It seemed to creep up on us in higher education overnight: One day, we were reading news of this new, exciting artificial intelligence (AI) tool called ChatGPT. The next, we were being interviewed by the press about what we were going to do about it; and a month and three upgrades later, ChatGPT 4.0 is a central topic of summer “pedagogy in action” programming, and most faculty are preparing for its profound impact on how we teach classes and assess students.
By this point, most of us have experimented with ChatGPT and have critiqued it as producing generic (although clear) writing, making errors, not referencing properly, and missing information that has been generated since 2021. But even as we smugly believe we can see the differences between a ChatGPT-generated essay and a human-generated one—and maybe we can—we know that will not last forever; eventually, ChatGPT and similar AI tools will likely match and beat humangenerated writing in comprehensiveness and accuracy.
Regardless of disagreements over the quality of ChatGPT-generated material, most people agree we are not going back. AI is here to stay, and the best institutions of higher education will recognize this new tool and help students learn how to be most creative and insightful with it. Much is still to be learned about how to write the best prompts to attain useful information, how to work with ChatGPT over time to improve its quality, and what to be on alert for both in terms of pragmatic problems and ethical concerns.
Still, for all the fears about AI taking over human thinking, I remain optimistic about the transforming experiences of education as distinct from what we are producing with ChatGPT. The transformative work in education is engaging students so that they become insatiably curious and committed to topics that spark their imaginations, collaborating with students as they refine their intellectual aspirations and life goals, and teaching students how to think critically—looking for narratives that are missing, pushing back on imprecise and biased reasoning, and digging for novel perspectives. This process, for me, remains the domain of humanity. It is the heart of education—not the information attained but rather the vision, confidence, and values one develops through a college like Vassar.
This summer, I saw the impact of this deeply as other faculty members and I taught political economy, critical thinking, and scientific reasoning at the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda. The 48 undergraduate students mostly had been taught in large, lecture-based high school classes with an expectation for memorization, not critical thinking. Over the two weeks of class using liberal arts pedagogy in which students were asked to think beyond the readings, to challenge the faculty and each other, and to develop their own perspectives on the topics in class—we witnessed a transformation. Students started to speak up in class, pitching new ideas, asking questions I had not anticipated, and making connections with us as faculty and each other as peers that were grounded in the joy of intellectual discovery. I do not know if they were using ChatGPT to prepare for class, but regardless, the main goal of education had begun—opening the mind, discovery of new ideas, building confidence, and developing one’s viewpoint on complex topics of importance.
Whether we are using ChatGPT to outline essays or write computer programs, the distinguishing core of why one attends Vassar will remain—to learn to think in new ways, to challenge existing beliefs, to be inspired by faculty and peers, and to launch a meaningful life.
Elizabeth H. BradleyPresident