Introduction

Techno-capitalism is a social system dominated by technology-driven capital, in which technological development is a primary vehicle for wealth concentration. Professors are currently trying to navigate the incursion of techno-capitalism into higher education through the widespread adoption of generative AI platforms like ChatGPT. 

In a recent article for Current Affairs, Professor Ronald Purser argues that AI is destroying the university by undermining critical thinking, accelerating the corporatization of higher education, and contributing to “AI colonialism” by desecrating the environment and displacing racialized communities to build AI servers and data centers. While some of his colleagues quickly embraced this technology, most tried to figure out how to resist it. As Purser describes his department’s initial response to ChatGPT’s emergence in 2022,

The panic came first. Faculty meetings erupted in dread: “How will we detect plagiarism now?” “Is this the end of the college essay?” “Should we go back to blue books and proctored exams?” My business school colleagues suddenly behaved as if cheating had just been invented.

Seemingly, the most common response to generative AI has been to revive teaching methods from 20 years ago: hand-written exams, oral tests, proctoring, and other surveillance techniques. While this may be an effective stop-gap measure, it doesn’t address the underlying reasons for the widespread adoption of generative AI in the first place. Why don’t students want to learn? Or more specifically, why don’t they want to learn what their professor are trying to teach them? Could something about dominant pedagogical assumptions explain why students are so eager to outsource their learning to a chatbot? 

As professors rush to revive the pedagogies of my own college days, there is a risk of romanticizing those times – times that I personally remember with dread. This romanticism can be seen in Purser’s own recollection of his college years in the ‘80s, when university was more affordable and less vocationally-driven – at least for some people. Purser recalls a vision of the 20^th-Century university that encouraged students to “explore,” “be challenged,” and “figure out what mattered.”; “That kind of education – the open, affordable, meaning-seeking kind—once flourished in public universities. But now it is nearly extinct,” he laments.

This paints a picture of a “golden age” of uncommodified and accessible education, in contrast to the present, deplorable state of education as a cheapened, mass-marketed product. While this picture is not totally false, we should be careful not to glamorize the past. 

Many academics, including myself, do not reflect fondly on the university of the past, nor do we see a firm line between past educational technologies and their present iterations. Instead, there is a throughline of disciplinary strategies that have simply become more high-tech in recent years. Yet these strategies have always had the same goal: to produce docile bodies. Critical pedagogy theorists from 20-50 years ago did not describe a golden age of academic freedom, but rather a set of disciplinary and surveillance technologies that functioned to produce obedient subjects: cogs in the neoliberal machine, molded to fit specific roles in the economy. In fact, they viewed education as a primary site of discipline, “establish[ing] rhythm, impos[ing] particular occupations, regulat[ing] the cycles of repetition,” and channeling populations into differentiated regimes of power, as Foucault wrote in 1977 (149). Let’s look more closely at some of these critiques of educational power. 

Education as Discipline 

On Foucault’s analysis, formal education produces “docile bodies” optimized for productivity and obedience – bodies that follow rules, meet deadlines, accept positions in “bullshit jobs,” and assimilate into neoliberalism in a multitude of ways. This analysis extends to universities, where students are “subjugated by disciplinary regimes” and “turn[ed] into objects of knowledge” rather than being recognized as knowledge-producers and epistemic authorities (Foucault 1977, 28). 

Foucault’s critique of neoliberal education as a disciplinary technology was echoed by many of his contemporaries. Paolo Friere, for instance, described the dominant pedagogy of the 20^th-Century as “the banking model,” whereby students are positioned as passive “receptacles” of institutional knowledge, which is “deposited” in them by their teachers (1968, np). Students are meant to “mechanically memorize” and exactly reproduce their lessons, adding nothing personal or original, similar to a chatbot processing datasets (ibid). 

Bell hooks invokes the banking model to describe her time at Stanford University, where she “was enthralled with the process of becoming an insurgent black intellectual,” but “the primary lesson was reinforced: [students] were to learn obedience to authority” (1994, 4). “In graduate school the classroom became a place I hated… The university and the classroom began to feel more like a prison, a place of punishment and confinement rather than a place of promise and possibility” (ibid). A part of the unspoken lesson was white supremacy, as students “from marginal groups were made to feel that [they] were there not [there] to learn but to prove that they were the equal of whites” (5). The main emotions hooks felt in class were not love of wisdom or curiosity, but rather “boredom” and “apathy” (5). 

As a disabled student 20 years ago, I similarly felt that the unspoken lesson of higher education was to learn obedience to able-bodied supremacy. I, too, felt bored, apathetic, and, above all, alienated – not just by the readings, which either erased or medicalized disability; nor just the intense productivity regimes, which were designed by and for the average able-bodied, neurotypical knower; but also by the foundational assumptionsof the university, which position disability as outside of and oppositional to education itself. The message was loud and clear: I don’t belong here. I belong in a different type of institution, 

As Jay Dolmage observes (2024), “for most of the 20th century, people with disabilities were institutionalized in asylums, ‘schools’ for the ‘feebleminded’ and other exclusionary institutions, locations that became the dark shadows of the college or university, connected with residential schools, prisons, quarantines, and immigration stations in these shadows” (3). These segregated institutions were still operating when I was a teenager: the last residential school didn’t close until the mid-1990s. The university, along with prisons, asylums, and immigration detention centers, is not a completely separate institution but part of a “technology of governance” that sorts populations into those deemed worthy of investment and “optimization” on the one hand, and those marked for abandonment, dispossession, and displacement on the other. Professors belong to the former category, and their job is to condition students to occupy authoritative roles within the neoliberal order.      

The takeaway is that the pre-20^th-Century university was a far cry from a wellspring of epistemic freedom, equality, and justice. In many ways, it was more exclusionary that today’s education system, because the exclusions were explicit and material: the architectural exclusions, curricular ableism, and punitive regimes were even more entrenched than today.   

Technologies vs Tools

I turned to Foucauldian analysis for this presentation in part because Foucault helps to illuminate how technologies aren’t simply modern inventions but rather encompass entire disciplinary regimes designed to regulate and optimize populations for neoliberal purposes. 

For Foucault, a technology isn’t simply a tool, like a smart phone or AI. It’s a dispersed set of techniques, procedures, and discourses that regulate human behavior and produce certain kinds of subjects. Neoliberalism can be seen a technology in this sense – one that divides populations into those worthy of investment and cultivation and those to be abandoned or excluded. Using this framework, we can see the university is a neoliberal technology that cultivates a disciplined, self-managing subject, oriented toward competition, productivity, and market participation. Within the technology of the university itself, there are micro-technologies that enforce discipline, impose obedience, and punish dissent. In the 20th Century, these technologies included panopticon-style classrooms, with a lectern at the front and desks arranged in rows to prevent talking, cheating, and distraction; timed exams, standardized tests, and grading systems that produced a uniform type of knower and a canonic body of knowledge; and admissions criteria that excluded populations viewed as “undisciplined” or “unfit.” The result was a largely white, able-bodied, cisgender, male student bodied, governed by professors and administrators from the same demographic groups. 

The 20^th Century also witnessed the advent of digital ranking systems, such as institutional leaderboards, citation indexes, and journal impact factors. These metrics contributed to a system of digitized surveillance that standardized and optimized academic performance, favoring quantity over quality and prestige over originality. Marc Edwards and Sidharta Roy (2016) describe these metrics as “perverse incentives” that select for the most ruthless academics – those willing to lie and cheat to get ahead in their careers. Maeve McKeown, in writing about the philosophy job market specifically, describes it as a “Hunger-Games-like contest” to “publish in ‘top’ journals,” “amass greater numbers of publications,” and win the most grants (2022, 99). This contest has produced “unbearable working conditions” for academics, while stifling “diversity, creativity, and dissent” (ibid). The result is a sludge of generic academic “content” that caters to general-interest journals and billionaire donors.    

In fact, the content produced by neoliberal education is not that different from the AI slop that academics profess to hate: formulaic writing that ignores structural inequalities and sanitizes capitailsm. Charles Millscalled this slop “ideal theory,” Robin Dembroff called it “cisgender commonsense,” and Shelley Tremain calls it “neoliberal eugenics.” None of this philosophical slop is new. It’s merely a continuation of centuries of neoliberal disciplinary regimes. Generative AI just makes it easier to produce this formulaic content in large quantities. Yet even before ChatGPT appeared on the scene, McKeown lamented that

Almost everyone [in academia] has given up resisting and accepts the cards they have been dealt. They play by the rules, even though they resent them. At a time when bold new ideas and vision are needed for our crisis-laden world, a world that is literally on fire, political theorists are busying themselves with the game (100). 

The gamification of education may have reached new heights in the 21st Century, but it was spawned by the disciplinary technologies and quantification systems of the last century. 

Crisis Epistemology

While the current situation is dystopian, it is important to understand that this technological crisis is precedented and familiar – simply an extension of centuries of capitalist bureaucracy. The surveillance technologies of the 21^st Century are continuous with the surveillance technologies of the 20th Century, which served to produce docile subjects, manageable populations, and dominant discourses. Today, Proctoro has replace panopticon-style classrooms and Turnitin.com has replaced human invigilators, but all of these technologies belong to a broader carceral continuum aimed at producing obedient knowers and hegemonic forms of knowledge. Foucault used the term “carceral archipelago” to describe the diffuse network of prisons, surveillance systems, and disciplinary institutions that structure modern life, which we can take to include the neoliberal university. The low-tech 20^th Century university and its modern, “AI-powered” version are not opposites, but rather two “islands” within the same carceral archipelago, demonstrating the continuity of educational discipline across time – a form of discipline that discriminates against disability. 

Kyle White (2020) coined the term “crisis epistemology” to describe a colonial ideology that imagines crises as unprecedented and urgent. “The presumption of unprecedentedness,” he says, “makes it possible to willfully forget certain previous instances or lessons related to a crisis” (4). With respect to climate change, this presumption allows people to ignore its roots in the colonial displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples – a history that continues into the present. In education, there is a similar strategic forgetting of the ableist, racist, and patriarchal characteristics of 20^th-Century education, which were critiqued by the critical pedagogists of the time. Historical reflection reveals that the surveillance regimes of the past prefigured and enabled the surveillance technologies of the present, which continue to bring education into alignment with the interests of capital. Older disabled and neuroqueer academics like myself vividly remember how the dominant pedagogy of the neoliberal university harmed, alienated, and excluded disabled students and other marginalized groups. Reviving those methods is, at best, a stop-gap measure: it may temporarily block generative AI but it fails to address its underlying causes in neoliberalism. 

Whyte explains that “the presumption of urgency suggests that swiftness of action is needed to cope with imminence. There either may be moral sacrifices that have to be made or ethics and justice are not elevated to a level of serious attention” (5). The “urgent response” to climate change is often to implement green technologies that “desecrate Indigenous lands” and “provincialize Indigenous knowledge systems,” contributing to “green colonialism” (2). Similarly, the urgent response to AI-supported plagiarism is often to ban modern technologies and revert to traditional methods – methods built by and for neurotypical, nondisabled knowers – without consulting with those most affected. Whyte emphasizes that consultation, consent, and collective action are the best responses to crises.   

Ultimately, the structure of higher education itself needs to be interrogated and radically changed. Some proposals that I have defended in my own writing include: ungrading, eliminating predetermined learning objectives, adopting a pedagogy of play inspired by Maria Lugones, banning billionaire donations in academia, decolonizing knowledge, and revising the curriculum to focus on prison abolition and the de-institutionalization movement. While I do not have space to elaborate on these proposals here, they all rest on the idea that education should not be standardized, surveilled, and policed by neoliberal authorities. These techniques make it far too easy to replace learning with AI-generated slop that replicates dominant discourses and reproduces hierarchies of power. Education should not be boring and alienating, as hooks described it. It should be playful, subversive, and unruly. And until it becomes these things, people will turn to AI as a substitute for learning.   

Thank you.