SALT LAKE CITY — University of Utah professor Hollis Robbins argued in a Substack post titled "It's Later Than You Think" that the advent of artificial general intelligence would require a culling of sixty to seventy per cent of the country's professors.
Robbins, a professor of English and special adviser in the humanities at the University of Utah, maintained that institutions failing to adapt to AI will not survive and that those that do will look fundamentally different. She writes about artificial intelligence and higher education on her Substack, "Anecdotal Value."
"This isn't a mere transformation but a brutal winnowing. Most institutions will fail, and those that remain will be unrecognizable by today's standards," she wrote.
Robbins suggested that professors hoping to keep their jobs should write a memo explaining what specific knowledge they possess that AGI does not. She said professors unable to produce a compelling memo with concrete, defensible answers should lose their positions at universities.
"The only defensible reason for universities to remain in operation is to offer students an opportunity to learn from faculty whose expertise surpasses current AI," she wrote.
Robbins, who previously served as dean of arts and humanities at Sonoma State University, has experimented with large language models to assess their knowledge of the African American sonnet tradition — her area of academic expertise — and identify the edges of their capabilities.
In the post, Robbins described American higher education as bureaucratic, with generic curricula and poor teaching, conditions she said leave the sector vulnerable to an AI takeover. She pointed to rampant AI-assisted cheating, declining faith in the value of a college education, and faculty dissatisfaction as symptoms of a deeper issue in academia.
Robbins argued that elite universities are becoming interchangeable because of the Common Application and pressure on students to attend the most prestigious colleges possible. High student transfer rates, with about forty per cent of students transferring at least once between institutions, place additional pressure on colleges to make courses interchangeable. At the University of Utah, learning outcomes are defined by the Utah System of Higher Education.
Robbins contended that colleges should instead cultivate a unique character based on the charisma of professors, the novelty of academic inquiries, and the quality of instruction. She does not believe that all human inquiry has ended or that artificial intelligence will fully replace human scholarly work.