From the Athens of Veracruz to ChatGPT

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From the Athens of Veracruz to ChatGPT<br>Norma Sancho on the emptiness of online education

Hollis Robbins and Norma Sancho<br>Jun 17, 2026

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You would think, given the explosion of posts and think pieces on the Vanderbilt state of scholarship report, following endless laments about the crisis of the humanities, that all college is sitting in rooms with great professors and great books thinking great thoughts, the main risks being Marxists and astrology.<br>How do I know there are fewer Marxists in academia than critics on X would have you think? Because if academics really were Marxists they would be coming out of the woodwork in droves to tell the story of struggle outside elite spaces, seeing the “crisis in the humanities” story as a luxury belief, per Rob Henderson. Yet there’s a lot of silence in the usual higher ed spaces about working-class students, even when one voice broke containment on Substack and X last month to articulate the struggles of isolated online students far from elite seminar rooms.

I had stopped short, reading Norma Sancho’s comment on Carl Hendrick’s post “The Death of the University Degree,” a meditation on credential value in the age of ChatGPT provoked by a change in Princeton’s honor code. Her voice is blunt and insistent. Carl, she begins, “your essay is excellent, but I think it overlooks the current reality of why many young people — and many adults — are attending high school, university, or online degree programs in the first place.” She describes an educational experience that in a perfect world would get her, too, an interview with Ross Douthat:<br>I’ll be turning 49 in a few days. For the past year I’ve been enrolled in an education program at a private online university. What I receive are videos, PDF study guides, and video-call classes where teachers lecture to students whose cameras and microphones are turned off. All our assessments are multiple-choice. There is no forum where students can meet each other, build networks, discuss ideas, or experience anything resembling an intellectual community.

“It is very sad to study this way: alone, disconnected, unseen,” Norma continues. “But this is how millions of people around the world are now ‘studying.’” In isolation, why not turn to AI?<br>ChatGPT and Claude have become, for many of us, the only available interlocutors. Not because we are intellectually lazy, but because no one else is there. No classmate responds. No teacher offers serious feedback. No institution creates a space for discussion. No human being seems to care what we are thinking or trying to understand.

I was pleased to post her comment, see it get over half a million views, and watch other higher ed writers pick up the thread. TheVanderbilt report which now dominates the discourse does not mention online education, though a conservative estimate would be that 15 to 20 million students globally are enrolled in the kind of online-only programs Norma describes, about one in twelve of the 269 million students in total. Norma describes herself as currently working-class and temporarily unemployed.1 I wanted to know more about her and reached out. Because English is not her first language, she asked to answer in writing, using DeepL to translate; no other AI involved.

Last month, you wrote, at the end of a long comment on another substack on education: “What kind of economy and educational system has made a robot feel more viable, attentive, more dialogic, and more intellectually available than the institution charging students for a degree?” I recognized this as the most succinct articulation of the central problem in higher education in the AI era. I posted it on X on May 25, along with a link to your whole comment, and was not surprised that it reached over a half million people in a day.<br>Let’s begin with your degree program, which you did not identify in your piece but I think is important for readers to know. Where are you studying and what is the program?<br>First, thank you very much, Professor Robbins, for this opportunity, and please accept my apologies for not being able to do this in another format because of my limitations with the language. I am very honored by this distinction.<br>And to answer the question, I’m currently studying for a Bachelor’s Degree in Pedagogy at Universidad UMOV S. C., whose commercial name is UMOV Academy. It is an online degree program in Mexico, and it lasts two years and ten months. The program is divided into eight four-month terms, with six courses per term, forty-eight courses in total. Students take two courses every five weeks, and each course is organized into six or seven modules, with a partial evaluation and a final evaluation at the end. The evaluations are always multiple-choice, but I should say they are not necessarily easy. You do have to read the materials. The questions usually require attention, and there is a second opportunity...