Last September, Tyler Austin Harper published a piece for The Atlantic on how he thinks colleges should respond to AI. What he proposes is radical—but, if you've concluded that AI really is going to destroy everything these institutions stand for, I think you have to at least consider these sorts of measures. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2025/09/ai-colle...
> Another reason that a no-exceptions policy is important: If students with disabilities are permitted to use laptops and AI, a significant percentage of other students will most likely find a way to get the same allowances, rendering the ban useless. I witnessed this time and again when I was a professor—students without disabilities finding ways to use disability accommodations for their own benefit. Professors I know who are still in the classroom have told me that this remains a serious problem.
This would be a huge problem for students with severe and uncorrectable visual impairments. People with degenerative eye diseases already have to relearn how to do every single thing in their life over and over and over. What works for them today will inevitably fail, and they have to start over.
But physical impairments like this are also difficult to fake and easy to discern accurately. It's already the case that disability services at many universities only grants you accommodations that have something to do with your actual condition.
There are also some things that are just difficult to accommodate without technology. For instance, my sister physically cannot read paper. Paper is not capable of contrast ratios that work for her. The only things she can even sometimes read are OLED screens in dark mode, with absolutely black backgrounds; she requires an extremely high contrast ratio. She doesn't know braille (which most blind people don't, these days) because she was not blind as a little girl.
Committed cheaters will be able to cheat anyway; contemporary AI is great at OCR. You'll successfully punish honest disabled people with a policy like this but you won't stop serious cheaters.
The problem is that this is treating the symptom rather than the cause. The symptom is that cheating for college admission and achievement is too effective. The cause is that college admission and achievement has become high stakes, and it absolutely should not be.
I enjoyed my time, I made a lot of lifelong friends, and figured out how to live on my own. My buddies that enrolled in boot camp instead of college learned all those same skills, for free.
Education won’t be ruined or blemished my LLMs, the whole thing was a joke to begin with. The bit that ruined college was unlimited student loans… and all of our best and brightest folks running the colleges raping students for money. It’s pathetic, evil, and somehow espoused.
My 40-some-odd years on this planet tells me the answer is yes.
It sounds entirely reasonable and moderate to me.
Not so in plenty of other countries. Hopefully US reverses the anti-science trend before it's too late
You can access the full article at https://archive.is/zSJ13 (I know archive.is is kind of shady, but it works).
Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper.
> Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected.
Just like my on-campus classmates never smoked weed or drank underage, I'm sure.
