The title of Hollis Robbins recent article “Universities would prefer not to” borrows from Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853,) which tells the story of a quiet clerk in a New York law office who slowly stops working and starts responding to every request with the polite phrase “I would prefer not to”.
In the case of universities, prefer not to change, that is.
Robbins’s argument is deliberately harsh. Four years after ChatGPT shocked academia, she says, much of American higher education has become less an accelerator of society’s adaptation to AI than a brake on it. Frontier AI research has largely moved into industry, while universities, the institutions supposedly devoted to knowledge, discovery, and preparing the next generation, remain preoccupied with preserving curricula, assessment systems, and institutional habits formed before generative AI existed.
Don’t get me wrong. Universities are right to worry about intellectual honesty. A student who asks an AI system to write an essay or a scholar who fabricates research commits a genuine offense against truth. Catholic education in particular should take those concerns seriously.
But protecting intellectual integrity is one thing. Protecting the old academic machinery is another.
And I agree with Robbins suspicion that some of higher education’s resistance to AI has considerably more to do with the second.
As we all know, universities have spent recent years suffering a serious loss of public confidence. Gallup measured confidence in higher education at 57 percent in 2015. In 2026 it stands at only 38 percent. Pew found last year that seven in ten Americans believe higher education is moving in the wrong direction.
As Robbins explains, higher education can appear remarkably insular: confident in its own procedures, protective of its credentialing power, and frequently more interested in defending the structures it already controls than asking whether those structures still serve students and society well.
Robbins offers a wonderfully instructive historical analogy. In nineteenth-century Britain, the Post Office controlled telegraph communications. When Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone appeared, one senior engineer dismissed its usefulness partly because Britain already possessed a “superabundance” of messenger boys. The result was not that the telephone disappeared. Britain simply adopted it more slowly, for everyone’s loss except the chosen bureaucracy.
There is a lesson here for universities: AI is being used everywhere around them and within them. In other words, a university can forbid ChatGPT in an essay assignment, but it cannot forbid the world into which that student will graduate.
Much of academia still seems focused on the question: How do we stop students from using AI to do what we have always asked them to do? They are avoiding a more interesting one: What should we now ask students to do because AI exists?
If AI can provide information cheaply and instantaneously, then professors should spend more time bringing students toward what Robbins calls the frontier; the areas where knowledge is incomplete, contested, local, experiential, or genuinely new.
That would not only not lower academic standards, but might actually raise them, and would return universities to what they claim to be: institutions at the frontier of knowledge rather than guardians of yesterday’s methods for transmitting it.
There is also something distinctly Catholic at stake here. The university, historically, is one of the great achievements of Christian civilization. At its best it is not a credential factory. It is a community ordered toward truth, where intellectual formation occurs through reason, discipline, argument, mentorship, and the integration of different branches of knowledge.
That conception of education should make Catholics less frightened by AI, not more. That’s because if a machine can save a lot of time and energy in the process of knowledge-wathering, then perhaps the human parts of education can become more important.
AI could potentially open more time and energy for mentorship, the patient examination of difficult questions, the formation in virtues and the integration of knowledge with moral responsibility. Those are things that were at the core of higher education, but have slowly disappeared.
Robbins reports that a large share of faculty and students in the United States and Canada remain unusually receptive to institution-wide AI bans, while only 17 percent of students in the region believe their instructors are well equipped to guide them in using AI. She describes most institutions as existing in a “state of AI paralysis.”
That is not sustainable. Reasonable guardrails should protect learning, not institutional inertia. The great irony would be for institutions dedicated to advancing knowledge to become obstacles to one of the most important knowledge technologies of our lifetime.
A perspective based on basic realism should instead bet on teaching students how to use AI without becoming dependent upon it, and recognize the difference between information and wisdom.
But for that to happen they have to stop preferring not to.