Category: colleges and universities

AI leads to massive cheating at Brown

July 10, 2026 • 8:45 am

Is it a surprise that students are using AI to cheat when they get the opportunity? I guess it does surprise some people, for a pretty clear case of cheating at Brown University made headlines at Inside Higher Ed (click on the screenshot to read).

Excerpts:

For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.

But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.

His welfare economics class typically attracted up to 30 students, but this spring he taught 86—an increase he attributes to the promised take-home exams. When the midterm came along, the average score was 96 percent.

“Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because … take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time,” Serrano said.

He knew something “fishy” was going on, and so he and his graders ran the test through ChatGPT. The AI gave answers that mirrored what his students had written, and which were “kind of correct, but very off and with a very convoluted style,” Serrano said. For example, one question asked students to prove a mathematical statement that could most obviously be done using a “direct argument,” Serrano explained. ChatGPT—and many of his students—used a “contradiction argument,” which gave the right answer but was “very contrived” and which Serrano could tell wasn’t written by a human.

Prof Serrano said he wasn’t going to fail students for cheating (the allegation can’t be proved) but would give them a final exam in class. At that announcement 18 students dropped the course and 9 decided not to take the final.

Here’s the distribution of scores for both exams, with the final in gray and the midterms in orange.  They didn’t plot a correlation, but there doesn’t appear to be one because many of the students who did terrible on the final got nearly perfect scores on the midterm:

The University turned a blind eye to this cheating—for that’s what it surely is—until Serrano went public.

In May, Serrano submitted the data shown above to Brown’s Standing Committee on the Academic Code and received no response. After he went public with his story in late June, the committee, through his department chair, asked Serrano to submit individual complaints against each student suspected of cheating, including copies of their exams, he said.

Most people with a sense of right and wrong would find this behavior unethical, tempting though it may be to cheat, but some misguided profs think that, well, if the chance to cheat is there, there’s nothing wrong with taking it. Here’s from P.Z. Myers, who found the same results with his students.

I figured this out back during the pandemic, when by necessity I had to offer exams online. Scores shot up! I knew immediately what was going on, but I didn’t punish the students — I couldn’t blame them for taking advantage of the system.

“I couldn’t blame them for taking advantage of the system”??  That’s equivalent to telling the students, “It’s okay to cheat if you can get away with it.”

More:

Asked about the university’s response to the cheating, Brown spokesperson Brian Clark told Inside Higher Ed that the procedure for investigating cheating allegations is the same whether it’s one student or several.

“Brown treats every allegation of academic integrity with the utmost seriousness. In regard to this economics course, multiple academic leaders from Brown were in touch with the faculty member who raised concerns to provide details about how the allegations raised could be formally adjudicated. To date, the faculty member has not provided the necessary details to the Standing Committee on the Academic Code to pursue this path toward resolution,” Clark wrote.

If Brown took it seriously, why didn’t they respond to Serrano’s original complaint?  Now Brown is adjusting its rules—to be easier on the students! My bolding:

As the cheating scandal unfolded in Serrano’s classroom, a Brown committee on generative AI in teaching and learning was examining how the technology was being used at the university and formalizing recommendations for how Brown can adapt and respond to AI developments. Its inaugural report was published Tuesday.

Three-quarters of Brown professors said they are concerned about students using AI to cheat, according to feedback from 105 faculty members. The same share of respondents said the same in a 2025 nationwide survey from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. As part of a set of medium-term recommendations, the committee encouraged the university to amend the College Academic Code and the graduate student code “to address GenAI realities and safeguard against misuse.”

The committee also suggests that faculty “de-emphasize punishment” and avoid highly restrictive rules around generative AI use.

There is no way to check with 100 percent accuracy whether GenAI has been employed, and norms are likely to change in the years to come,” the report states. “Moving the conversation beyond punishment also allows for open dialogue that will be necessary as Brown navigates this moment.

What is motivating this softness on cheaters, which includes relaxing bans on using AI? I can see this only as a misguided extension of the victim/oppressor narrative, with the students seen as victims. Alternatively, it could be the new mentality that sees students as customers of the university, with their high tuition buying them good grades and a degree. ChatGPT, which launched at the end of 2022, was the first program that made AI cheating widely available, and the oppressor/victim dichotomy was intensified by the killing of Geore Gloye in 202.

The problem of course is that how can you prove that a student used AI unless more than one student gives the same answer. I know there are programs to detect whether AI was used, but I also hear they’re not that good.

The only solution is to not let students have take-home exams, and ensure that in class they cannot have their laptops or phones open, or surrending them before you take the test.  (I am told by one professor that students got around this by bringing two phones and then cheating on the second phone when they ask to go to the bathroom).

It would be harder to cheat in labs, for you have to actually do something like run experiments or synthesize an organic compound. I remember that in O-chem (the bane of all biology students) we had to extract caffeine from coffee, and then you were tested when the prof looked at the melting point of your caffeine when it was tested in a glass tube. That would be hard to fake with AI, though I suppose you could purchase caffeine.  But if professors want to ensure that students don’t cheat, they’ll have to be creative.  Recent surveys show that over 60% of college students admitted to cheating in some way, and that goes up to 95% if you consider high school.

****

Here’s a tweet lauding the highest achiever and two students who apparently didn’t cheat as their midterm scores weren’t that different from their final-exam score.

h/t: Luana

Vanderbilt’s Provost Daniel Diermeier discusses the ideological erosion of universities—and the way to fix it

May 6, 2026 • 9:30 am

I’m proffering you a must-watch video, at least if you’re interested in the rise and fall of American academia.

Vanderbilt University, with its emphasis on free speech, academic freedom, and institutional neutrality, is rapidly becoming the University of Chicago of the South—or should I say that The University of Chicago is the Vanderbilt of the North? For Vanderbilt has been transformed since hiring the University of Chicago’s previous Provost, Daniel Diermeier, as its Chancellor (i.e., President).  Diermeier is implementing the Chicago Principles in a big way at Vanderbilt. In fact, he’s doing better than Chicago. For example, when pro-Palestinian protestors illegally occupied a university building in Vanderbilt in 2024, the protestors were removed after 22 hours, with some students arrested and others suspended.

In contrast, when this happened four times at Chicago (i.e., violations of University rules during anti-Israel demonstrations), nothing happened to the students. Some of them, and lik-minded faculty, were arrested after a sit-in in our Admissions Office, but all charges were dropped. Bachelor’s degrees with temporarily withheld here from a few later protestors, but then the degrees were granted soon thereafter. At Chicago, violations of university rules during protests—invariably pro-Palestinian protests—are met with no punishment, which of course simply encourages further rules violations. When inquiring about this laxity, I was told that it would be the worst possible optics if the University police were seen to “lay hands on protestors.”

So here’s a one-hour talk by Chancellor Diermeier at the Heterodox Academy meeting at UC Berkeley (he’s introduced by the UCB Chancellor). The Youtube notes are below.

Centered on the theme “The Value of Viewpoint Diversity: Why It Matters and How to Practice It Well”, this conference offers actionable insights, fosters rich intellectual exchange, and brings together individuals from across the region who are invested in the future of higher education.

Notice that Diermeier speaks without notes, yet the speech is well constructed and logical. Kudos to him. At the beginning he outlines three areas of inquiry, which I’ve put in bold. I’ve also added comments.

Progress

Diermeier argues that there has been progress in free expression of universities: there is now less shouting down of speakers—something he attributes largely to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). To see if he’s right, you can check FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database. So far, there have been 98 deplatformings or attempted deplatformings in 2026, and the year isn’t half over. I’m not sure that this isn’t an increase rather than a decrease over previous years. You can count them if you wish.

Diermeier is also glad that institutional neutrality is spreading rapidly: more than 140 schools, he says, have adopted some kind of position of being institutionally neutral—that is, taking no official position on political, moral, or ideological issues unless they have a direct influence on the stated mission of a university.  I was dubious of this figure, but he’s right. Here’s a chart from an article in Free the Inquiry showing the remarkable rise in U.S. and Canadian universities adopting institutional neutrality. Look at the big jump starting in 2024!

And there’s also been some improvements in the UK as reported by Times Higher Education: click to read (h/t Jez):

Finally, Diermeier states that the intrusive and ideologically extreme versions of DEI are becoming less powerful in universities. Here he’s right, too, though that may disappear after Trump goes. Extreme forms of DEI will certainly return if we get a Democratic President—one of the bad side effects of Democrats, especially “progressive” Democrats, gain power.

Principle is the second area of Diermeier’s talk. His topic is the answer to the question, “What is the purpose of a univesity?”  And here he has no doubts, for the purpose is to produce “pathbreaking research and transformative education”—production of knowledge and conveying this knowledge to society via publications or other scholarly outlets.

He goes on to discuss the importance of free speech and emphasizes that it’s not the same thing as academic freedom, a point I’ve made repeatedly. As a private citizen I am free to espouse creationism as much as I want, but I am not free to teach creationism—or other palpable falsehoods—in my biology classes. You can’t say anything you want as a professor teaching classes.

Diermeier takes up the issue of the meeting: “viewpoint diversity”, which many people think is the real kind of diversity that universities should strive for. But he notes that although viewpoint diversity is a worthy goal if it’s meant to buttressfree speech, he’s not clear about what the term really means. Diermeier notes that viewpoint diversity as a desideratum is really the byproduct of a more important goal: preventing the erosion of scholarly standards by political or ideological principles. If that erosion is taking place, as it is in many areas (science is somewhat of an exception, but, as Luana and I showed, the erosion is even affecting biology), then it enforces a conformity that stifles free speech and academic freedom. Thus, if you prevent that kind of erosion and its chilling effect on speech, viewpoint diversity should automatically inrease.

Diermeier then gives several examples of the kind of symptoms we see when academic fields are afflicted with ideological erosion. The symptoms are “citation justice,” “positionality statements,” and “avoidance of trans issues” (he means the fear of academics to even discuss trans issues).  I’ve never heard a college president be so open in opposing these trends, but he’s right.

Politics is Diermeier’s third topic, and this is where he suggests remedies.  He notes that ideology isn’t pervasive in academia, guessing that about 85% of faculty are committed to doing their academic mission—investigating the areas of interest to them, like me working on speciation in fruit flies. But, he says, the other 15% “have political commitments that they consider essential to who they are as scholars.:” Examples of these people, in my view, are Chicago professors like Alireza Doostdar and Eman Abdelhadi, pro-Palestinian scholars who are always spouting off  or demonstrating against Israel. Abdelhadi is reported as saying this:

Abdelhadi. . . . described the University [of Chicago] as “evil” and “a colonial landlord” in her remarks, which centered on the topic of political organizing in one’s community.

“Why would I organize here? I don’t care about this institution. Like I don’t—like fuck the University of Chicago, it’s evil. Like, you know? It’s a colonial landlord. Like, why would I put any of my political energy into this space,” Abdelhadi said at the conference. “And I kind of had a moment of disdain for people who spent a lot of time doing that.”

“The genocide really collapsed that and made me realize two things,” she continued. “One is that, well, my students need me. So, it was like: ‘Oh, I actually have to organize here to take care of my students, who I do care about.’ But I also realized—and I think this is a painful lesson that a lot of us in the Palestine solidarity movement have been learning—is that we don’t have power.”

Despite her criticisms of the University’s role as a “landlord, a healthcare provider, [and] a police force,” she described UChicago as “a place where [she has] access to thousands of people that [she] could potentially organize” politically.

In other words, damn the scholarship; she is here to ideologically convert “thousands of students.”  This is what Diermeier means by the “other 15%.”  He adds that people with such an agenda are mostly on the Left, and yes, that is also correct.

How do we fix this? In the Q&A session beginning 44 minutes in, this is precisely the question that Abby Thompson of UC Davis asks Diermeier, and his answer isn’t completely satisfying: he says that the faculty must organize and stand together against this kind of ideological erosion.  My response is that that’s way easier said than done.

But I’ve gone on too long, and my summary is no substitute for listening to this engaging talk. It’s the best discussion of the state of American universities that I’ve heard since I started teaching:

The University of Chicago curriculum grows increasingly “progressive”

March 17, 2026 • 11:00 am

Over at the Heterodox Stem site, Iván Marinovic, a professor at Stanford, has hit on a way to measure wokeness in college curricula. He uses key words to distinguish “ideological and activist” courses from those that hew to the “Western intellectual tradition” (note the caveats in his piece), and shows that, using this measure, the curriculum of the University of Chicago over the 13 years from 2012 to2025 has more than doubled the percentage of courses whose description include woke words, while the percentage of courses described with “Western canon” words has remained relatively constant. Marinovic calls this process “curriculum degradation,” and notes this:

The University of Chicago occupies a unique position in American higher education. Its undergraduate Core Curriculum, built on the Hutchins-era Great Books model, has historically been the strongest institutional commitment to the Western canon at any major research university. If curriculum degradation is occurring even at Chicago, it is likely occurring everywhere.

Click the title below to see the article:

Here’s Marinovic’s methods

We classify every course in a university catalog using two keyword lists: a progressive list and a Western canon list, as described below. We assign a course to a category if its title or description contains at least one keyword from the category’s keyword list.

We matched via word-boundary regular expressions on the combined title and description text (case-insensitive). Word-boundary matching ensures that partial matches are avoided (e.g., the term “race” does not match “interface” or “brace”). Each course’s title and description are concatenated into a single text field; if any keyword from a given list appears within that text, the course is flagged for that category.

The progressive keyword list comprises approximately 55 terms and phrases signaling engagement with progressive social frameworks, diversity/equity/inclusion initiatives, or critical identity scholarship. These terms are organized into eleven thematic sub-categories, shown in Table 1.

Here’s Table 1:  Progressive-signal keyword list by thematic category.

And the Western canon method:

The Western canon keyword list comprises approximately 45 terms and phrases signaling engagement with the traditional Western intellectual and literary canon, spanning classical antiquity through the Enlightenment. These terms are organized into six thematic sub-categories, shown in Table 2.

This is  Table 2: Western-canon keyword list by thematic category.

The example school chosen (Marinovic suggests that this be done for other schools as a preliminary indicator of what’s going on in them):

We extract course data from thirteen annual catalogs (2012–2013 through 2024–2025). After deduplicating crosslisted courses, which appear under multiple department codes, we obtain 21,381 unique courses across 114 departments. Departments are mapped to broad areas: Humanities, Social Sciences, STEM, Professional, and Other.

Figure 1 presents the central finding. The progressive signal rose from 12.7% of the catalog in 2012–2013 to 28.3% in 2024–2025—more than doubling over thirteen years. The canon signal dropped from 13.2% to 11.9%. The progressive-to-canon ratio consequently rose from 1.0× (parity) to 2.4×.

Now you can say that this is obvious because “wokeness” or “progressivism” is a fairly recent phenomenon, and has invaded academia since most professors are liberals or Democrats. And that invasion is expected to be reflected in course content.  But this index is a way of measuring the extent of that invasion (or “degradation” as the author calls is), and seeing which universities and which feels have been the most “degraded.”

Marinovic also divided up the proportion of “progressive” versus “canon” courses in each of four area: the humanities, the social sciences, STEM (science, technology, enginnering and mathematics), and professional areas, presumably courses in medicine, business, and the laws. The conclusion, presumably for the final period, is shown in Table 3 below:

Table 3 shows that the progressive signal is highest in the Social Sciences (27.4%) and Humanities (24.6%). The progressive signal is naturally lower in STEM (7.6%) but still unexpectedly high given the technical nature of STEM content.

Indeed, I have personal experience with the increasing “progressivization” of the biological sciences:

Marinovic proposes that we might make Curriculum Content Indices for many schools, saying it takes only a few hours to do this if course information is publicly available.  How would we use thse?

Such an index would allow prospective students to assess how much of a university’s catalog engages the Western intellectual tradition versus ideological content; donors to direct funding toward institutions that maintain intellectual breadth, and policymakers to monitor trends and evaluate the effects of reform efforts.

Finally, Marinovic gives an important caveat about the data and how it should be used:

A word of caution is in order. Keyword-based textual analysis of course descriptions is a blunt instrument. A course flagged by our progressive keyword list may turn out, on closer inspection, to be a rigorous scholarly treatment of the topic; conversely, a course that escapes detection may nonetheless promote an activist agenda in practice. The signals we measure should therefore be understood as a noisy first approximation—useful for identifying broad trends and prompting further inquiry, but never a substitute for substantive evaluation of what is actually taught. Policymakers, in particular, should resist the temptation to use simple keyword counts as the basis for funding decisions or regulatory action. Our goal is to promote transparency and informed conversation, not to supply a scorecard that short-circuits careful judgment.

As far as I know, the University of Chicago is the only school to be vetted this way, but many universities have their course catalogue—though not necessarily the course descriptions—online and could be crunched in this way.  I’d love, for example, to see similar data from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as Columbia University, Barnard College, and, of course, Reed College, Swarthmore, Harvard, and Smith. And how could we forget Oberlin?

Graduate-student union strike looming at Harvard

March 11, 2026 • 10:18 am

It must be strike season at American universities. Spring seems to be the time when well-paid, privileged, and entitled graduate students look to their unions—unions like the United Auto Workers—to demand even higher wages, other privileges, and, as I posted yesterday, political statements by some universities.

As I reported yesterday, there’s an impending graduate-student strike at Columbia, with the union demanding not only big salary increases for the students, but also that the University do all manner of anti-Israel things, like divesting from Israel and withdrawing from opening a program in Tel Aviv. That seems to me a violation of institutional neutrality, and I trust that Columbia won’t en

Now Harvard is follow suit, threatening a strike about wages, though fortunately there are no demands there about Israel. (It’s unlikely that any union demands related to Israel would be accepted by either university, as they’ve both been subject to lawsuits for ongoing antisemitism.)

As the article in the Harvard Crimson reports, both teaching fellow and research assistants (two ways that grad students can get paid while getting advanced degrees) want raises, with teaching fellows demanding a huge increase in pay.

Harvard is not biting, so a strike may be impending.

Click the link to read the Crimson article:

This is a bit complex; see what you make of it.  First, the demands (Crimson quotes indented):

Harvard rejected graduate student workers’ demands for sweeping wage increases at a Tuesday bargaining session, countering with more modest raises and declining to equalize pay between teaching fellows and research assistants.

The proposals come as contract negotiations between Harvard and Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers stretch past a year and union members vote in an ongoing strike authorization vote launched last Tuesday.

Last month, HGSU-UAW proposed a plan to close the wage gap between teaching fellows and research assistants, which would raise TF pay by roughly 74 percent — bringing it in line with the equivalent of a 10-month RA salary. The proposal also included a 12 percent increase to base salaries and annual raises of five percent.

Harvard instead offered a 10 percent raise over four years and a nearly 3 percent raise in the first year, amounting to annual raises of roughly 2.5 percent, according to a Harvard spokesperson.

It declined to match TF and RA monthly pay, according to HGSU-UAW president Sara V. Speller.

It appears, though that TF and RA pay is the same for the first four years of graduate fellowships:

Under Harvard’s current pay structure, graduate students earn roughly $50,000 annually during the first four years of their program, typically comprising two years of fellowship funding and two years of teaching fellowships supplemented with salary top ups and summer funding.

But those supplements expire after four semesters and summer funding ends after four years. During the remainder of their time at Harvard, many graduate students rely solely on teaching fellowships — which pay roughly $6,500 per section.

Now $50,000 is certainly enough to live, even in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notice that this is appears to be a minimum salary, as there is summary salary and diverse “top ups”.  After four years, you can either teach or be an RA, and that seems to be when the differential kicks in.  I know that in the biological sciences there’s no substantial disparity even after four years, as they somehow find money to adequately support all students, but perhaps it’s in the humanities where they are demanding salary increases. And I’m unable to find out much about the humanities given the time constraints of time for writing posts.

Given that no student has to pay tuition, and the salary is what the university gives them on top of tuition remission, I was told that in biology the students are sitting pretty throughout their entire graduate career, even if they have to teach after four years. They are not making $6500 per year.  In fact, they’re getting paid well on top of a free education at Harvard, so one may argue that these kinds of union demands are excessive.  One of those who feel that way is reader Bat, who who called my attention to the Crimson article and commented,

Much like scholarship uni athletics and the obscenities of NIL pay [universities now paying student athletes] and free agency portals for colleges, I just think none of this [graduate-student unions] has a place in higher education.

Throw the rascals out.  Plenty of hungry and bright applicants in the sea (as you informed Harvard when turning them down for grad school years ago if I recall correctly).

Sometimes we geezers are right.  You kids get off my lawn!

College essays change for the worse, rendered ineffectual by both how universities use them and how students can cheat using AI

February 24, 2026 • 11:03 am

Today’s article, by Liza Libes, was published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative think tank in Raleigh, North Carolina.

In its decision of the two cases Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court strongly limited the role of race in college admissions.  Using race as a prima facie criterion for admission was declared unconstitutional, but race could still be considered in admissions in a limited way. As the decision of the Harvard case said on page 8 (both were decided together)

At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. 

Everyone immediately speculated that, because many colleges are determined to continue using race as a criterion for admission, they would try to circumvent the Court’s decision by asking students, in their admissions essays, to describe how they overcame hardships or would contribute to the university community, realizing that students would slip in race or ethnicity in these essays to lubricate their admission. As Libes describes in her piece (click screenshot below to read), that’s exactly what was done in North Carolina.

Libes also stresses the importance of real writing—as opposed to AI—as a skill that will help students in their later lives, for of course one can get AI to write essays along the lines of the themes above. I did that for one admissions essay (see below).

First, why students should learn to write well with their own brains and hands, and why colleges should ask for more than boilerplate essays designed to foster racial diversity or assess students’ ideologies. Libes’s extracts are indented:

Despite what our schools may have students believe about the relative uselessness of writing, strong writers achieve disproportionate professional success because good writing is a proxy for creative thinking—and creative thinkers become society’s visionaries. Take Steve Jobs, who was a storyteller before he was a programmer, or Thurgood Marshall, who reshaped American law not only through legal mastery but through powerful rhetoric. These mavericks have gone down in history not necessarily for their technical proficiency but for their aptitude for creativity.

Writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.Writing is the best tool we have to showcase creative thought.

. . . A good writer is therefore a strong thinker—and this distinction transcends academic disciplines. In my counseling practice, for instance, I routinely observe smart STEM students producing more insightful essays than average humanities students, because good writing is not so much a measure of technical ability as it is a proxy for the capacity to express ideas. Because creative thinking is invaluable in any walk of life, writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.

I suppose that part of Libes’s job is to prepare students for college admissions, as she’s not on a faculty.  But I’m heartened by her observation that STEM students write better essays than humanities students.  I have no experience of whether that’s true, as I never taught humanities students.

According to Libes, the changing of the college admissions essay, which began as a way to keep Jews out of elite colleges by looking for “Protestant values,” started after the banning of racial quotas in the Bakke case (1978):

In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, however, with many universities forced to drop their racial quotas, the college essay evolved into a tool for admissions officers to gain a glimpse of applicants’ “backgrounds and perspectives.” Soon, the college essay became less about the discriminatory idea of “fit” and more about the ideas that students could bring to the intellectual table.

Around the same time, the revamped college essay shifted admissions practices towards a more holistic evaluative model that relied less on grades and test scores than on the applicant’s intellectual potential as a whole. In one sense, this model is still in use today: I have students with perfect GPAs and SAT scores who not only fail to secure admission to “elite” colleges but who are also destined to land in menial professional roles—not because they aren’t smart but because they have never learned to effectively express their ideas. In theory, the college essay should be an effective tool to separate “smart but dull” from “smart and interesting” students. Though many college-consulting professionals have expressed doubts about the viability of the college essay in the face of generative AI, so-called large language models will only ever fall into the category of “smart but dull,” giving truly visionary students a chance to shine by demonstrating their capacity for original thinking.

These changes, then, apparently occurred between the early Sixties and the Bakke decision in 1978:

For a brief moment in time—the halcyon decades following the Civil Rights era—the college essay did indeed allow strong writers and thinkers to rise to the top of our society. In his book On Writing the College Application Essay, for instance, former Columbia admissions officer Harry Bauld wrote that the college essay “shows you at your alive and thinking best.” That was 1987. Today, colleges seem to be doing everything they can to move the college essay away from the model of “thinking” prowess towards the infamous doctrine of “fit.”

And so college essays have degenerated into exercises that allow admissions offices to judge both the rcial and ideological “fit” of students to a given school. Libes uses as examples schools on  in North Carolina. Get a load of this:

Of the five most competitive colleges in North Carolina—Duke, Davidson, Wake Forest, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State—three ask the ubiquitous “fit” question, prompting students to identify their reasons for wishing to attend these universities in a short-answer statement. [JAC: as you see below, the University of Chicago also asks a “fit” question.] Duke explicitly uses the language of “values” in its prompt, suggesting that the university cares less about academic preparation than it does about the morals of each individual applicant. Share the wrong moral values—conservatism, religious traditionalism, or moral absolutism, among others—and risk facing a rejection letter in your inbox the coming spring.

The “fit” question is not the only way these colleges screen for values. UNC-Chapel Hill and Wake Forest both insist that students demonstrate their readiness to make contributions to their “community,” thereby favoring students with a natural bent towards communal rather than individualistic values. Wake Forest, in fact, has no reservations about framing its “community” prompt in terms of social justice:

Dr. Maya Angelou, renowned author, poet, civil-rights activist, and former Wake Forest University Reynolds Professor of American Studies, inspired others to celebrate their identities and to honor each person’s dignity. Choose one of Dr. Angelou’s powerful quotes. How does this quote relate to your lived experience or reflect how you plan to contribute to the Wake Forest community?

Similarly, Wake Forest asks students to identify their top-five favorite books. While this might seem an innocuous and even intellectually worthy question, there is no doubt that a student who includes Born a Crime by Trevor Noah will fare better in the admissions process than a student who dares to list Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Oy gewalt: that Wake Forest question seems to be there to weed out students who don’t have the correct “progressive” ideology! And does Wake Forest also give a selection of Maya Angelou quotes, or does it assume that students already know her books? If they don’t, they’ll be scurrying like termites to read them ASAP.

And Duke, which I’ve realized is woker than I knew, raises the issue of the goodness of diversity, and explicitly incorporates that in a question. You know the students are going to go full Kendi with this one:

Adapting to the rise of wokeness in 2014, for instance, Duke added the following college-essay prompt:

Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had to help us understand you better—perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background—we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke.

But with the rise of Trumpism and the suppression of DEI and wokeness in universities, Libes notes that essay questions are now concentrating on the value of viewpoint diversity, which Libes says is “this year’s new ‘it’ essay.” She concludes by once again emphasizing real essays that inspire independent thought rather than ticking off presumed boxes about race and ideology:

If colleges wish to remain institutions devoted to intellectual excellence rather than moral choreography, they must abandon their obsession with “fit” and return to the college essay’s original purpose: to identify students most capable of independent thought.

It is precisely those students who go on to shape ideas, build institutions, and sustain our free, pluralistic society.

Libes doesn’t deal with AI so much (see below), but her essay is well worth reading, and inspired me to look up the University of Chicago’s admissions essays. My school is famous for asking unusual and sometimes off-the-wall questions aimed at demonstrating a student’s ability to think. And commercial sources publicize them during the admissions cycle, to let students see what they’re in for and to offer students “help” by producing company-written answers for a fee (I consider this unethical). You can see the list of admissions questions for 2025-2026 at the commerical site here (“we can help you draft in time for submission”). Sadly, the only required question is of the anodyne type seen above:

Question 1 (Required)

How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.

A big yawn for that one! It’s a “fit” question like the ones in North Carolina.  HOWEVER, we offer seven other essays that are far more interesting as gauges of creativity, and applicants must choose to answer just one of these in addition to Question 1. I’ll show you just three:

Essay Option 1

In an ideal world where inter-species telepathic communication exists, which species would you choose to have a conversation with, and what would you want to learn from them? Would you ask beavers for architectural advice? Octopuses about cognition? Pigeons about navigation? Ants about governance? Make your case—both for the species and the question.

Essay Option 2

If you could uninvent one thing, what would it be — and what would unravel as a result?

Essay Option 6

Statistically speaking, ice cream doesn’t cause shark attacks, pet spending doesn’t drive the number of lawyers in California, and margarine consumption isn’t responsible for Maine’s divorce rate—at least, not according to conventional wisdom. But what if the statisticians got it wrong? Choose your favorite spurious correlation and make the case for why it might actually reveal a deeper, causative truth.

Now THOSE are questions worth offering, and do you really need the required question to assess a student’s ability?

But there is one big problem: AI can answer all of these questions, and better than most students. As an example, I chose the Option 1 question, about telepathy, and sent it to Luana to put into her paid AI bot. I will put the bot’s answer below the fold. But do read it because it’s amazingly good and, to me at least, indistinguishable from a human answer. In fact, it’s much better than I think many high-school students could write. THAT is why they use AI, and why Luana thinks that AI spells the death of humanities in liberal-arts schools.

In the end, then, given the existence of AI and its ubiquitous use by students, is there really any point to asking essay questions? I doubt it, especially because you can “guide” the AI bot by asking for specific things to appear.  After due cogitation, I decided that universities should require only four things for admission, none of them essays:

  1. High-school grades
  2. SATs or ACT standardized test scores. Sadly, these are optional at the University of Chicago, and 80% of American colleges and universities either do not require test scores or forbid submitting test scores. (Grok says 90-93% don’t require them, though in 2015 60-65% of them did.) Doing away with test requirements is a big mistake.  There is no downside to using such scores; they were banned or made optional solely as a way to increase ethnic diversity, even though an article in the NYT shows that using standardized tests does not hurt diversity.and is also the best predictor of success in college, success in getting into graduate school, and success in the workplace in later life.
  3. Letters of recommendation. (These are not great, as students won’t ask for letters unless they know they’ll get good ones. In fact, I’ve been asked by students requesting letters from me to assure them that I’d write a good one.)
  4. Personal interviews.  You can tell a lot about a person from a 20-minute interview. Unfortunately, those have been used, as at Harvard, as a tool to weed out students—in their case Asian students, who were deemed from interviews to not be as “personable” as other students. That this was a bogus way to reduce the percentage of Asians admitted came from data showing that the difference appeared only when Harvard staff did the interviews, not when alumni were recruited to do interviews.

Some schools, like those concentrating on music, art, or fashion design, require submitting samples of your work, which cannot (as of yet) be faked by AI.

The four criteria above should suffice to properly assess students.  And standardized tests should always be required.  I’m hoping for the day when the University of Chicago realizes that.

Click “continue reading” to see the AI answer to the essay option 1 (on telepathy) below. We didn’t specify a word limit, though both essays that Grok produced were close to 500 words (I show just one response).  Thanks  to Luana for interacting with the bot.

Continue reading “College essays change for the worse, rendered ineffectual by both how universities use them and how students can cheat using AI” →

The University of Chicago funds big project on (Israeli) “scholasticide”

February 20, 2026 • 10:50 am

The other day I wrote about a course in “Liberatory Violence” given by U of C professor Alireza Doostdar, a course that seemed to me to be (while probably not violating academic freedom) designed to propagandize students—largely against Israel. (Doostdar has a long history of anti-Israeli activism, and is director of our Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion.)  While I can’t say that the course should be deep-sixed, I can say that it’s likely to promote hatred of Jews and Israel, which Doostdar sees as guilty of “Zionist settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.”  Ah, three big lies in one sentence!

But it’s one thing to teach a permissible but dubious course, and another to fund an initiative designed to indict Israel for “scholasticide”: the destruction of Palestinian academia by design.  Yes, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, a unit that “brings unlikely partners together to work on complex problems”, has announced funding for ten new group projects in 2026-2027.  Here’s one of them, and, lo and behold, Dr. Doostdar is one of the stars:

Scholasticide in and Beyond Palestine
Jodi Byrd (Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity), Alireza Doostdar (Divinity School), Eve Ewing (Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity), Darryl Li (Anthropology)

Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this project will use a mixed-methods approach in undertaking empirical research and comparative analysis to investigate “scholasticide” as a critical category for political and historical analysis. In addition to the resident research team, the project will involve a sequence of virtual visiting fellows.

This is another way to use College money to do down Israel, and this I object to. Believe me, if there were a similar project designed to investigate “genocide by Palestinian terror groups,” it would not only not get funded, but would raise an ruckus. This one has elicited nary a peep.  I’m wondering whether the University of Chicago even thinks about the optics of giving money for a project like this.

The University of Auckland passes free speech and institutional neutrality policy

December 16, 2025 • 10:17 am

The newish government of New Zealand is finally seeing the light, and has mandated that every one of the country’s eight universities (all government funded) must at some point adopt a policy of freedom of speech and institutional neutrality (the latter resembles Chicago’s Kalven Report).

The University of Auckland, the country’s flagship university and its best and most important one, issued a public announcement after adopting this policy, which happened this month via the University’s council. The PR announcement is here, and reads like this:

Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland has formally adopted its Freedom of Expression Statement, following approval by the University Council at its meeting on 10 December.

The statement outlines the University’s commitment to protecting and promoting freedom of expression and academic freedom, and reaffirms its role as a critic and conscience of society. It sets expectations for lawful, constructive and civil debate across the University and outlines the principle of institutional neutrality, which helps create an environment where conversations can freely take place.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Dawn Freshwater says the statement reflects extensive engagement and consultation with the University community.

“Freedom of expression and academic freedom are foundational to our role as a university. This statement provides clarity about our responsibilities and expectations as a community, and reaffirms our commitment to fostering an environment where diverse viewpoints can be expressed lawfully and constructively.”

The statement’s development involved an extended period of careful discussion and refinement through both a Senate working group and the Vice-Chancellor’s Advisory Group.

Professor Cathy Stinear, Pro Vice-Chancellor Equity and a member of the Advisory Group, says the work was challenging but rewarding for those involved.

“I’m particularly proud of the way we respectfully debated the issues and carefully balanced the tensions between free expression and caring for the diverse communities that make up our University.”

istinguished Professor Sir Peter Hunter, who chaired the Senate working group and led the development of the statement with support from Professor Nikki Harré and the Vice-Chancellor’s Advisory Group on Freedom of Expression, says the process was shaped by robust feedback.

“In my view, the process of finding common ground between many different points of view has been as important as the statement itself. Universities must demonstrate the ability to freely debate contentious issues.

“I would like to thank the members of the groups involved and the near unanimous endorsement from Senate.”

And below is the official statement itself. Notice the critical neutrality phrase, “The University will not take public positions on matters that do not directly concern university roles, functions or duties.”  That’s very similar to the Kalven report. Further, the last sentence justifies institutional neutrality as a way to avoid chilling speech—exactly the same rational that the University of Chicago has.

I’ve also obtained a copy of the Senate’s minutes that resulted in this outcome, and here’s a brief excerpt:

The majority of Senate voted in favour of the motion with only a few votes against and abstentions recorded.

The motion was declared carried.

Professor Hunter expressed appreciation for the extensive work undertaken by the Working and Advisory Groups and all contributors throughout the consultation process. He observed that the process had demonstrated the value of constructive debate and the willingness of participants to listen and adapt their views. He acknowledged all involved in the process and specifically Professors Stinear and Clements and encouraged commitment to ongoing dialogue and improvement.

The Vice-Chancellor concluded by encouraging Senate to continue fostering an environment in which open and respectful debate could take place and the voice of academic excellence could be heard. She recommended that Senate would continue to provide leadership in this regard.

Note that Sir Peter Hunter, the head of the working group, thanks not only Professor Cathy Stinear for help, but also Kendall Clements, one of the demonized signers of the infamous “Listener Letter” arguing why indigenous “ways of knowing” are not the same as modern science.  I find it interesting and heartening that all three of these people are in STEM: Hunter is a bioengineer, Stinear a neuroscientist, and Clements is an evolutionary biologist and ichthyologist. And note that there was very little dissent about passing this.  I suspect, though I don’t know, that the administration of Auckland Uni had put this on the back burner for years.  I find it ironic as well that the Vice-Chancellor, Dawn Dishwater, now says she’s in favor of this policy when for years she has put roadblocks on freedom of speech. (Remember when she promised an open discussion of indigenous versus modern science and then it never took place?)

Now why is this important?  Because it codifies what the rules are in the country’s most notable university, and one hopes that other universities will follow suit. They will more or less have to in principle, and draft their own statements, but what happens in practice in New Zealand could be quite different.  The country and its universities are rife with intimidation and peer pressure, and, as I’ve written about repeatedly, there is a huge amount of self-censorship. Nobody dares criticize indigenous “knowledge” nor even arrant preferences given to indigenous people. If you criticize any of that, you’re likely to lose your job. This kind of pressure has turned the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi into a sacred document, in effect the Constitution of New Zealand, despite the fact that “Te Tiriti,” as it’s called, is both ambiguous and wasn’t even signed by all the indigenous leaders. The Treaty has been interpreted as saying that indigenous people get half of everything, including presence of indigenous “ways of knowing”—which include superstition, legends, morality, and rules for living)—in science classes

 

This intimidation is especially notable in New Zealand’s universities.  The hope of those who pushed this policy is that the University of Auckland will be a model for the country’s other schools. But the policies outlined above will face stiff opposition—opposition from an entrnched academic and ideological culture based on identity politics. Fingers crossed! At least it looks like a step forward.