Growing concerns about AI’s sweeping takeover of American Universities

TDT | Manama

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There is no gainsaying that the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the last few years has generated a paradigm shift in the way laypeople, think-tanks, and officials all over the globe used to address daily issues and make future projections. Indeed, with AI, humanity has, albeit to various degrees, entered a brave new era, marked by an abrupt reconfiguration of pre-AI systems regulating human societies and worldviews.

In the US, pundits and commentators tend to jump headlong onto the marketplace to reflect on the omnipresence of such technology and draw conclusions regarding its implications for job security in the face of inevitable automation. While some have adopted a gloomy stance toward the new machine by highlighting the radical replacement of workers with chatbots, others have chosen the path of least resistance, hailing a potential transition into a smarter world where new employment opportunities will very likely be created.

Such controversy has lately spilled over into the US political scene as well, manifesting itself in a tugof-war between states and national governments over AI regulation. Heretofore, all US fifty states have introduced preemptive legislative measures to rationalize the use of AI, especially in the areas of biological activities, children’s entertainment, and economic restructuring. At the national level, however, the incumbent US President, Donal Trump, has chosen to stand at the other end of the spectrum, striking back with an executive order on December 11, 2025, intended to ban any form of oversight over AI, threatening to withhold federal funding from those states bent on enforcing “onerous AI laws.”

Notwithstanding the legitimacy of such political and economic concerns, the debate, however, tends to lose sight of another no less important casualty of AI largescale disruptions: tertiary education. A growing number of US scholars and researchers have recently drawn attention to AI’s potential threat to human agency through its systemic debilitation of the faculties of critical thinking and creativity. These critics, while cognizant of the inherent repercussions of AI on labor and democracy, deem it more urgent to scrutinize how AI is jeopardizing to the quality of education, in the first place.

The question perplexing a sizeable number of these educators is who is controlling higher education in the US and to what end. Media theorist Neil Postman, for instance, believes that the ascension of AI is not an arbitrary development, but rather an extension of a culture dominated by a “technopoly” where automation and digitalization reign supreme. Others like professors Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades refer to the rise of “academic capitalism,” a situation where postsecondary education is shaped by the heavy hand of the global economy, turning technology into a control panel powerful enough to redefine the meaning and scope of teaching and learning. Accordingly, what is commonly popularized as efficiency, innovation, and creativity is in actual fact a complete surrender to technological imperatives and instructions. Invaluable educational attributes, such as reflection, dialogue, knowledge, discernment, and productivity, have, for the most part, been substituted with automation, optimization, data delivery, commodity, and prompting. The upshot, Philosophy professor Troy Jollimore ominously predicts, will be seen in those “Massive numbers of students [who] are going to emerge from university … essentially illiterate.”

Nothing is more outrageous to educators than the preposterous connection of AI with students’ cheating. On this specific point, educators have proved to be quite resilient. While powerless to regulate AI, they have, nonetheless, devised their own means to curb its repercussions on the quality of educational outcomes…. (to be continued)

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Daily Tribune)