AI Isn't a Curse. It's a Gift for College Learning.
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a piece that offers a beautiful and evocative snapshot of intellectual life at its best. Its authors, Khafiz Kerimov and Nicholas Bellinson of St. John’s College, describe students gathered around a blackboard in a campus coffee shop, each wielding a different color of chalk as they work through Euclid and Lobachevsky together. There are groans of frustration, bursts of laughter, and sudden, collective insight. It is a vision of education at its finest: collaborative, messy, deeply human.
St. John’s has built its entire model of education around this kind of horizontal learning, where students and faculty are partners in inquiry rather than participants in a top-down transfer of information. There are few lectures, little note-taking, and no passive spectators. The classroom spills into common areas and study lounges, creating a campus-wide conversation.
This is admirable, and more institutions could learn from St. John’s commitment to dialogue. But from this unique experience, the authors make a sweeping claim: that artificial intelligence - specifically tools like ChatGPT’s “study mode”- will steal our ability to think and work together. They worry that students will abandon collaborative learning for solitary interactions with machines, and that the vibrant hum of campus life will fade into silence.
It’s a poetic warning. It’s also profoundly mistaken.
AI Is a Tool, Not a Fate
The fundamental error in the Chronicle piece is a sense of fatalism. The authors treat AI as an inevitable force that will transform education on its own terms. But AI is no different from any other technological development in the long history of learning. It is a tool, not a destiny.
When the printing press was invented, critics worried that books would replace the living exchange of ideas. When calculators entered classrooms, many feared students would lose the ability to think mathematically. When the internet arrived on campus, predictions abounded that libraries would empty and professors would be ignored.
In every case, these dire warnings failed to materialize. Students adapted, faculty adapted, and institutions adapted. The tools didn’t erase human connection; they changed its form. Today, study groups collaborate through Google Docs, friends meet on Zoom when someone is sick, and hybrid classrooms blend physical and virtual spaces.
AI will follow the same pattern. It can support learning by giving students quick access to explanations or helping them brainstorm ideas late at night. Used wisely, it frees up time and energy for higher-order thinking and, crucially, for collaboration. It is not a substitute for human connection unless we allow it to become one.
The Real Problem: Weak Community
Certainly, Kerimov and Bellinson are right to highlight the dangers of isolation. College should be an intensely social experience. Decades of research - notably the Gallup / Strada-Gallup Alumni Survey - links students’ having mentors, working on longer-term projects, and feeling cared for by faculty to stronger outcomes: greater workplace engagement, higher well-being, and a stronger likelihood of believing their college degree was ‘worth it.’”
But the real challenge facing higher education today isn’t AI; it is that many colleges and universities have already failed to foster community. Large lecture halls, transactional relationships, and administrative bloat have left too many students adrift. Even before ChatGPT, campus life was often fragmented and lonely.
The St. John’s model is remarkable precisely because it is so rare. Most students will never sit around a blackboard with a professor and ten classmates. They will attend courses with hundreds of peers, dash off assignments between work shifts, and rely on digital tools out of necessity.
Blaming AI for loneliness is like blaming the calculator for poor math pedagogy. The problem is not the tool. The problem is the absence of strong human structures.
Agency and Responsibility
The Chronicle essay’s most striking line is this: “The threat that AI poses to higher education today is not that it will steal our words, but that it will steal our ability to think and work together.”
But AI cannot “steal” anything on its own. Only people can abandon collaboration. Professors can still require group projects and in-class debates. Administrators can design dorms and study lounges that encourage informal interaction. Students can choose to meet in person, to wrestle with tough ideas together, and to form lasting friendships.
These are human choices. AI has no willpower, no agenda. It will not make college lonely unless we let it.
Rather than wringing our hands about technology, colleges should focus on building vibrant, in-person academic and social/living-learning communities. Courses should be designed for active engagement, with students expected to teach, challenge, and support one another. Physical spaces must encourage connection rather than isolation, and faculty should model the very collaboration they hope to inspire. Most importantly, students need guidance on how to integrate AI into their learning responsibly; using it to clarify concepts or generate questions, while keeping the real intellectual heavy lifting grounded in human relationships.
Reclaiming the True Purpose of College
The St. John’s vision of education is beautiful: students puzzling over Euclid together, ideas flowing freely across campus. That vision should inspire us to create more opportunities for connection, not retreat into fear of change.
Most students won’t live in a world of chalkboards and intimate seminars. For them, AI will be one tool among many. It can either deepen their engagement or dull it. The outcome depends entirely on how colleges choose to act.
The real danger is not that AI will steal the essence of higher education. The danger is that institutions will forget what higher education is for: cultivating minds through relationships, mentorship, and shared work.
If we keep that mission front and center, AI will not make college lonelier. It will make it richer. The question is not whether technology will reshape campus life; it always does. The question is whether we have the will to shape it toward connection rather than isolation.
The answer, as it has always been, lies with us.
