As the dean of Harvard College, David J. Deming believes one of his responsibilities is to help shape the college’s response to generative AI. How should teaching change to ensure that students’ work is their own? What is the purpose of college when a free tool can provide personalized, expert knowledge in seconds?
In recent days, Deming has laid out some initial responses to those questions in his Substack, Forked Lightning, in his convocation address to freshmen, and in an email to all undergraduates. And he’s gotten pushback. In particular, some professors and students were disturbed when he stated that there should be “acceptance, or even encouragement” of AI in writing done outside of the classroom. That this message came weeks after the college removed its Writing Center as a standalone unit, combining it with another academic support center, was not lost on critics. In The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper wrote that it raised the question of how seriously Harvard takes the skill of writing without AI, and what that signals to the rest of higher education.
The Chronicle spoke with Deming to discuss how he sees the undergraduate experience changing, why he thinks there needs to be even more conversation about AI, and how colleges can convince students that real learning includes some struggle.
