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Universities once helped humanity move beyond the rule of divine authority. Today, universities must help people learn not to become slaves to their own instincts. When do we know that a system of higher education has succeeded? We often answer this question through familiar measures: graduation rates, grades, employment rates, salaries, university rankings, research publications, or how well graduates meet the needs of the labor market. These indicators are useful. They tell us something about whether an institution is functioning effectively. But they do not answer the deeper question. What kind of human being does higher education produce? A university may produce graduates with excellent academic records, impressive technical skills, and highly competitive salaries. Yet if those graduates cannot govern their own desires, cannot use power responsibly, cannot distinguish between having something and being someone, and cannot continue learning when the world changes, can we really say...

  MIT is late to the conversation, but at least we finally have the conversation in writing. ChatGPT was launched in November 2022. Since then, generative AI has moved from an experimental technology to an everyday presence in education. Students use it to write code, explain difficult concepts, summarize readings, search for information, brainstorm ideas, and work through increasingly complex projects. Nearly four years later, MIT has now articulated a comprehensive institutional position on how generative AI should be approached in teaching, learning, and research training. That may feel late. But it is also important. Rather than treating GenAI simply as a cheating problem, MIT’s framework asks a much more fundamental question: What should education look like when machines can increasingly perform many of the tasks we traditionally use to measure learning? The answer is not to ban AI, nor to surrender education to it. Instead, MIT proposes a set of principles that put learning, ...