In 1869, Charles Eliot asked what the American college was for, and answered by dismantling the curriculum that had defined it for two centuries. In 1936, Robert Hutchins asked the same question against the pressure of the Depression, and refused to let the university be reduced to a job-training apparatus for an economy in collapse. In 1963, Clark Kerr asked it again of the postwar multiversity, and named the contradictions the institution had been carrying without naming. As much as we want to think this moment is unique, we stand at a similar inflection. The question is the same. The pressures are different. The hedging that has carried the American university through the last half century is no longer available, and the institution will have to answer, in language its students and their families can recognize as honest, what it is now for.
The pressure this time arrives in the form of a technology that has begun to absorb the credentialed performance the university has been selling. Large language models can pass the bar examination, write the brief, draft the memo, generate the code, summarize the literature, and produce the analysis that an entry-level professional was hired to produce. Companies have been laying off in the tens of thousands and citing AI as the reason, and a year later many of them are quietly rehiring, often offshore and at lower wages. Forrester’s 2026 Future of Work report finds that 55 percent of employers regret those layoffs and projects that roughly half will be reversed. The on-ramps into professional careers are narrowing at the same time that tuition continues to rise. The Burning Glass Institute reports that the value of a bachelor’s degree has dropped to a thirty-year low, with unemployment among recent graduates approaching levels seen among non-graduates, as employers automate the entry-level tasks that once gave junior staff the experience the labor market is now demanding upfront. The families paying that tuition are being asked to take on more debt for a credential whose market value the technology is in the process of revising in real time. The institution is being asked to absorb this revaluation at a moment when the federal research enterprise that has underwritten the modern American university is itself contracting, when state appropriations have been declining in real terms for two decades, and when the discretionary resources required to undertake any serious redesign are scarcer than they have been at any point in the postwar period. The institution has so far responded to all of this with a vocabulary of adaptation. AI literacy across the curriculum. Faculty workshops on integrating the tools. A few new degree programs. The vocabulary is not wrong. It is incommensurate with the size of what is happening.
