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Kirtland C. Peterson
‘82
Princeton Alumni Weekly
Thus far, Princeton has left decisions on AI use in the classroom to individual faculty members. It is currently weighing a proposal to require proctoring for in-person examinations, a good start if adopted. Should it commit to a broad set of solutions and generate the institutional energy required to implement them, the University would model positive change for educational institutions at all levels.
The fixes are obvious. Yet obvious fixes are often not made thanks to apathy and inertia, resistance to change, torpidity, investment in the status quo, lack of imagination, and defeatism. Meaningful change requires energy and commitment for the long haul, on the part of a sufficiently large number of people.
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Faith in higher education continues to plummet, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—the nation’s leading organization representing faculty interests and a longstanding voice on academic freedom and university governance—has decided to train its guns on the growing movement to establish civic education centers at public universities. The AAUP’s objections amount to a single, unlovely demand: we get to decide what students learn, and nobody else gets a vote.
Six days after the report went online, the AAA fired back with a full-throated defense. “Anthropologists welcome rigorous critique of the discipline,” wrote its president, Carolyn M. Rouse. “What we cannot accept is a sweeping verdict about anthropology’s intellectual culture, scholarly practices, and professional norms built on selective evidence and issued without consultation.
Since faculty voted in may to proctor in-person exams, national news outlets and some alumni have decried the end of Princeton’s 133-year-old tradition of unsupervised testing, but students, faculty, and recent graduates say the conversation within the campus community has been mild.
