In June, University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos announced that the institution would be rolling out Claude Enterprise, an artificial intelligence tool developed by Anthropic, to all students, faculty and staff.

The letter features carefully composed language: “Spanning the domains of research, education, and operations: these are powerful tools that are being made available to help individuals find ways to improve our pursuit of knowledge.”

Tyler Austin Harper, a staff writer at The Atlantic and a former professor, responded to the news on X with a pointed challenge: “Genuinely, can someone give me the steel man version of the rationale behind the new ‘give everyone AI’ university strategy? What is the theory of the case here? Do universities think it’s sustainable to ask students to pay over $90K per year to cheat their way through college?”

Harper is not a reactionary technophobe. He has written carefully about AI and education for years, and his concern is not that students will use these tools — they already do — but that universities are now complicit in a transaction that hollows out the very thing they claim to sell. That anxiety deserves to be taken seriously. But framing the question this way blocks the more important one.

He is right that this decision raises serious concerns. Releasing AI into the classroom renews a foundational debate about what learning actually means. But the “cheat machine” metaphor conceals a much deeper rupture.

Read Alivisatos’ letter carefully, and three distinct promises converge inside it. First, the possibilities AI opens up for research and knowledge production. Second, the commitment to teach students how “to think with machines, how to think without them, and how to think about them.” Third, the ambition to relieve staff of administrative burden. These goals do not contradict each other, but they do not necessarily reinforce each other either. And the letter does not appear to notice the tension. The problem is not whether AI exists. The problem is whether the university still knows what it is selling.

The value proposition of higher education has historically rested on three things: acquiring knowledge, learning to think and connecting with a community. AI intervenes radically in access to information. A student who asks Claude to summarize John Rawls before a seminar has not learned to read his work. A student who uses it to draft the opening paragraph of an argument has not learned to face the blank page. The capacity to sit with a hard problem before reaching for assistance, to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing, is not a byproduct of education. It is close to the point of it.

Digital ethics scholar Luciano Floridi, in his book “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence,” warns that AI risks not merely replacing old skills but devaluing them. His concern is not that humans will stop knowing things, but that “deskilling in sensitive, skill-intensive domains” creates fragilities that only become visible when the technology fails.

A university classroom is exactly such a domain. The ability to construct an argument under pressure, to read a difficult text without a summary that is one click away, these are not quaint habits from a pre-digital era. They are capacities that, once lost at scale, are not easily recovered. Equipping students with those capacities remains something a university can still do. The question is whether it will.

What Harper of The Atlantic misses is this: The problem is not that the U. of C. gave students AI. The enterprise license carries a real practical benefit: data protection and an obstacle to the tiered access that lets wealthier students use more powerful tools. The genuine problem is that this decision obligated the university to redefine its own educational philosophy. The letter does not do that. Instead it presents ambiguity as flexibility: “Policies vary by course,” it says, and “instructors at all levels are navigating a fast-evolving landscape.” These statements may be true. But they read less like leadership and more like a transfer of responsibility.

The U. of C. has historically claimed to keep alive questions that resist consensus. AI is the test of that claim. If the tool simply makes the assignment less painful, Harper’s question remains standing.

Alivisatos closes his letter with confidence that “the results of today’s announcement will serve to enable our community to find the best paths forward in the domains of research, learning, and operations with informed experience and a spirit of experimentation.” That is a promising statement. But a spirit of experimentation is not the same as a theory of education.

I came to theology after years working as a civil engineer. What drew me to graduate study was not access to information; I had that. It was the experience of being made uncomfortable by ideas I could not yet hold, of writing through confusion rather than around it. That kind of formation does not survive a curriculum built around convenience.

Harper is right that the question is urgent. He is wrong that the answer is obvious.

The harder truth is that no one yet knows what a university looks like when it takes AI seriously and takes learning seriously at the same time. If this partnership is to mean anything beyond a licensing agreement, the U. of C. needs to say clearly what it believes education is for and then build a policy that protects it.

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Yunus Emre Tozal is a civil engineer in Chicago and a graduate student at Catholic Theological Union.

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