Erin Kunkle

I posted this on Instagram yesterday. Posting here today so that everyone can see how ridiculous this situation is. I was the one who made the Alo purchase, in person, in Utah. When we got the call that Charlie had been shot, we rushed from the office and into the airplane. We arrived in Utah with nothing but the clothes we were wearing. We were in those clothes all day at the hospital and slept in them that night. The next morning, our friend Stacy handed me her card, and I went out and picked up some items and toiletries for various team members and Erika. Alo was down the street. Also, if you look closely at the video below, you will see that the photo of Erika’s account was taken at 12:14 pm on March 10. A week before the video was released. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a clear sign this was a planned, manufactured attack. To accuse Erika or anyone else of entertaining a “shopping spree” hours after her husband was brutally murdered is cruel and vicious.

This, right here, is the canary in the coal mine for higher education. For my upper-level in-person teaching, I've switched to in-class, no-device, open notes essay exams. Online humanities courses at any significant scale are dead, and publicly available LLMs are the reason. Our fundamental skills -- reading, writing, reasoning, remembering -- are decaying at an alarming rate. We are losing a generation, and when that generation is grown, there will be virtually no one left to teach basic skills to the next. I love the good things that generative AI can do. Some of them are absolutely amazing. I use these tools to create projects that I think will be groundbreaking. But we are facing an extinction event for higher education. And with the best will in the world, my colleagues don't have a plan. They mill around, acknowledging that, yes, there are problems, and opining that perhaps we should move to in-class exercises that incorporate AI and ask students to think about the outputs. There is no coherent university-wide policy. There is no movement to recover the lost tools of learning. I mention memory palaces, but most of my colleagues have never heard of them. Those who have think that I'm trying to be clever, recommending going backward in order to go forward. How quaint! It does not occur to them that training young people in such skills might become a lynchpin of civilizational survival. Intensive reading, effortful study, deep learning -- a few individuals will always gravitate toward these things. But at scale, all of this is dying. We are drowning ourselves face-down in the shallows. φάσκοντες εἶναι σοφοὶ ἐμωράνθησαν

That's smart parenting right there.

SPOILER ALERT: Men cannot get pregnant