The False Choice Between Meaning and Accountability in Higher Education
Thoughts on Ronald Purser's December 2025 essay in Current Affairs, "AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself"
There’s an essay by Ronald Purser in Current Affairs making the rounds on social media. It’s a thoughtful piece, and I recommend reading it.
AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
Purser’s essay makes several compelling points about AI’s infiltration of universities. The Perplexity ad openly promoting academic dishonesty is genuinely disturbing. The juxtaposition of CSU spending $17 million on OpenAI while issuing layoff notices and cutting entire academic programs deserves outrage. The MIT research on cognitive debt provides sobering evidence that outsourcing thinking to AI literally changes how our brains work.
However: the essay’s broader critique rests on a premise I don’t accept: that treating students as customers and asking for accountability in what universities deliver is somehow a corruption of higher education’s noble purpose.
I’m a first-generation college student. I took out massive loans to attend a public university here in Virginia, and my wife took out even larger loans to attend grad school while I was doing my PhD.1 This was a risky financial bet and it took us decades to pay them off. The only way these decisions make financial sense is if I graduate with skills that command a salary sufficient to repay those loans without struggling to make ends meet. If I sacrifice years of early earning potential and go into serious debt, it only makes sense if I graduate with skills and credentials that have real value in the labor market. That does not mean that higher education is only job training, but it does mean universities have obligations that look a lot like what businesses owe their customers: clarity about what is being offered, whether it works, and whether it is worth the price.
When Purser quotes scholars lamenting that “academic departments now have to justify themselves in the language of revenue, deliverables, and learning outcomes,” or that “public universities were being remade as vocational feeders for private markets,” I read it as if he’s treating these developments as self-evidently bad. But students paying tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars deserve to know what they’re getting. Asking universities to articulate measurable outcomes is very basic accountability, not some betrayal of what it means to be a university.
Universities absolutely should cultivate critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, and civic engagement.2 They should also prepare students for employment. This is not a contradiction. Most graduates will enter private labor markets. Pretending otherwise doesn’t serve working-class students, it abandons them to figure out career preparation on their own while still charging them for the privilege.
The real problem isn’t that universities think about deliverables. It’s that they’re delivering less while charging more and now outsourcing even that diminished product to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/Etc. You can oppose the corporatization of higher ed without pretending that education exists in some realm beyond economic reality. Students are customers because they pay for a service. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean reducing education to credential factories. It means universities owe their students something concrete in exchange for their time and money.
I read Purser’s story of attending a low cost public university in the 1980s with real sympathy. That world, where exploration could be the main point of college, has mostly vanished. Tuition has climbed and wages haven’t kept pace. Insisting that universities are partly businesses is not capitulation to “neo-liberal jiu-jitsu.” Universities are businesses, and it’s an acknowledgment that when you charge life changing sums of money, you owe students both serious intellectual formation and serious vocational preparation.
I mentioned at the top that I liked this essay and I recommend reading it. Which brings us back to some real, compelling questions Purser’s essay raises:
What happens when universities deploy AI tools without pedagogical rationale or faculty consultation?
Why are students being used as guinea pigs in an unregulated educational experiment?
How do we respond when the tools designed to facilitate cheating are institutionally mandated?
What are the labor and environmental costs hidden behind the AI-industrial complex’s push into higher education?
What happens to a university when core intellectual work is quietly handed off to platforms whose primary obligation is to shareholders, not students or faculty?
Who owns the data and content that flow through those systems, and who gets to decide how they reshape curriculum, assessment, and hiring?
How do we measure “learning” in an environment where AI can simulate understanding on demand, and what counts as cheating versus legitimate augmentation?
Those are the issues that should be at the center of our debates about AI in higher education, and on that much I think this essay is absolutely right to sound the alarm. These questions deserve more than a corporate partnership announcement and a faculty workshop on “prompt engineering.”
My PhD, like most in biomedical sciences, cost me nothing, and I received a modest stipend. But my wife had to take out ~$100k in loans to attend a 2-year MS program in speech-language pathology at Vanderbilt where I did my PhD.
Some of my favorite courses in college were art history, physical anthropology, human sexuality, and world religions. None of which contribute to my earning potential, but all of which left an indelible impact on my worldview and that I still think about 25 years later.