The neglect I experienced at the hands of my undergraduate institution (The University of Illinois, 1988–1992) could not be described as “benign” because it was not designed for my benefit, but reflecting on the past through the lens of the present challenges to education, I’m grateful for it.

For all practical purposes, I was left to my own devices, both academically and socially. We were provided a student handbook with information on degrees and programs and a catalog with course descriptions and were basically required to figure stuff out from there.

After I’d accrued 60 hours of credit, I didn’t even need the previous pro forma sign-off of an “academic adviser.” I never met with an academic adviser. I did manage to graduate in four years, but there were some hiccups along the way that wouldn’t have happened had someone or something other than me been looking over my choices.

I badly failed an Econ 101 exam after a happy hour debacle (see this old post for some details). I took a course that repeated credit I’d already earned through Advanced Placement. I switched majors six or seven times in search of the path of least resistance that was consistent with some of my interests. My transcript, while meeting the requirements for graduation, is minimally coherent as plan for future employment.

I took ice skating (a one-hour course), a skill I’d acquired at age 5 and practiced since as a competitive hockey player, for credit, twice.

Socially, the university had lots of infrastructure, but it was, again, largely unsupervised. I joined a fraternity and the lacrosse club, both run, for better and worse, by students themselves.

I simultaneously learned not very much and just about everything important in college. My somnambulant path through many of my courses left very little impression on my retained knowledge, but at the same time I was figuring out what I was interested in and how to cultivate those interests into an acceptable experience of life. I knew I probably didn’t want to go to law school and become a lawyer but by graduation had no alternative plan, so I took a temporizing job as a paralegal that confirmed my suspicion while clarifying that writing was perhaps the one thing that I found worth working hard on.

I experienced, I flailed, I failed (within recoverable bounds). I grew up, emerging still mostly unformed, but with a sufficient sense of and capacity for self-direction that I was able to continue to make forward progress in the world.

There is lots of hand-wringing over what students should be doing, what skills they should be developing in this age of artificial intelligence, and I’ve come to the conclusion that, above all, students must practice the exercise of agency.

“What Agency Means in the Era of Automation” is the subject of a highly recommended recent piece by Marc Watkins at his Rhetorica newsletter. Watkins argues that the chief challenges in a world where a machine can do your homework is helping students figure out where their efforts are best applied, not to the ends of efficiency and optimization, but in engaging the process of appropriate struggle and, dare I say it, learning.

In all of my many campus presentations last semester, I argued that dealing with student use of generative AI is fundamentally a demand-side problem, where the approach must be to help students make the best choices for their own best interests. We don’t need to wall them off or shove them into the embrace of the technology. We have to give them opportunities to forge their own relationship and attitudes towards AI, a process that must include giving students the right to refuse its use.

That many students have done a clear-eyed assessment of what institutions and classes are offering and then chosen to outsource the work to a large language model is a reflection of the nearly ubiquitous “transactional model” of education that signals the meaning of the exercise is found in the grades and the credential, rather than the experience of learning.

It’s not mysterious, and it’s not even particularly complicated. As I’ve written previously, I think it’s clear that students desire more than this, but when confronted with a system that does not particularly value experience or process, engaging in the necessary struggle that attaches to learning looks like a sucker’s move. When institutions push a narrative that AI is part of an inevitable future, students are pushed further away from exercising agency, the exact capacity that would allow them to thrive in a world of increasing automation.

I’m not just talking about jobs and employment, either. Not to put too obvious a point on it, but life is supposed to be lived, and while there are many factors at work, I don’t think the rising incidence of anxiety and depression is entirely unrelated to a system that privileges transactional rather than experiential and explorative behaviors.

There is no meaningful survival for higher education if we become the transactional model plus AI. This is, long term, not something of value either monetarily or to our broader human development.

I do not want to make an outright case for a return to the kind of neglect I experienced as an undergraduate. For one thing, the underlying conditions that allowed for this neglect to not harm huge swaths of students have changed in terms of the cost and stakes of earning (or failing to earn) a degree. As postsecondary education has become more and more a private rather than a public good, both individuals and institutions have been required to step up their vigilance.

But, again, as I’ve argued previously, some, perhaps much of this institutional vigilance has prevented students from developing the skills of agency. By laying down the degree and program pathways and tethering students to learning management systems, we may keep them on the straight and narrow toward a credential, but where is the room to wonder if this is the actual path one should be walking?

Where is the slack to stumble, rise and reorient?

One of the pleasures of teaching writing was having the chance to see students overcome challenges that they may have previously viewed as intractable in an atmosphere where stakes were low enough to incentivize struggle and risk. To see a student who had spent their entire academic life tethered to the five-paragraph essay format crack the problem of structuring a piece of writing in a way that is deeply aware of audience needs, and then to see that student recognize their burgeoning capacity, is a great thing.

Great for me as the instructor, great for the student as a person who is going to have to work through those types of challenges for the rest of their life. As Marc Watkins says in his piece on agency, “If AI indeed requires us to rethink education and what it means to learn now that machine intelligence is ubiquitous, then we need to invite students into that conversation and emphasize that college isn’t where you go to receive knowledge or a degree, but to actively engage in creating an experience unique and worthwhile to you.”

Education will always, must always belong to students, and for that education to have maximum value, we must give students maximum agency. This has always been true, but now it’s a nearly existential imperative for both students and institutions.

Agency over automation is what we can offer of value, so let’s do that.