Let's Stop With the Pearl-Clutching and Roll Up Our Sleeves

It’s Time for a Bold Revisioning of Higher Education

By Van L. Davis, Ph.D.

Recently, a colleague forwarded to me Ian Bogost’s latest essay for The Atlantic, “College Is Coming Apart.” Bogost is a professor at an elite liberal arts college whose educational worldview is what you might expect: higher education is broken, is “incompatible with itself” (whatever that means), and that faculty “have no idea whether we are really teaching or just LARPing for students who are also pretending to occupy their role.”

I’m exhausted by the academic pearl-clutching that seems endemic these days; Bogost is merely the most recent of them. Cries of higher education’s demise are everywhere and come from academics and tech bros alike. What I’d like to propose is this: Maybe the way we’ve approached higher education these last several decades is over, and maybe that’s not such bad a thing.

I’m the product of a small, residential liberal arts institution where I received a great deal of personalized instruction inside and outside of the classroom. In fact, the relationships I had with faculty have changed my professional and personal lives—so much so that I remain in contact with two of my professors to this day. Those personal relationships, in part, propelled me to become a history professor. I wanted to give my students the opportunities that were given to me.

So, I’ve spent a lot of time over the course of my career thinking about the value of higher education and how that intersects with digital learning—and, of course in 2026, how all of this is impacted for good or for ill by AI. I’m so tired of all of these higher education naysayers who are clutching their metaphorical pearls while decrying the demise of higher education as we know it. Because what almost none of these critics are willing to admit is that the higher education they are mourning was never one that the majority of Americans had access to or wanted.

Rather than decry the death of something that never was, can we use this moment as an opportunity to reinvent who we are, what we do, and how we do it? What can and should higher education look like in the age of AI? What values should drive our work, and how might we be able to leverage technology in service of those values?

Learning is learning. Modality should matter less and less since all learning is now digital.

Gone are the days when only online programs leveraged digital tools. All courses, in some way or another, now leverage digital learning tools regardless of whether they are on-campus or online courses. Nevertheless, we are hearing critiques of online from the late 1990s and early 2000s resurface with accusations that online learning is somehow of lesser quality and more prone to academic integrity issues. The reality is that in our post-COVID world, more students are taking at least one online course than not. If modality doesn’t matter to our learners, why should we?

Community Matters More Than Ever

In To Know as We Are Known, Parker Palmer writes, “Good teachers also bring students into community with themselves and with each other—not simply for the sake of warm feelings, but to do the difficult things that teaching and learning require.”

Now more than ever, we must be in community with each other as we engage in so many difficult conversations, including those about the very nature of learning and humanity in an AI world. And community need not only be developed face-to-face; virtual community is equally, if not more, important, given the pervasiveness of virtual communities that our students find themselves in.

Education is a process, and the product isn’t the credential. It’s the person.

MIT recently released its AI and Education report meant to outline a series of recommendations for faculty, staff, and students related to AI use on the campus. I was struck by this statement: “All of us who teach at MIT will need to be prepared to help students understand both that the process of education is necessarily a productive struggle, and that the most important product of their education is not a GPA or a diploma but themselves: their personal growth and intellectual maturity and the development of their own imagination, insight, and judgment.”

To all of the pearl-clutchers out there, I challenge you to rethink the value of higher education. Think about how it can be an engine for the economic and personal development of learners of all ages and their families. Think about how digital learning can actually expand educational access rather than serve as some sort of existential threat. And think about what it will take to do so. How can we create communities that matter to everyone involved in the educational process? How does technology become a tool for access and connection? And how do we construct a curriculum that addresses the unique moment in time that we find ourselves? Let’s set aside the pearls and instead roll up our sleeves to make digital learning work for all students.

This isn’t the time for education as usual. It’s the moment for a bold revisioning of higher education. It’s time to take what’s worked and adapt it to this unique moment in time. Let’s commit to having brave but tough conversations within our community as digital learning leaders.

It may feel lonesome where you sit on your campus. You may be tired of constantly defending the work that you do to both peers and strangers—but you are not alone. You are a part of a rich community of leaders committed to expanding educational access and quality through online learning and digital tools. Thank you for the work that you do and being an integral part of that community.