There are roughly three camps in higher education right now on AI: adopters, resisters, and the undecided. Adopters are working through genuine difficulties, trying to figure out what education means when students have tools that can write, analyze, and reason alongside them. The undecided are watching. Resisters are waiting for someone to rescue them from a situation no one is coming to rescue them from.
Resistance to AI in higher education is not a strategy. It is a posture. And it may cost us more than we can afford to lose.
Higher education was already losing the public before AI became a campus issue. Gallup found that American confidence in higher education fell from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2024, recovering only modestly to 42% in 2025. Republican confidence collapsed from 56% to 20% over the same period. New America found that the share of Americans believing colleges have a positive effect on the country fell from 69% in 2019 to 54% in 2025. The reasons people give are consistent: cost, political insularity, and doubts about labor market relevance. We are an institution under sustained pressure from almost every direction. That is the condition in which we are deciding how to respond to AI.
The resistance position, at its clearest, holds that AI threatens learning integrity and that higher education should push back by restricting or excluding AI use. These concerns are not frivolous; they are legitimate. But the political logic is weak to the point of incoherence. Successful resistance would require persuading legislators to slow AI development, persuading businesses and professions to decline AI adoption, and persuading students to stop using tools that are free, powerful, and already on their phones. None of these outcomes is remotely plausible. The notion that faculty governance statements will reorder the AI development landscape is not a serious political analysis.
There is no coalition that will defend AI resistance in higher education. The right has little sympathy for the institution to begin with. The center is focused on workforce relevance. The left has its own complicated relationship with AI but will not make the defense of essay-writing pedagogy a political priority. If higher education becomes the institution that resists a technology the rest of the economy is adopting, we will not be signaling integrity. We will be confirming the suspicion that we are more concerned with protecting our own methods than with serving students. That story will be told loudly by people already looking for evidence to support it.
The adopters are doing harder, less glamorous work. They are asking what learning outcomes mean when students have access to generative AI, rebuilding course and program structures around skills that require AI as a collaborator rather than a shortcut, and assessing how students reason, evaluate, and judge rather than what they produce on a first draft. The arrival of calculators did not eliminate mathematical education; it shifted emphasis toward conceptual understanding. The arrival of CAD did not kill architect schools; only the drafting courses. The arrival of legal research databases did not shut down law schools; it ended the careers of some paralegals. AI will similarly shift the locus of educational value without eliminating it. Our job is to figure out where that locus now sits.
That means revising learning outcome statements to specify what students can do with AI assistance. It means building assessments around judgment, argument, revision, and reflection. It means teaching students to use AI critically, which is itself a significant intellectual skill. None of this requires abandoning academic standards. It requires updating our account of what those standards are for.
We are not starting this conversation from a position of strength, and resistance will accelerate the erosion. It will confirm narratives we cannot afford to confirm and alienate students who need us to be useful to them. The conversation worth having is about curriculum and learning outcomes. That conversation is harder and may feel less virtuous than resistance. It is also the only one that might actually help.
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