Part 2 – A Technological Partnership in the Academy
The modern university has taken responsibility (we might call it a dominion mandate) for instructing generations in critical thought, writing, communication, and skill training, confirming the proficiencies of the students under our care. Our work has focused largely on certification, and AI practically eliminates that priority. If, for example, the bots can answer any question I’ve ever had about Dante, why do I need a literature degree to prove I’ve learned all there is to know about Dante? The students of today will be using AI tomorrow to cure diseases, engineer new residential and commercial structures, develop strategic military response capabilities, extend lifespans, or find ways to destroy them—and they can do it all while we’re lecturing about the Treaty of Westphalia, convinced they can get enough notes on it through ChatGPT to nail the test next week. The elite class of knowledge keepers who train the knowledge workers may rapidly contract the dreaded scourge of obsolescence as Silicon Valley hires more college drop-outs and college-averse, and they will quickly become further contaminated on Main Street, Wall Street, and J Street.
AI may represent an existential threat to our work—maybe even to all of humanity. But the technological genie is not returning to a Luddite bottle. Certification is less necessary today than it was a decade ago because we’re using iron tools instead of steel weapons. The problem, insofar as it depends on us, lies in the mirror, exacerbated because we have neglected dominion of our academic garden. We have relinquished our sacred work.
Any time we deliver our lectures on autopilot, procrastinate our research, neglect office hours, stymie the careers of our colleagues, begrudgingly fulfill our committee duties, we are reducing our efforts to the assembly line of certification instead of the transformational process of re-creation. The mid- and late-career faculty are especially prone to this disease, but it also afflicts the early-career faculty struggling to do it all while climbing the mountain of tenure. With our eyes on too many worldly goals, and if we do not seek the Kingdom first, we too easily resort to a bureaucratic malaise instead of joyful wonder and discovery.
The good news is that the Christ provides, if not a template for implementation, at least a vision of a renewed creation: “Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age’” (Matt 28:18-20).
The final statement in Matthew’s gospel culminates in a picture of the Messiah’s kingship—one that has been slowly building since his genealogy and origin story. Jesus earns his authority through the cross, stripping Satan of the presumed authority he gained when Adam and Eve gave in to temptation. Then, in a remarkable turn of events, he hands the keys of the kingdom—foreshadowed in Matt. 16:16-20—over to his disciples. Christ reached across the cosmos, bridged the gap of sin, and not only raised us from death to life but also restored to us our Edenic authority over creation. The renewal of our purpose, expressed with triumphal eloquence in the Great Commission, is as much a description of the Kingdom’s gradual, peaceful conquest of earth as it is a final, evangelistic imperative. That mandate re-focuses our attention away from our own fiefdoms and toward the sanctification of souls.
Each nation, tribe, and tongue must decide how to enact that Commission to expand the Kingdom, using the generational tools available to bring glory to God through Christ. At this moment in history, like Gutenberg’s Press or Edison’s light bulb or Jobs’ iPhone, LLMs require our thoughtful reckoning. Therefore, if we are to master this new tool and not become enslaved to it, the Academy will need to make changes, adjust its mission, and prioritize the soul as the centerpiece of learning. Practically speaking, there are at least several actions we might take to teach our students—and ourselves—a proper sense of dominion. Let’s call it a pedagogical framework for understanding learning in an age of AI.
1. Recognize AI’s strengths. Its predictive capacity to anticipate words and combine them into syntactical patterns of meaning is surely remarkable. It gives us, like the research capabilities of the computer, the internet, and Wikipedia before it, a place to begin. It helps us combine data sets, synthesize one discipline with another, and—through human direction and agency—even develop new ideas. We should talk openly with students about its possibilities, inquire as to how they are already using AI, and ask for their input in original classroom activities. Thankfully, there are some students who don’t want “easy learning” and do prefer a challenge; this subset of enthusiasts makes it all the more incumbent upon us as educators to be strategic in our pedagogies.
2. Highlight its weaknesses. The machine is as fallible as those who program it. Though it may learn new, more efficient processes, it does not reflect on its own product. It does not contemplate truth. Even beyond the occasional—or frequent—hallucination, AI, untried and untested by the user, will cause our creative, generative, and investigative muscles to decay.1 It lacks self-awareness, affective learning, and cannot reflect the glory of God in whose image it is not made. We should discuss the ethical challenges, informed by 5,000 years of Western thought, of when AI could, should, or should not be used. For a pragmatic student body, we should discuss how over-reliance on AI can diminish other skillsets and foster “cognitive atrophy.”
3. Encourage experimentation. The freedom to try and fail is also baked into a moral universe built upon free will. We should imagine the possibilities of what AI could do, perhaps even allowing our students to design their own work products and assignments. Surprisingly, students feel most risk averse to this prodding. Whenever conversations lean in such a direction, my students insist they cannot fail. To do so would be to risk everything: grad school, a position in a prestigious law firm, their parents’ disappointment. Universities augment these fears by highlighting our own US News & World Report rankings, underscoring our own research accolades, and boasting about Journal Impact Factor. Let us lower the stakes by allowing them to try with AI, try without it, and resubmit their work when they don’t reach the standard.
4. Teach process. Students are already using AI whether we discourage them or not, to the point that some are openly asserting the professor is an obsolete commodity (in truth, she is not, but she could certainly become so). Rather than fight their impulses—though there are certainly times we should—we might try instead to show them how to partner with an LLM as a research and writing assistant, not an essay generator. If companies are gravitating toward employees who know how to harness AI, then we should be on the front lines to show them. In my own composition courses, I am teaching students how to use AI to research and create. This requires them to document the process of generation so I can verify they are not merely plagiarizing and can direct them toward better ways of understanding.
5. Speak the language of creation. Were Adam to develop a machine to cross-pollinate and help him develop hybrid species, he would still be exercising dominion, especially as he continued to manufacture ever more efficient routines and more beautiful products. It is only when he lets machines dictate his tasks while exercising no careful oversight of his own that he abdicates his authority and loses mastery of his Garden. Or, from a theological perspective, when he chooses the road of ease over disciplined stewardship. We should be envisioning new inroads and new pedagogies that can become productive class time. Our imaginations should be saturated in a vision of the Kingdom where creation is expanding in physical, metaphysical, and digital spaces throughout the cosmos.
This reminds us that creation is, of necessity, an interpersonal act. The tasks of writing and image production can now be done by tools, but creation can only be accomplished by a humanity imprinted with the image of a creative God. What knowledge we do gain, in any form, is best retained with emotional intelligence.2 AI can give data, but it isn’t yet doing much to communicate data through story. And, at least for the foreseeable future, it cannot relate to me in a way that a caring mentor will. Any Jarvis, Kit, or C3PO will always be a metaphysically artificial substitute. It may have IQ, but it lacks EQ. In other words, we as human professors have the relational power to contextualize information and to charitably mentor students through the knowledge AI can re-generate but not, by itself, comprehensively create. If and when machines achieve theory of mind and affective computing, the problems besetting professors and students will have systemically reached into every aspect of human life. And our job security will probably be the least of our concerns.
But for today, we in the Academy must exercise faithful dominion over our classrooms and our institutions at large by cultivating the minds and souls given us. If we are to retain relevance for workplace training and continue to teach old truths for new generations, then we should carefully and critically exercise our skills with the tools we have discovered. This will require shifting our own thinking from knowledge-keeping to knowledge-generating, from self-importance to humble service, from certification to creation.
