“Attention Sanctuaries”

Jonathan Kramnick, a professor of English at Yale, responding to a Chronicle of Higher Education query about what’s ahead for higher education (subscription required). His title: “Attention Sanctuaries”:

Amid the din of AI propaganda and messianism, a countercurrent will take shape: renewed interest in books, paper, face-to-face conversation, and creativity free of large language model interference. The impulse will begin with students and move upward. University administrations, captivated by tech evangelism, increasingly treat AI as the inevitable future of higher education. Faculty members, inundated with exhortations to integrate it into teaching and research, hesitate to resist. As institutional leadership drifts toward anticipatory obedience, students will begin to reconstruct education around the living, embodied world of meaning and experience they feel has been stolen from them.

I hope he’s right. See also Diana Senechal on literature and reverence, and George Steiner on “houses of reading.”

The Chronicle asked eleven academics to comment on what’s ahead. One mentions “affordability” as an issue, along with the guarantee of “real return on investment” for students. One mentions the difficulty of “financing even degrees with high rates of return on investment.” No one mentions the increasing adjunctification of higher education.

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[“Anticipatory obedience”: a phrase associated with (ex-Yale professor of history) Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny (2017): “Do not obey in advance.” Kramnick no doubt expects that the reader will recognize the connection.]