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  "path": "/2026/03/23/shortcuts-to-the-end-of-the-university/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-23T11:15:14.000Z",
  "site": "https://dailynous.com",
  "tags": [
    "Institutions",
    "artificial intelligence AI",
    "teaching",
    "technology",
    "the future of the university",
    "Shortcuts to the End of the University?",
    "Daily Nous"
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  "textContent": "“It’s not just the problem of brazen cheating. In some ways, the more insidious threat LLMs pose to undergraduate learning is the promise of instant shortcuts.” . That’s Paul Sagar, Reader in Political Theory at King’s College London, writing at Unherd. He continues: Why struggle through that difficult article, why read that complicated book, why force yourself through the problem set, when the internet can just summarize it for you? The answer to which is: because it is only through the struggle, the forcing, the wrestling with ideas for yourself, over the course of years, that you can truly train and develop your mind. Indeed, this is the reason university humanities degrees put such a high premium on writing. Writing is thinking. Until you have tried to put your ideas on the page, you never really know if you understand them and have them under control. Unfortunately, the truth of these facts only becomes apparent with experience—which is exactly what undergraduates lack. You may also be surprised to hear that people in their late teens and early twenties tend not to be good at putting off immediate pleasure in exchange for distant reward. Traditionally, one thing that universities were good at was teaching young people this skill by forcing them to acquire it. (One learns by doing.) LLMs, however, pose a direct threat to this entire process. They are a quick-fix drug dangled before students’ noses whose true effects appear to be the stunting of intellectual development. That’s the problem. What’s the solution? By this point, it is abundantly clear that the only pedagogically robust response to LLMs in universities is at least a partial return to traditional methods. Reliance on online coursework has to be reduced; a significant return to paper and pen is required. This is the only way we can guarantee that students are not cheating in (all) their submissions. It is only by demanding that they prove their knowledge directly, in person, that we can incentivize them to go away and learn properly in their own time. Everybody in higher education knows this already. But one problem with that solution is that it’s not clear that university administrators are on board with it. At KCL, Sagar says, faculty were..\n\nThe post Shortcuts to the End of the University? first appeared on Daily Nous.",
  "title": "Shortcuts to the End of the University?"
}