Posted on 28 Oct 2025 by Neil Harrison

A few years ago, a philosophy colleague and I taught a college English composition course at Lindenwood University organized around a single, surprising (for students) word: bullshit. We leaned into the theme, using Harry Frankfurt’s classic essay as our guide and asking students to explore what it means to be sincere, what it means to be a fraud, and how to tell the difference. We also decided to lean into the AI moment. This was Fall of 2023, the beginning of the first full academic year since ChatGPT was introduced. We didn’t ban the new generative AI tools; we invited them into the classroom. We experimented with writing papers with AI assistance, making the central work of the course not just writing, but thinking critically about how we write. Our guiding principle was trust. We trusted that by including students in the conversation, by empowering them to use and critique these strange new tools, they would become more engaged and curious, not less. We wanted to replace the impulse to police our students with an invitation to collaborate with them.

That classroom experience felt vital and exciting. But it now feels like it exists in opposition to a dominant and growing mood in academia. I see a rising tide of anxiety about AI, a kind of moral panic that my co-author James Hutson and I have started calling “academic alarmism.” This rhetoric often cloaks itself in philosophical rigor, insisting that because AI lacks human “moral agency,” it is unfit to serve educational roles. We hear that terms like “tutor” or “collaborator” must be restricted to humans, a kind of linguistic gatekeeping that ignores centuries of learning with non-human tools. (…)

(…)

We argue that the university’s role isn’t to be a gatekeeper but a guide.

The alarmists warn of disengaged students and the death of critical thinking. But when I hear those warnings, I think of a specific student from that “bullshit” class. She dove into the experiment, using AI tools with an intellectual curiosity that was inspiring. (…)

The university has always been a place of mediated knowledge, from the un-agential textbook to the impersonal learning management system. To insist now that only unmediated, Socratic dialogue with humans is “authentic” education is to weaponize a fiction against pragmatic innovation, especially in an era of mass education where that ideal is rarely the reality for many students.

The real pedagogical crisis is not the advent of generative AI but the structural underfunding and the challenges of widespread university access that have defined higher education for generations. AI, thoughtfully integrated, has the potential to redistribute scarce human attention and restore some measure of the engagement we all yearn for. The challenge of higher education in the age of AI is not to shield students from complexity but to equip them with the habits of mind, skepticism, and  metacognitive awareness required to flourish amid it. The pedagogical imperative is not less responsibility but more.

Disponível em: https://teachinginhighereducation.wordpress. com/2025/10/28/the-intellectual-bankruptcy-of-anti-ai-academic-alarmism-a-rebuttal/. Access: 21 nov. 2025. (Adaptado).