The future of the university

There’s been a lot of writing lately on what AI is going to do to the university. The most recent entry is from Kevin Munger, who writes in Asterisk that the threat isn’t that AI replaces universities or makes them obsolete (rather they will survive, as they have for centuries, by reinventing themselves), but the possibility of academics reacting defensively, banning or policing its use and turning academic work into “a sort of dockworkers union of knowledge.” He proposes a middle path, in which rather than using AI to churn out yet more papers, academics let it absorb the grunt work and redirect freed-up time to things only universities have the time horizon and incentives to do well: maintaining decades-long datasets that underpin research fields, reading and carefully engaging with others’ work (an activity he positions as to some extent a return rather than a continuation), and acting as a check on a rising tide of amateur research from a newly empowered class of curious non-experts.

The piece pairs well with other recent work engaging with the future of universities from different angles. In June, Nils Gilman argued that the current form of the teaching university is finished, because the set of activities holding it together (“the book, the lecture, the problem set, the written examination”) are disrupted and dissolved by AI. Back in early 2025, Ben Reinhardt wrote a long essay positioning the modern university’s cacophony of roles as an issue that predates and exists largely independently of AI (in fact, he mentions AI in the piece only once, in the title of a new Princeton initiative). Ben posits that the university’s problem is that it combines too many unrelated jobs into one institution (credentialing, research, teaching, job training, technology development, etc), and that each would benefit from being housed in a more specialized institutional form. Despite the disparate diagnoses and recommendations in the pieces, all agree that universities aren’t going anywhere; they predate many modern nations and may outlast many more (for more on that history, you can read this new NBER working paper).