This text is a “Last Lecture,” presented to students at the University of Virginia in Old Cabell Hall on April 24, 2023 at 8pm. It is intended to be what I would say to students if I knew I were giving the last lecture I would ever give. Here a the video of that presentation. I hope you’ll find it interesting and maybe even valuable. — Lou Bloomfield, August 27, 2023, lab3e@virginia.edu.

Why are you here?

Not here at this lecture; here at UVA. For students, I can’t think of a more important question. That question is on my mind whenever I talk with students, so it’s natural for me to build my last lecture around it. And I’m going to focus on 3 pairs of choices:

• Are you here to learn or are you here for a degree?
• Are you here because you want to be at UVA or are you here because you want to be associated with the UVA brand?
• Are you here to learn how to create or to learn how to prompt AI to create for you?

There are other important pairings and I’ll discuss them in another part of the universe’s overall quantum wavefunction (think “Everything everywhere all at once”). Those pairings include:

• Are you here for yourself or are you here for your parents or family?
• Are you here because you want to be here or are you here because you don’t know what else to do?
• Are you here to live your best life or are you here to live your most valuable life?

Each of those dichotomies might seem to have an obvious answer or at least one that sounds more praiseworthy than the other. As I delve into the first 3, however, you may find that each choice has both merits and shortcomings.

Are you here to learn or are you here for a degree?

To understand what those two choices entail at present, it’ll help to have some historical perspective. Now, I’m not a historian of education or even a historian in general, so you should take what I say with a grain of salt. I’ll try to be accurate, but I may make mistakes. What matters most in what I’ll say is this basic outline: that colleges have changed over the past hundred years and that the changes have been for the better and the worse. Recognizing these changes should give you insight into the two choices I’ve offered.

Thomas Jefferson studied at William and Mary for two years and went on to practice law, but he never received a formal degree. A degree wasn’t necessary for a lawyer and higher education of that era emphasized appropriate education, not official degrees. Jefferson went on to found UVA, but he was opposed to the granting degrees, which he saw as “artificial embellishments”. UVA did award M.D., Master of Arts, and Law degree in its first few decades, but there were other fields of study for which no degrees were awarded. It wasn’t until 1868 that UVA began awarding Bachelor of Science degrees and until 1899 that it began awarding Bachelor degrees as part of the shift toward standardization in higher education.

It is my understanding that UVA, like all colleges, wasn’t all that intellectually rigorous and demanding until well into the 20^th Century. Colleges were effectively finishing schools – places where white gentlemen (sorry, everyone else) were sent to improve themselves before going on to approximately the same jobs and positions they would have held had they not attended college. A gentleman’s family, community, status, and connections were likely to be far more important than his education.

Even when training students for specific occupations, such as Medicine and Law, that training was less demanding back then. Many lawyers learned how to actually practice law in apprenticeships and first jobs, and medicine only became a serious academic discipline in the early 1900s, when it began to embrace science and evidence-based practice. In the 1800s, most medical schools were run for profit by local doctors who had been taught the same way themselves and knew little of anatomy or physiology.

In other words, it’s almost within human memory that higher education first began to play a significant role in preparing people for future employment, as opposed to providing only intellectual, spiritual, and cultural enrichment. Okay, for clergymen, lawyers, doctors and maybe a few others, higher education was of some significance in their work. For most other gentlemen, however, higher education was about spending time with the right sorts of people, developing the mind—though not too vigorously, and having an interesting couple of years in a lively new setting.

Even into the middle of the 20^th Century, the Ivy League schools, among others, emphasized “well-roundedness” in their students—a vague concept that included most gentry but enabled colleges to limit or exclude undesirable groups, such as ethnic, religious, and racial minorities, and undesirable types, such as intellectuals and nerds. For the mainstream college population, the college experience was supposed to be pleasant, not a studious grind or a cultural melting pot.

When and why did things finally begin to change? A proper historian could give you definitive answers to those questions, but I’m not a proper historian. As best I can tell, the when was shortly after WWII and the why was that the college population began to grow dramatically. Precipitating factors included the GI bill and the social, cultural, technological, industrial, and economic changes that occurred post-war. The Cold War developed, the space race began, people became more mobile, the population became more urban, more people began working outside the home, communications improved, and people started to expect an ever-higher standard of living.

Prior to WWII, only a small fraction of the US population went to college and those who went tended to be an elite bunch: children of the wealthy, powerful, and successful, children of the gentry, children of college graduates, and those who had the money and time to attend college without undue hardship. While calling it the “elite bunch” oversimplifies what is surely a complicated group, I think that members of that group not only made up most of the college population, they were also far more likely than average to be successful, to achieve wealth, prosperity, fame, or respect; they were born to it. The elite bunch dominated two things, college and success. And because success was preordained for those in the elite bunch, the stakes at colleges, for the students, for the faculty, and for the institutions themselves, were rather small.

It is my theory that much of the increase in college enrollment during the second half of the 20^th Century was a consequence of people confusing correlation with causation. Specifically, people started to believe that college caused success. To understand this sort of confusion, consider my favorite Wikipedia example:

Sleeping with one’s shoes on is correlated to waking up with a headache. That correlation is real, but there is no causation—shoe-wearing during sleep does not cause a headache. However, going to sleep drunk frequently causes both.

In the case of college, my theory is that many people observed the elite bunch and concluded that their college attendance caused their success. Acting on that dubious deduction, they chose to attend college in the belief that it would lead inexorably to success. In reality, being in the elite bunch led to both college attendance and to success—that is, wealth, prosperity, fame, and respect.

Although college did lead to success for some people outside the elite bunch, it wasn’t effective for others. Life simply isn’t fair. Some people are destined to succeed for reasons having nothing to do with their college attendance, while others who go to college struggle thereafter. College is not a panacea.

Whether my theory is correct or not, college attendance soared after WWII. Prior to 1950, only about 6% of Americans had graduated from college. These days, roughly 40% of Americans have graduated from college. Along with a rapid increase in college graduates, several other changes occurred between 1950 and now, including:

1. More people, notably women, entered the workforce.
2. Jobs and positions became significantly more competitive, particularly at the higher end of the pay scale.
3. The elite bunch encountered more competition for the jobs and positions to which they had previously felt entitled.
4. Everyone began looking for advantages and angles they could use to get ahead.
5. Laws, regulations, and oversight gradually increased.
6. The stakes at colleges, for students, for faculty, and for the institutions themselves, became much higher.

The effects of these changes were many and varied. Here are some specifics.

Students changed: The new students weren’t predestined to succeed and many of them were looking to their college experience to play important roles in their future paths. They wanted what college had to offer and that appeared to be a college education, at least initially. The new students worked harder than previous generations, learned more, thought more deeply, and graduated with stronger backgrounds and often with considerable training that helped them succeed in the world.

However, assessing a college graduate, determining what they know, what they can do, how willing they are to do whatever they need to do, and generally figuring out what is going on between their ears is extremely difficult, so society began to employ various proxy metrics—measurements that were easier to make—to categorize and compare the burgeoning ranks of college graduates. Instead of assessing a college graduate directly, society began asking which college? What grades? What major and minors? What extra curriculars? What internships? In short, what on their resume distinguishes them from everyone else?

Unfortunately, that shift to proxy metrics gave birth to an enormous game and students learned to play that game. They began focusing more on those proxy metrics and less on what those metrics were meant to represent. Students sought to get into the most prestigious colleges. They tried to get the highest grades. They chose majors and minors strategically, often competing to get into the programs that had the best reputations. They participated in extra curriculars not just for fun or service, but also because they wanted to enhance their resumes. In sum, they gave up doing what might have suited them best in order to do what looked the best.

With more students and more competition for the best resumes, college became a fraught experience. The stakes were suddenly high. Not surprisingly, some students began to see life as a long series of strategic choices and high-pressure performances, starting almost from birth and having no end in sight.

Colleges changed: With the new students expecting more return on their college years, colleges had to offer better academic programs and more academic programs in specialties that led directly to future employment. Teaching and learning became more rigorous and scholarship improved to meet the needs not only of academia, but of society at large. The college missions of education and scholarship were high priorities, at least early on.

But colleges had other priorities as well. Colleges have always cultivated human networks and connections, particularly among alumni, to help their graduates learn, prosper, and succeed. Forging those connections became even more important for the new students who didn’t already have them.

One of society’s responses to the enormous growth of college enrollments and the concern that things at college weren’t always fair or above board was to introduce more laws, regulations, and external oversight. Colleges reacted by hiring large numbers of administrators to handle all the compliance activities, particularly at the more closely scrutinized public institutions. Colleges developed sizeable bureaucracies.

Growth and improvements required money and influence, and colleges worked to attract both. Colleges began competing more aggressively for students, faculty, money, prestige, and public goodwill. Colleges became increasingly like other businesses. Though their visions and original missions may have been high-mind, colleges are still businesses and they pursue business agendas at some level: specifically, they act to maximize income, minimize risk, and build brand.

As enrollments and payrolls grew, so did the business of college. Colleges raised tuitions. They diversified into activities that marketed well, attracted money, and fostered public enthusiasm—notably entertainment and construction. They became risk averse and they began to cultivate prestige and name-recognition any way they could.

As colleges evolved into diversified business enterprises, their earlier focus on education and scholarship began to waver and they allowed other activities and needs to divert their attention. That diversification has had both positive and negative effects, and which is which depends on your perspective and interests. My primary interest has always been college’s educational and scholarly missions, and I believe that the diversification has not been good for those missions.

Faculty changed: The new students arriving in the 50’s and onward were expecting a good education at college and faculty had to provide that education. Colleges hired more and better faculty. In general, they did a pretty good job, apart from those faculty being mostly white males. New faculty are normally hired by existing faculty and that hiring process, along with the promotion and tenure processes, is traditionally based on detailed assessments of each potential faculty member’s actions and abilities regarding scholarship and teaching, their intellect, experience, service, citizenship, and integrity. Those assessments are extremely hard work for everyone involved and became even more so as colleges began competing aggressively with one another on every front.

The competition for faculty was simply part of a general competition between colleges. Faculty prowess and performance, along with student quality and achievement, became proxy metrics by which society rated and ranked its many colleges. Since society had neither the will nor the way to actually assess faculty and students directly, it turned to proxy metrics for both. In truth, even colleges use proxy metrics to assess and reward their faculty most of the time; the alternative being altogether too much effort.

So, what are those proxy metrics for faculty? It has been the tradition to assess and value faculty primarily on their scholarship, not their teaching [an arrangement that I could discuss, but won’t.], and the proxy metrics for scholarship in most fields are simple: how many books or papers published, which journals or academic presses published those works, how often those works have been cited by other scholars, how many invited presentations, and which awards and fellowships received. There are more, and the details vary with discipline, but that’s a representative list.

Those metrics are okay but imperfect and they are subject to game-playing. They’re also not entirely fair. For example, publishers and award committees are themselves judged by proxy metrics, including who they publish or give awards. That arrangement encourages self-fulfillment: no editor has ever been fired for publishing work by a highly-published scholar and no award committee has ever been seriously criticized for giving its award to an award-winning scholar. Moreover, faculty at prestigious institutions or with prestigious colleagues are often treated as prestigious themselves and that tends to boost their metrics.

The increased competition between colleges includes competition for current faculty. Superstar faculty now move between colleges the way superstar athletes move between sports teams. Many faculty aspire to be such superstars, but time is finite and it’s difficult to do superstar scholarship and superstar teaching and superstar service. Some parts of the faculty job description inevitably fall through the cracks.

Like most people, faculty tend to prioritize what is recognized and rewarded, not what they’re merely encouraged to do. Since scholarship is most recognized and rewarded, teaching is increasingly passed off to graduate students and adjuncts, and grades have been allowed to inflate significantly. Grades are one of the key proxies used to assess college graduates, so students have become more demanding about grades. Since grades are not one of the proxies used to assess faculty, faculty are inclined to yield to students to avoid conflict. Giving everyone A’s is win-win.

A similar effect has occurred with class content. Since the proxy metrics barely measure what is taught or learned, there is little incentive for instructors or students to do more than the minimum required to ace those metrics. Teaching less and learning less is another win-win. Okay, I’m overstating, but the effect is real.

Overall, the goals and agendas for faculty are complicated and contradictory, just as they are for students. Some students are passionate about immersing themselves in the life of the mind, while others just want to enjoy their college years in relative peace. Similarly, some faculty aspire to the lofty ideals of the traditional academy and liberal arts, and see college as purely about developing the mind, ennobling the spirit, and fostering the erudite citizenry required by society, commerce, and democracy. Others, particularly in disciplines that are directly related to employment, see college as job preparation and have little interest in the purely enriching aspects of college. Most faculty fall in between, but the competition between those two sensibilities leads to an unfortunate competition for resources—money, attention, status—at most colleges.

Society changed: With a larger fraction of people attending college and expecting success as a result, society created its own self-fulfilling arrangements. Society began granting higher status to those with a college education. Since measuring a college education is difficult (what is a college education and how do you assess it meaningfully?), society turned instead to proxy metrics, starting with a college degree.

If you had a college degree, you were treated as superior to those with only a high-school degree or less. You had a higher position in society and you were given more respect. At some point, employers started requiring college degrees for all sorts of jobs, including many that did not make use of a college education. A college degree became a ticket to success.

Not surprisingly, people with college degrees have been found to be more successful than those without—higher average incomes, more respect, higher social status. No duh! If you require a college degree to work in all the high-paying jobs, people with college degrees will have more high-paying jobs! That same goes for social status and respect. It’s self-fulfilling.

In recognition of the importance of college degrees and your attendance at this lecture, I am awarding each of you a college degree from Bloomfield University, a four-minute school accredited by the Bloomfield Accreditation Organization. Our degrees may be small, but a little bit goes a long way. [Toss the degrees.]

Alas, a college degree alone wasn’t always enough; that degree had to come from the right schools, from the right programs of study, with a high-enough GPA, with the right internships or extracurricular activities. The resume became all important and its contents stretched all the way back to pre-school for some people. To get into the right college, you had to go to the right high school and take the right classes with the right GPA. To get into the right high school, you had to go to the right middle school and so on.

Life became a series of hurdles on the way to success and each hurdle involved lots of proxy metrics that substituted for what really matters, which is what exactly is developing inside a young person’s head (how they think, what they understand, what they know, what they can do, what motivates, energizes, and empowers them). The items that are gradually appearing on the person’s resume are supposed to represent that development, but I question the strength of the relationship. And each item or possible item on a resume can become its own focus of activity. Young people can and do “work on their resumes,” and I’m not referring to the process of typing or editing it.

Nearly everyone is a co-conspirator in this resume building. K through 12 education has been diminished by its focus on helping students build their resumes to get into college. Organizations of all sorts take advantage of young people who want those organizations on their resumes. Parents, families, and friends invest time, money, and energy helping young people “improve” their resumes in various ways.

I doubt that all of that resume engineering makes the world a better place and suspect that some of it is actually harmful. Moreover, I think that some of the things students are made to study or do prior to college serve no purpose—they are forgotten soon after they’re studied or experienced and produce no significant development of the minds their appearances on resumes are supposed to represent. And some things that students would actually benefit from studying or doing before college are discarded or ignored. I find it a sad situation.

As society began to see college attendance as key to individual success, it lost interest in financing an individual’s college attendance. Historically, college had been seen as a public good—a grand public endeavor aimed at preparing the enlightened citizenry necessary to sustain society, commerce, and democracy. Once college became an individual good—the path to individual success—the general public lost interest in or even became hostile to spending money on college for others. State support for public institutions of higher education shrank dramatically and laws, regulations and oversight aimed ostensibly at minimizing waste and frivolities at those institutions increased enormously. Vast resources are now wasted in a fevered attempt to avoid waste.

Which brings me to the present situation: people and institutions are mostly pursuing self-interest—they are trying to achieve the best outcomes for themselves—and they are frequently being assessed by proxy metrics on route to those outcomes. I think that the overall result, higher education as a whole, is non-optimal; it has inefficiencies, distractions, and even serious failings that would be nice to eliminate or avoid. But people are human, they dislike change and they are reluctant to give up a half-full glass for the promise of a full one later on. It’s the system we have and will have for a long time, so it’s important to make the best of it.

Which brings me back to the original question (if you weren’t sure I’d ever get back to it, that makes two of us). Are you here to learn or are you here for a degree? I hope that you’re here to do both and I’ll tell you why.

Here to learn because this may be the only time in your life when you can focus intensely on that activity and when you’ll have the exceptional resources, opportunities, teachers, and peers that a first-class college can provide. Jefferson is out of favor, for understandable reasons, but his concept of the “the illimitable freedom of the human mind” is meaningful nonetheless. You have the means to enrich your mind with the knowledge, experience, creativity, and insights of past, present, and emerging generations and to acquire new ways of thinking, understanding, doing, creating, and interacting with others, many of which may be useful to you going forward.

If part of your college education is training and skill-building, embrace it enthusiastically – such education will never get easier than it is now. And if part of your college education is purely for its own sake, enjoy it, breathe it in, and savor it now and always. You are also here to learn how to learn, a task that should serve you well in the future because learning never ends.

When possible, try to take classes with the best teachers, remembering that they may not be the most prestigious faculty according to the metrics. And do your part, too: nothing motivates good teachers to do their best like having students who are doing their best. Participate! I’m not exhorting you to be extroverted if you’re not; I think that introverts are just as valuable to society as extroverts. Instead, I’m encouraging you to engage in learning in whatever way you can and to make the most of your academic interactions with teachers and peers. We learn from one another.

Here for a degree because it is a significant milestone in your progress through life. It represents the completion of a serious, intense, and important undertaking and thus has substantial intrinsic value. It is also the “coin of the realm” – the artifact that entitles you to the many perks and privileges that society grants to those who have completed four years at college. While I have been looking askance at the use of so many proxy metrics in higher education, they are part of the present system, like it or not. Your degree from a prestigious college, along with your GPA, your major and minors, your extra-curriculars, will play a significant role in your life going forward.

Your degree’s impact on your future may fade gradually as other things begin to dominate your resume or it may remain important indefinitely as a way to convince or reassure clients, companies, and colleagues that you are something special. For some people, putting a list of degrees after their names can be a professional necessity or perhaps just a matter of pride. In any case, your degree becomes part of your personal brand and that brings me to my second topic.

Are you here because you want to be at UVA or are you here because you want to be associated with the UVA brand?

I’m not a huge fan of branding, personal or organizational, because I think that branding can have some unfortunate consequences. Here is my analysis:

If you make some product and you want to put your name on it because you’re proud of it, that’s fine with me. You’re signing your work. People will appreciate the quality of your product and may associate your name with that quality.

And if a business makes a product it’s proud of, it can put its name on that product, too. Again, people who appreciate the product’s quality may associate the business’s name with that quality.

Where things go awry is when a person or business reverses the relationship between product and name; when they start selling the name rather than the product. They may still make a quality product, but when people start wanting it blindly, purchasing it uncritically, and valuing it for the name it carries rather than its intrinsic quality, the seller will be tempted to lose focus on that quality. The brand can gradually become the priority and a raft of subtle corruptions can enter the world.

The same story applies to services; if you provide a quality service, by all means, put your name on it. But if you start selling your name and lose interest in quality, that’s not so good.

We’re human and we have countless human weaknesses. We like approval and confirmation that we have made the right choices. We want others to think we’re smart, powerful, important, knowledgeable, sophisticated, and special. We fear missing out on things others have or do. We’re tribal and thus attracted to others who share our loyalties, customs, and beliefs. We’re skeptical of and resistant to change. We avoid risk. Those human behaviors make us susceptible to influence and manipulation by those who know how to exploit them. And branding enables that exploitation.

Okay, I have no expertise in marketing or branding, but I think I understand the basic relationship between branding and human nature. When we have some branded item and see others with that brand, it confirms the correctness of our choice. When those others look back at us, we feel smart, powerful, important, … special for choosing that brand. When we see others having this sort of interaction over a brand that we don’t have, we fear missing out. We tend to group together over a brand (think a sports team) and we are reluctant to change brands (think adults still rooting for their childhood sports teams). And of course, sticking with a particular brand helps us minimize risk.

As long as a brand keeps providing an appropriate level of quality and value, that’s okay. But when branding enables a drop in quality and value, when the brand is being sold, not the product or service, and people are being coaxed into settling for less than they deserve, I’m not so happy. Branding easily becomes a game to separate people from their assets.

In a competitive world such as ours, where information is often unavailable or imperfect, there may not be a loftier alternative to branding, marketing, and advertising. Necessary evils and all that. What troubles me about advertising is that it plays on all our human weaknesses—our need to feel good about ourselves, our desire for confirmation about the correctness of our choices, our fear of missing out, our loyalties, our need to belong, our craving to be like people we respect, envy, or desire. We fall for all the brand ambassadors. And if we’re misled, that’s our problem.

Plus advertising is expensive. To give you some perspective, I’m going to ask you a question with four choices. The question is this: when you click on an online advertisement for a product or service, about how much does seller pay for your click? The 4 choices are: 1/10,000^th of a cent, 1/100^th of a cent, 1 cent, and 1 dollar. Are you okay with the question? So, what’s the answer?

• 1/1000^th of a cent
• 1/100^th of a cent
• 1 cent
• 1 dollar

The correct answer is about 1 dollar. In some situations, your click might cost the seller only 20 or 30 cents, but it can easily cost the seller $2, $5, $50, or more, depending on the product or service and the likelihood that you will actually make the purchase. Behind that advertisement is a huge digital infrastructure that has auctioned off your eyeballs to the seller from whom it expects the most money and that auction is powered by information about you. That information is so valuable to the advertising machinery and the seller that you are monitored relentlessly across the internet and in real life. Your every action is recorded and if they could read your mind, they would. Big Advertising is watching you!

The websites and apps that host the ads may appear free because they’re not charging for their content. Nevertheless, they do sell a product and that product is you! Your eyeballs are being sold to the advertising machinery for a slice of the pay-per-click ad money. The money in advertising is so huge, roughly $300 billion/year in the US, and the scramble for that money so intense that it taints almost everything. No matter how high-minded an organization, once it starts hosting pay-per-click ads on its website or app, it begins to feel pressure to increase its ad revenue. Its focus tends to shift from producing good content to attracting and selling your eyeballs. Even formerly respected and reputable publications have allowed that click-bait mentality to infect their entire online presences. It’s pitiful.

The cost of all this advertising is ultimately borne by us in the form of higher prices. When you purchase branded products or services, you are getting less than you pay for because a sizeable portion of the purchase price is going toward marketing and advertising.

What about colleges? How are they affected by branding, marketing, and advertising? The two traditional products of a college are education for students and scholarship for faculty, though there are other important activities such as providing health care and offering expertise to the community and society. As long as a college is providing quality and value in its education and scholarship, I’m good with it. When a college begins to focus too much on branding, marketing, and advertising, however, the results are not so wonderful.

I’ve already talked at length about the hazards of assessing a person’s worth entirely from their resume—from their personal brand, if you will—rather than by looking carefully at that person’s knowledge, understanding, and so on. Personal branding affects not only how a person is perceived by others; it also affects how that person perceives themself. Witness the alarming stories about young people desperately curating, controlling, and comparing their personal brands on social media.

Similarly, there are hazards in assessing a college’s worth entirely from its brand, rather than by looking carefully at the quality and value of its student education and its faculty scholarship. Yes, education and scholarship are difficult to assess, but they are what actually matters.

Among the problems with brand-based assessment is the time lag between performance and perception. Organization build their brands slowly, offering good quality and value early on and being recognized as a good brand only much later. The same lag appears when that brand decays; there is a long delay between its decline in quality and value, and the eventual recognition that its brand is dying. Countless brands have come and gone over the years, typically rising gradually on their founders’ passionate commitment to quality and value, and then decaying gradually when less dedicated people take over and milk the brand for money at the expense of quality and value. Colleges are no exceptions to these sorts of dynamics.

Providing great student education is hard work for both the students and their instructors. Teaching and learning can be frustrating, tedious, and exhausting, and their purposes and rewards are often visible only in retrospect. They involve a lot of delayed gratification. Because a college education is known to be hard work with a delayed reward, colleges have trouble “selling” students on college education itself. They find it much more effective to “sell” students on a college brand, particularly when that brand encompasses an exciting and engrossing college experience.

So, colleges have become full-service communities with nearly everything a young person could want during their four years. They have diversified into many areas outside education, including fancy dorms, exciting sports and entertainment, attractive buildings, and a wide range of college-supported clubs, organizations, and activities. That diversification is expensive and much of that expense is borne by the students themselves in form of higher fees and tuition. The students may still be receiving good quality and value, but some of the product they’re buying is no longer education. For those who can only barely afford college at all, paying for all those bells and whistle is a true hardship and may contribute to debilitating debt.

Where branding begins to cost in terms of quality and value is when a college begins to purchase prestige. It starts hiring superstar scholars, building institutes and centers, and hosting events and activities that increase the college’s visibility, brand recognition, and brand stature while contributing little to the college’s educational mission. Occasionally, such brand building can even interfere with education.

It’s easy for a college to see practically everything as an opportunity for brand-building, marketing, and fund-raising. Many important positions that once guided education and scholarship, and that gave society some its most notable public intellectuals, have been retarget at marketing. They have become primarily brand ambassadorships.

By keeping students engaged with and proud of the college brand after they graduate, the college is able to seed the world with additional brand ambassadors, whose ongoing association with a well-recognized college brand is win-win for themselves and the college. Even students who don’t want, enjoy, or have use for a college education still benefit. Mere association with a strong brand is a valued commodity in modern society and people are often influenced more by a person’s brand and brand-associations than by that person’s actual character and abilities. We are judged by the brands we keep. It’s a perfect arrangement.

As a college’s attention shifts toward its brand, its education and scholarship may begin to suffer. Since college education is hard work, everyone involved can do less and feel okay about it. Students never complain, for example, when an instructor cancels a class or a reading assignment. After all, the college brand is still good, even if the education is less so. Components of the college are routinely renamed and rebranded with buzzwords like “excellence” and “leadership” – adding nothing of real value and rendering those words essentially meaningless.

Focusing on brand allows a college to enroll students who are less interested in or capable of educational achievement in exchange for other assets that support the brand, notably money, power, and public goodwill. As long as the educational decline isn’t too severe, the brand can remain strong and people will continue to praise the college for its great education long after that education has become somewhat less than great.

The timescale for brand decay is long in any organization and, for colleges that timescale is generations. The long tail is due in part to the many people associated with the college brand, most of whom have vested interests in keeping it strong. There are also self-fulfilling arrangements around, like the fact that college rankings are based in part on a college’s prestige and a college’s prestige is based in part on college rankings.

So, I’m not thrilled with college branding’s effects on college education. I’ll leave its effects on college scholarship for another day.

Returning to my opening question:  Are you here because you want to be at UVA or are you here because you want to be associated with the UVA brand? Again, I hope that you’re here for both reasons.

Here because you want to be at UVA because it’s the right place at the right time for you.

The right place because it genuinely fits you, your interests, your goals, your abilities, and your aspirations.

The right place because it offers a range of opportunities, experiences, and interactions that excite you, that make you comfortable but not so comfortable that you don’t stretch and grow, and that serve to form you into the person you ultimately want to be.

The right place because it meets your needs: financial, geographical, familial, and personal.

And the right time because you are ready to be here at UVA. Because you have the energy, the freedom, the commitment, and the motivation to get a college education now, not later, not never, now.

There may also be baser reasons you want to be at UVA: because it’s the next stage on the conveyer belt of life, because what else is there to do, because your family or friends expect you to do it, because you want to have a fun four years drinking with your buddies at a college resort, spa, and circus.

Everyone has those baser reasons in them to some extent, but I hope you feel the loftier ones as well. It’s possible that you don’t, that UVA is not a good fit for you or that now is not the time, and that you would do better to be attending college elsewhere or sometime in the future or maybe never. College is not for everyone and why should someone who doesn’t enjoy getting a college education and who won’t benefit from it in a meaningful way in their work life or their personal life go to all that trouble and expense? There are other paths in life that may be better for them.

Here because you want to be associated with the UVA brand because that association is valuable. Soon and for the rest of your life you will be asked where you graduated college and you will be able to tell them proudly that you graduated from UVA, a college with a well-known and prestigious brand. That brand will get you in some doors that your college education alone will not. At times that brand will prove more important than who you are. I’m not thrilled at that situation, but it would be naïve or foolish to reject the power of the brand. It is what it is.

I may quibble about all the brand-related hoopla I see going on (in fact, I often do), but UVA remains a strong college in the activities I value most: in its educational enterprise and its contributions to scholarship. You can and should remain proud to be associated with its brand. I exhort you, however, to encourage and help UVA in maintaining its high level of education and scholarship against the pressures it experiences in the world of branding.

Are you here to learn how to create or to learn how to prompt AI to create for you?

I first introduced AI to students in my class a year ago, about six months before the general public learned about chatGPT and all hell broke loose. We were playing with GPT3, a precursor to chatGPT, and I asked them to suggest a topic for GPT3 to write a paper on. Someone suggested “What is the meaning of life?” GPT3 took a minute or two, but it wrote what we all considered to be a pretty impressive paper. At which point, someone asked “how will an instructor know that it wasn’t written by a student?” I had no answer and neither did anyone else.

While that story suggests that I’m going to talk about integrity, I’m not. I do care about integrity, I value it above almost all else, but I’ve had a few encounters with integrity in my career and I’m bored with it.

Instead, I want to look at change and what really matters in a college education. For about 30 years, I taught a class of my creation called “How Things Work” – an examination of physics in the context of the everyday world. I looked inside ordinary things and found physics on a need-to-know basis. And my class changed every time I taught it, in part because the world changed. On my watch, incandescent light bulbs gave way to compact fluorescent lamps, which subsequently gave way to LED lights. I had to change, to adapt, to create anew. Change is hard, but it’s important and necessary. Tradition and inertia are no excuse for letting education or scholarship ossify. Both should be creative and dynamic, and AI is surely going to drive enormous change in colleges and the world beyond.

A cornerstone of my How Things Work class in its early days was a term paper. In that paper, I had students do what I did: find an ordinary object or activity and look inside it for the physics that made it work. Developing that paper made students think hard, absorb and integrate the physics we had discussed in class, and apply their insights and understandings to real world objects and issues. I viewed this as an activity that would train them for real life. Education with a purpose!

At first, that project worked beautifully – students had to use their minds in many different ways and come up with a work of science and art. It really was an educational experience. They’d pick something that interested them and think about it deeply because there weren’t many resources to help them outside of the class itself and conversations with me. But the internet changed that.

Beginning in the late 90s, websites began to appear online that looked at ordinary things and explained how they worked, if not exactly at a physics level, then close enough. And the term papers began to change. In the early 90s, most students spent 5% of their term-paper time looking unsuccessfully for non-existent resources and 95% of their time using their minds to think through and write those papers. By the mid-00s, most students were spending 80% of their time finding pre-digested content online and 20% of their time assembling and paraphrasing that content into a paper. They weren’t really thinking anymore and the term paper project lost its purpose and value. I had to abandon it.

To my mind, looking stuff up online and assembling it into a new document isn’t educational, it’s mechanical. It doesn’t require the deep insight, understanding, and creativity that distinguishes the human mind from a typewriter or a copying machine. It’s now computational, because that is approximately what AI does these days: it looks stuff up online and assembles it into a new document. Wow, students in my class were doing what AI does years before its time!

Current and near-future AI is mostly automating the best work that humans can do without making rich, full use of their minds. It can easily outperform humans in tasks like memorizing things, finding references, writing boilerplate documents, assembling prior working into new documents, and even producing derivative, quasi-creative art, poetry, prose, code, and media.

The press is full of criticisms, pointing out AIs mistakes, fictious claims, and apparent hallucinations, but I suspect those are just teething problems. Twenty years ago, people (particularly academics) were quick to dismiss Wikipedia for the same reasons (maybe not the hallucinations) and look how Wikipedia has turned out. It’s great; I use it and contribute money to it routinely. It precipitated change, particularly for those in the encyclopedia business, but it freed many of us from the tedious task of chasing down resources elsewhere. It helped kill my term paper, but such is life.

Like Wikipedia, AI will improve. It may eat us alive at some point, but so far it hasn’t truly replaced us for the things that require our full mental capabilities. But it will and should change education, just as it will and should change the broader world. There are contexts in which memorization is important, but such memorization needs to be accompanied by understanding and insight. Memorization alone is barely education at all. Case in point: Many of you learned about inertia at some stage and memorized the statement: “An object in motion stays in motion and an object at rest stays at rest”? Fine. So, answer this question, my first question each semester in How Things Work: A rotary lawn mower spins its sharp blade rapidly over the lawn and cuts the tops off the grasses. Would the blade still cut the grasses if they were not attached to the ground, but still standing upright?

• Yes
• No

Here are the grasses (green linguine) and here is the rotary lawnmower blade.

The answer is yes and it’s an example of inertia in action. For the stationary grasses to get out of the way of the blade, the blade must push them forward and they must accelerate forward for some time so as to outrun the blade. Neither the push nor the time allow is enough and the blade cuts right through them. They remain nearly in place because inertia dominates their motion. That same principle is crucial to blenders, food processors, and even flyswatters. I hope that you’ll now begin to see inertia in action everywhere.

AI will decrease the value of mindless memorization in education just as in everything else. It will decrease the value of mindless searches for relevant content – an activity many call research, but is more like butterfly collecting. And it will decrease the value of imitating and copying. As hobbies, those activities are fine: learn the names of all the flowers, find all the stories about mountain climbing, and paint watercolors in the style of your favorite artist. Just don’t expect to be alone – AI will be doing it with you.

Which brings me back to my question: Are you here to learn how to create or to learn how to prompt AI to create for you? Yet again, I hope that you are here to do both.

Here to learn how to create because that is what humans can do and one of the highest, most elevating aspects of human existence; here to learn how to think new thoughts, to explore new ideas, to be the first in a garden you invent in your own mind.

I hope you will learn to lead by doing, not by simply bossing everyone else around. In my opinion, conventional leadership is overrated; telling others what to do while standing at the rear or flying by at 30,000 feet is often cowardly, ineffective, and prone to mistakes. Better leadership, doing leadership, involves creating, defining, inventing the paths that others will take and doing it on the ground and from the front.

I also think that isolated ideas are overrated. They’re valued in academia because they often lead to publications and, like a typical academic, I used to think ideas were the be-all-and-end-all. After some experience in business, however, I realize that academics are naïve and that Thomas Edison was correct when he said “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” In the real world, it’s the things that stem from ideas that matter most—the institutions, organizations, businesses, products, services, communities, governments, treatments, opportunities, structures, literatures, arts, cultures, and everything else—that actually make the world better and improve the human condition. Making things happen in the real world is much harder than most academics think; the perspiration required is daunting. I encourage you to learn not only how to create ideas, but also how to create the myriad real-world things made possible by those ideas.

Learn how to prompt AI to create for you because that is the way of the future. Just as typewriters made handwriting obsolete and computers made typewriters obsolete, AI will make some aspects of our old lives obsolete. It’s going to affect academia and it’s going to affect the world.

Handwriting hasn’t disappeared altogether; some people still handwrite heartfelt personal letters because the act of writing by hand engages the mind deeply and emotionally in ways that typing may not and because that handwriting is intrinsically meaningful. What the shift to typewriters and then to computers did was to eliminate some of the drudgery of preparing documents wherein the heartfelt engagement of hand writing wasn’t needed or desired, and being handwritten only made the documents harder to read.

Correspondingly, current and near-future AI will primarily eliminate some of the drudgery of doing tasks wherein the doing part doesn’t require deep mental engagement and adds little intrinsic value to the outcome. Hand-sorting a guest list is a mindless activity that adds no value, so let a computer do it. Similarly, personally searching for every reference to the legal status of some plot of land is a nearly mindless activity that adds no value, so let AI do it. Writing routine or boilerplate letters, same thing! In fact, reading routine or boilerplate letters, same thing! What makes us human, and what we can do that AI currently cannot do, is think deeply and do meaningfully, and those are the areas where we will continue to shine and thrive.

One area that remains uniquely human is that of creating the prompts for AI. Those prompts will get shorter as AI gets better at anticipating trivial stuff like our preferred formats and whether to address certain letters to home or work addresses. But the core pieces of a prompt – the minimal prompt required to get AI to produce the results we desire – require our deep mental engagement. Your prompt is your creative work and in many cases it already contains much of the value of what AI ultimately produces from it. Think of a boilerplate letter generated by AI: I probably don’t want to read it; what I’d rather read is the prompt that was used to generate that letter. There may be some value in the boilerplate itself, I’ll let AI read it, but the prompt surely contains most of what I want to learn from the letter.

AIs current ability to be a good assistant will soon evolve into an ability to be a great assistant. In doing so, it will eliminate various task people do and even some jobs they do. It will eliminate or render quaint some parts of academia as well, things we teach and learn, and ways in which we do those things. It may even eliminate parts of academic disciplines or the disciplines themselves. Only time will tell.

For now, learn to create good prompts for AI. In doing so, you’ll learn how guide the world of the future and you’ll learn to use your mind the way nature intended. AI can already write technically good poetry, but I’m pretty sure it lacks the imagination, understanding, knowledge, preparation, insight, inspiration, and creativity to write great poetry. If you pour those human strengths and qualities into your prompts to AI, maybe together you will write something amazing.

Why are you here? Not here at UVA; here at this lecture. I hope it’s to listen to my thoughts about life, the universe, and everything. And don’t forget that you’re now a proud graduate of Bloomfield University, with its vast network of Alumni. Send your contributions to…

More seriously, I have seen many changes in colleges since I started as a freshman nearly 50 years ago, some for the better and some for the worse. I hope that you’ll join me in recognizing that while colleges, like everything else, are imperfect and subject to many human weaknesses, they nonetheless gather together many good people for a noble purpose: to convey accumulated wisdom, insight, experience, skill, and vision from one generation to the next and to create even more. If you’ll look beyond the distractions of metrics and branding, something I struggle with myself, and immerse yourself in the core academic tasks, I think you’ll find the highest values of your adventures at the U. That’s why UVA is here and maybe that’s why you’re here, too.

Presented at the University of Virginia on April 24, 2023 at 8pm in Old Cabell Hall by Lou Bloomfield, Professor Emeritus of Physics.