AI-resilient pedagogy must transcend the classroom

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In a recent column, Head Opinion Editor Charlie Yale challenged Princeton to adopt an institutional AI policy modeled on recommendations from the University of Chicago Law School. Among other changes, his column proposes an electronics ban for first-year courses and greater measures to test knowledge “without the guardrail of technology.” 

Princeton would do well to heed this vision of the post-AI classroom. Citing the “ease of access” of AI tools on personal devices, the University recently overturned its 133-year-old ban on in-person proctoring for examinations. Princeton’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning offers syllabus statements to accommodate disparate classroom AI policies. And yet, the Rights, Rules, Responsibilities handbook, the University’s most comprehensive policy document, devotes more words to the Nude Olympics than to AI usage. 

Clearly, Princeton needs an institutional approach to AI-resilient pedagogy — what the University of Chicago defines as “modes of classroom interaction and performance evaluation” — that prepare students to use AI without offloading the development of foundational knowledge-making skills. While Yale’s column makes valuable suggestions for introducing these changes to the classroom itself, its narrow vision of campus learning spaces limits its efficacy as a model for AI-resilient pedagogy.

A properly AI-resilient pedagogy must transcend the physical space of the classroom. To be sure, classroom computer bans and in-person exam proctoring are essential to safeguard humanistic inquiry. But encouraging broader social engagement with intellectual questions and with each other requires a campus supportive of what we might call “casual intellectual experiences”: extracurricular learning that is participatory, embedded in community, and free of barriers to entry. 

The challenge posed by AI is not simply that it makes cheating easier but that it challenges the merit of assessments themselves. For example, the model of intelligence evaluated by something like a midterm — the ability to answer targeted questions about a vast swath of information — is AI’s core competency. There’s a lot of hucksterism in Sam Altman’s claim that AI will make intelligence like a utility, capable of being bought and sold like electricity, but there’s also a kernel of truth to which our pedagogical practices must respond. 

AI-resilient pedagogy must address an educational environment in which merely teaching information has become less important than providing students avenues for self-directed inquiry. The phrase “self-directed” often accompanies a more sinister project of remaking learning into curiosity lazily scaffolded by generative AI. But it also signals a very real pedagogical shift. Today, a surplus of knowledge-generating capacity accounts for a scarcity of student investment in the knowledge-making processes. Now more than ever, students need to be reminded of what it was that made them care about learning enough to come to a school like Princeton. 

The McGraw Center’s guide to AI-resilient activities and assignments — the closest thing Princeton has to an institutional policy for updating classroom practices in response to AI — recognizes this much. Take its key recommendations; assessments should foster “personal connections with the material” and “ask students to observe and analyze real world phenomena.” What better way for professors to adopt these suggestions in their pedagogy than by encouraging students to translate knowledge into participatory campus programming? Recommendations like those offered by the McGraw Center would benefit from reminding professors what these casual intellectual experiences represent on campus: students self-directing the difficult business of exploring new theories from the limited viewpoint of their own lives. 

By endorsing the pedagogical value of these experiences, professors have the opportunity to amend a flaw at the heart of Princeton’s vision of campus community. In an excellent column, Raphaela Gold argues that “community care days” and similar institutionally sponsored extracurricular programs treat campus community as the byproduct of freebie give-aways. Conflating “chances to acquire goods” with genuine connection, these experiences signal a reticence to build community on the basis of what attracted so many of us to Princeton: the opportunity to pursue intellectually stimulating experiences with likeminded peers. 

And the student groups one might expect to organize casual intellectual experiences have tended to prioritize prestige over growing student participation. While critiques of selective admissions processes have traditionally been levied against finance and consulting clubs, student groups oriented toward artistic and cultural programming are just as liable to perpetuate this problematic dynamic. Of course, part of what makes casual intellectual experiences unique is that they do not require the support of student organizations. But the financial backing and institutional legitimacy of Princeton clubs grants them privileged access to campus spaces, transportation services, and other resources needed to make events accessible to students. Amending the barriers to participation which so many of these clubs enforce — through, for example, funding reassessments of clubs that meet ODUS’s selective membership criteria —  is essential to align institutional resources with support for these casual intellectual experiences. 

Thankfully, students have begun to repair this dynamic. Programs like the Nassau Weekly’s poetry workshops and WPRB’s live storytelling contests have long been outliers in an extracurricular landscape dominated by exclusivity. This fall, however, the New York Philosophy Club — which facilitates philosophical inquiry in discussions between amateur participants — announced they are bringing a chapter to Princeton. 

Same too, for the Brooklyn-based Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA), at which I interned this summer. Their sidewalk studies, sometimes described as “intellectual bar crawls,” convert literary texts into lenses for viewing New Yorkers and the city in new ways. These events are always free of charge, and their low barriers to entry invite a diversity of participants necessary for stimulating discussion. The SoRA programs I’ve attended brought together city employees, tech industry veterans, and retired university professors to study attention, giving me a more human perspective on these issues than I would have gained through chat-bot assisted study.

I appreciate that “casual” experiences are not a brand familiar to many Princeton students. Rightfully so; one doesn’t need to make time-worn allusions to our ambition and drive to observe that, throughout much of Princeton’s history, “casual” experiences permitted a predominantly white male student body to flaunt its privilege through disruptive pranks and debauchery. By calling a sidewalk study or philosophy salon “casual,” I do not mean to promote intellectual unseriousness. Rather, I aim to renew our sensitivity to this term’s etymology. Casual comes from the Latin “casus,” which means everything from chance, occasion, opportunity, accident, or event. As we revise assessment policies to mitigate the harmful effects of AI, we must also invent experiences which scaffold, outside the classroom, the foundation of what makes college campuses sanctuaries for human centered learning: the chance to catch the flicker of a new idea and be irrevocably changed by the encounter.

Few would call Nick Manetas ’27 a casual guy, but he has made peace with this. An English major from Richmond, Va., he can be reached at nm1629[at]princeton.edu.

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