Will AI Break the University? - by Rory Truex - Civic Forum

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Will AI Break the University?<br>Field Notes from a Tough Year

Rory Truex<br>May 19, 2026

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As I write this, my students are taking an in-person exam on Chinese Politics. Three hours, closed book, no computers, pencil and paper. It’s Saturday morning. I am sitting outside a lecture hall, and they are emerging, slowly, with cramped hands, glad to be done with the test and the semester.<br>I have been teaching for over ten years, and this is the first time I have ever done this sort of exam. My final has always been an open book take home test, where students have an eight-hour window to answer a few longer essay questions. If I gave that exam now, with some gentle prodding, Claude or ChatGPT would be able to produce A+ answers. A student could feed them the exam, syllabus, and lecture slides, and in two minutes they’d have back perfect essays. That would not have been the case two years ago.<br>Want to crawl into a pit of despair about the future of teaching and learning? Spend 10 minutes looking up student tools for the AI age. Just a few months ago, Companion.AI launched a new “homework agent” which could directly interface with Canvas, the system through which most universities produce course websites. The AI could login into Canvas, watch lectures if they were recorded, do the readings, and upload assignments on time. It could even participate in discussion boards. It was called: Einstein.

“Set him up and forget about it. Einstein checks for new assignments and knocks them out before the deadline.”<br>Fully automated cheating.<br>After a backlash and a cease and desist letter, Companion.AI wound up deleting the product and website, including old tweets trumpeting it from their 22-year-old CEO Advait Paliwal. Paliwal believed Einstein would help free students from academic labor, likening his contribution to freeing horses from their carts.<br>It’s unclear whether the whole endeavor was a publicity stunt or a flimsy attempt to make a quick buck (see great piece by Marc Watkins), but it revealed something deeper about the challenge we face in education: the moral fabric of universities is on the precipice of breaking down.<br>Integrity Tasks

Universities run on what we might call “integrity tasks”—little pieces of work that are expected to be done honestly, by a person, but with minimal policing and oversight. When a student is asked to write a paper, that’s an integrity task, the expectation being that they do the work themselves and do not plagiarize. When a journal asks for peer review of an article, the expectation is that the professor reads the article themselves and writes a thoughtful, thorough letter. When a department chair asks a full professor for a tenure letter evaluation, that professor is expected to spend one or two days reading the candidate’s work, and then to write a lengthy 3-5 page letter assessing the quality.<br>A key through line of all these tasks is that they are time consuming. I would say I spend about 20% of my time evaluating other people—writing letters of recommendation, tenure evaluations and reports, and journal reviews. Add in grading and the other forms of feedback on student work, it’s probably closer to 40% of my working hours. In the profession, the whole month of August is known as letter writing season.<br>AI introduces a gigantic moral hazard in that it substantially reduces the time taken to complete these things, if the person is willing to let an LLM do it for them. For students, an essay that would have taken away a beautiful Sunday afternoon can be completed in minutes. Worried about being caught? Run it through AIHumanize, which will take your AI written essay, and then use AI to make it sound more human. For only $10 a month!<br>Professors are not immune from these temptations. At conferences over the last few months, I’ve heard the full range of bad behavior stories already. Anthropic recently released data from a study of over 74,000 educator conversations with Claude. A full 7% of those conversations involved the educator using AI to do grading or student assessment in some way, and “when they did, 48.9% of the time they used it in an automation-heavy way (where the AI directly performs the task).” Similar practices are creeping into peer review.<br>Taken to the extreme, these behaviors could produce the shell university, where AI generated work is being passed off as human, and then in turn evaluated by another AI, again passed off as human. I was at a dinner party the other night, and someone there was bragging that he had earned a degree “before ChatGPT was invented,” the implication being that he actually did the work. We are entering a new phase in universities where degrees will be handed out, and it may well not be possible to know if the student did any work at all.<br>The current detection methods for all this are inadequate, and guidance from our institutions is… underwhelming. The...