Institutions Can't Think on Their Own
Why would we expect anything different from students?
The Patrick Dempsey: #0124
I write weekly articles about possibility, reinvention, and the courage to begin something new.
A Few of My Favorite Things
My favorite thing higher education does is form a committee to think radically about the future—and then give it sixty minutes every other Thursday to do so.
There is something so rich about this. At so many levels.
First, there is the idea that meaningful change can happen through committee.
Second, there is the idea that transformation can happen through a group of people gathering for roughly 120 minutes a month, over three months in the fall and four months in the spring.
Third, there is the idea that whatever challenge warranted forming a committee in the first place is best addressed according to the cadence of the academic calendar. If the issue was important enough to form a committee, shouldn’t its work be completed sooner rather than later?
I Love Irony
Anyway, all of that is just to say that higher education claims to be the guardian and purveyor of learning and “critical thinking,” and so I find it passing strange that the institution itself so frequently fails to demonstrate either of those competencies—or much related to them.
This contradiction is particularly egregious on the institution’s own terms, given that institutions are run by people who attended the very institutions we are told uniquely provide access to “critical thinking” and all that goes with it.
At the highest levels of leadership, institutions tend to be staffed by people holding all the credentials the institution provides—PhDs in essentially every leadership position.
Given the logic of the claims higher education makes, these people ought to be the most adaptive, the best problem solvers, and the deepest critical thinkers.
And yet . . .
AIgnorance
Take, as just one example—totally random, nothing special about this example 😆—higher education’s response to AI.
2023: For most institutions, the response was complete ignorance. It is still unclear whether higher education leaders were aware of ChatGPT and, if they were, whether they considered that it might have any meaningful effect on the industry.
2024: A few committees were formed to begin exploring. A few institutions were “bold” enough to put policies in place banning AI.
2025: Things finally got serious 😉. Landscape analyses began. A few people went to conferences. Several faculty members started creating and sharing “AI-resilient” assignments.
2026: More AI policies. Still waiting on strategy. Still waiting on the value proposition that makes $60,000 a year worth it. Still wondering whether higher education gets it.
Through all of this, we have an institution that sells—or promises; I’m not sure which word is more appropriate—the idea that it produces the sharpest minds and the best thinkers.
More than that, higher education often implies in its discourse and marketing materials that it alone produces people uniquely capable of adapting, solving problems in real time, confronting uncertainty, and literally creating the future.
And, again, the institution is run by people who not only participated in the system that makes that promise, but who completed it!
In other words, the institution is run by the living portfolio of what the system produces.
And yet . . .
Walk a Mile
So, when confronted with the greatest technological challenge and opportunity of our lifetime—we should EXPECT to see higher education leading the world in its response. Novel approaches, bold visions, courage and commitment to respond in ways only it can.
Instead, we get this incredible combination of ignorance and resistance.
The most radical—and perhaps clearest—“strategies” we have seen so far amount to total AI and technology bans on the one hand, and ChatGPT for everyone on the other.
Neither seems particularly strategic.
Neither seems like the kind of response that should have been produced by a system that stakes its reputation on its unique ability to confront uncertainty and do something truly remarkable with it.
So, when higher education looks at students using AI to complete assignments and blames them . . .
When higher education bans AI because it cannot figure out another way . . .
When higher education, in the midst of all this, says to prospective students, “Come! We are going to teach you everything you need to succeed in a changing world” . . .
Remind me again why we should believe them?