themselves from any long-standing intellectual or ethical obligations associated with prior fields. While new interdisciplinary paradigms can arise, under neoliberal market pressure, they also represent a kind of curricular deregulation, allowing programs to be rebuilt around whatever institutions currently identify as strategic. Again, this is not new. The explosion of various market-targeted college degrees since the 1990s provides more than enough evidence there.

This brings me back to “mindset.” As Panchanathan notes, there is risk and the possibility of failure. The market manages this risk by offloading it. It protects capital from risk by distributing consequences downward. As such, students being asked to take on an “entrepreneurial mindset” are not simply taking their own risks but are being to to accept precarity as an opportunity. But why should we accept those risks on the market’s behalf? The mindset being sold here is about learning to internalize risk-taking as the responsibility of the student rather than an unjust imposition by a market that obviously has no care for the individuals on which it places these demands.

I have a different mindset, I suppose, but it still isn’t one to impose on others. We can agree that the future is uncertain. That’s part of its charm. I can’t accept the mental gymnastics by which uncertainty becomes certainty. How does the uncertainty about AI become the institutional proclamations that we must do/teach/research AI in a particular way? Why should we accede to these demands?

In fact, rather than mutely following the market and training students to serve as a receptacle for market risks, one might imagine that learning to distinguish between the material and historical forces shaping the world and our capacities in relation to those forces would be among the most basic things a university could teach.