How will AI hit higher education?

An expert wonders if AI will turn higher education into a version of OnlyFans… or a new discipleship

AI may hit academic life, especially at the college level, far harder than many university leaders are willing to admit. In a conversation with Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer at The New Yorker, Hollis Robbins, an American academic and essayist, argues that students will not only use AI to cheat, or that professors will need better policies. It is that much of higher education has already made itself vulnerable by becoming standardized, bureaucratic, and interchangeable.

Once courses become fungible, learning outcomes generic, and professors treated as replaceable delivery systems, AI does not appear as an alien threat. It appears as the logical next substitute.

That is where the OnlyFans line bites. Robbins is describing a future in which the credential may shift away from the institution and toward the individual professor: not the university as a coherent intellectual home, but the professor as a branded source of expertise, mentorship, and niche authority.

In her account, some of the future of higher education could look like “OnlyProfessors,” where students pay not for a broad institutional formation but for access to particular minds teaching at the edges of knowledge. She argues that institutions which survive AI will likely be leaner, stranger, and more differentiated, while much of today’s generic higher education may simply lose its reason to exist.

From a Catholic perspective, that diagnosis is both illuminating and incomplete. The Church was essential to the birth of the university precisely because the university was never meant to be a content vending machine. It was a community ordered to truth, a place where disciplines cohered, where masters formed disciples, and where knowledge was pursued within a larger vision of reality.

In that sense, Robbins may be right that the future could move away from mass standardization and back toward something closer to apprenticeship, mentorship, and intellectual discipleship. That part is not decadent. In some ways, it is pre-modern. It echoes an older educational logic in which formation came not mainly from interchangeable modules, but from sustained contact with living teachers.

But there is also a real danger. Discipleship can be noble; platformized intellectual celebrity can be corrosive. A university reduced to atomized expert-subscriptions would be a form of fragmentation, driven by market logic and personal branding.

Catholics should not mourn the collapse of empty bureaucratic sameness. But neither should it accept a future in which education becomes merely bespoke consumption, detached from a stable community of inquiry, moral formation, and shared pursuit of wisdom.

So perhaps the true alternative is not “OnlyFans or the university.” It is whether higher education will continue as hollow standardization until AI exposes its emptiness, or whether it will recover a deeper model that looks, in some respects, more like discipleship: teachers who really know something, students formed in living contact with them, and institutions confident enough to be distinctive instead of interchangeable.

As Kang implies, if AI forces that reckoning, it may not destroy the university so much as reveal how far many universities had already drifted from their original purpose.