When I read the most recent installment in College President Sian Leah Beilock’s seemingly annual series of Atlantic articles last week, two main contradictions stuck out to me.
The first is a matter of individual consistency. Countless times, I have seen the phrase “we teach students how to think, not what to think” tied to Beilock’s name. I have a deep, personal and profound appreciation for that sentiment. My grade school took such a sentiment to its extreme, weaving the phrase “learning for learning’s sake” into the very text of the curricula, waiving grades in favor of inculcating a culture of “you get out what you put in.” Though such an anomalous schooling did not come without its faults, I do honestly believe that it allowed me to develop a unique appreciation for education’s intrinsic value, not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.
Artificial intelligence lies directly in opposition to the endeavor of thinking. I could pretend that I have never used AI to attempt to “think through” my own thoughts, to expand on my “own” ideas, but that would be a lie. What I can honestly say is that such an act is impossible. Just as I can not read my friend’s mind, even the most powerful AI models can not read mine. Even to attempt outsourcing thinking is the beginning of the end. That is to say, the president of a college cannot have an espoused value of teaching students “how to think” while writing an article titled “Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth.”
The second contradiction I was struck by is on a less personal, more institutional level. I will not go down the overused path of bringing in the 1819 Supreme Court case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the effort to protect Dartmouth’s status as a college, rather than a publicly-run university. Dartmouth’s undergraduate school is purposefully and definitively a liberal arts program. We do not have undergraduate business, finance, journalism, marketing or nursing majors. Our curriculum is made up of 13 distributive requirements spanning the spectra of cultures, disciplines, and languages. It is a program designed to educate and expand students’ understanding, knowledge and world view. Dartmouth offers plenty of career guidance and training, but we remain a non-vocational, liberal arts institution.
I find nothing inherently wrong with Beilock’s stance. She makes an incredibly valid point in her statement that “if universities hope to remain relevant in a world shaped by artificial intelligence, they should strive to guide students to understand and use these tools productively.” Higher education is undeniably under attack, and I understand the urge that university presidents feel to defend their careers and their constitutions; no one ever wants to feel as though their life is becoming obsolete. Beilock’s article becomes problematic when she begins to define Dartmouth’s role as almost strictly career-preparatory, stating that “when these students graduate and are out in the world, employers will certainly expect that they have these [AI] skills already.” Reading this, I felt as though the president of our liberal arts college was changing the very nature and purpose of our academic institution without consultation and without acknowledging that many of us chose this school because of its liberal arts and apparent anti-preprofessional culture.
I cringe every time I hear someone ask “what role will AI play in [insert any and every field here].” I understand that the world is changing, that not asking those questions and ignoring the technological advent is not an option. However, echoing the sentiment of Eli Moyse’s ’27 article from earlier this week, I am bothered by the current sense of exceptionalism — or as Moyse put it the “historical singularity” — that plagues the discourse surrounding AI. Dartmouth College, founded in 1769, survived the American Revolution, 11 official declarations of war, the Industrial Revolution, the Technological Age and countless other paradigm shifting advances. I think we can make it through the AI era and remain a liberal arts college.
I have no issue with places such as the Center for Career Design and other career-oriented Dartmouth programs creating AI literacy curricula. In fact I think they should. But I do believe that in the College’s academic spheres, we need less AI, not more.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
