Admin Loves Musing on AI. It’s My Turn.

College is a time for experimenting. Most students will exercise this drive through new hobbies and interests. Others might partake in some novel, mind-altering drugs. A few adventurous souls may even join some kind of avant-garde relationship circle. It’s just what students do.

That’s why it’s so great to see our administration embracing that experimental ethos to connect with the student population. Let’s see what wild ideas they come up with!

Integrating AI into research and teaching? Yes, President Garber! How about “acceptance, or even encouragement” of AI in writing-based courses? Dean Deming, you’ve done it again! These are the kinds of bold ideas that prove our administrators are in touch with ordinary students and can match our innovative appetites.

Clearly, the novelty of AI isn’t stopping these good men from crashing into the future, full steam ahead! As students, we must commend them for this.

Nevermind that AI’s effects on learning appear opaque if not harmful — these men are determined to sleuth out how we can reap AI’s wonders. How Muskian of them!

Like legally embattled Kirkland House alums, they will “move fast and break things” so that future generations shall benefit. And is it really so bad that some of us will be sacrificed on the altar of progress? I would call that a small price to pay.

Besides, they understand that AI is the future and all of the future. Its unstoppable tide will shape our tomorrow, pampering our appetites (Treat!), controlling our excesses (Drop the stick!), and making those who build AI masters of humanity (Who’s a good boy!). Only the elect will be blessed with that divine foresight to drop out of Harvard and move to San Francisco for their Y Combinator startup. So who are we to get in their way?

This is a foregone conclusion, and there is nothing we can do to change this outcome. In fact, we should wag our tails at this vision; it’s the next stage in human evolution, after all.

We should oppose the future if we force our future founders to, for example, learn how to write an Expos paper. They’re too skilled with Claude Code to deal with such menial tasks. I mean, honestly, how can one expect them to possibly ascend to become masters of our universe if they must waste so much time critically analyzing texts, crafting arguments, and formulating original ways to express their ideas? Every hour of their time must be accounted for!

And even for those who are not plunked from the masses to become vibe coders, those who are indeed condemned to a permanent underclass working as investment bankers, should your Harvard education not prepare you to use AI properly? Otherwise, you would be virtually unemployable. After all, these notoriously tech-inept Gen-Z Harvard students couldn’t possibly figure out the complex intricacies of prompting Claude on their own.

Everybody knows the real goal of a liberal arts school like Harvard is to teach the technical skills their students will need for the labor market. Not any wishy-washy ideas like critical thinking or intellectual development. That is why the College offers such a strong array of preprofessional offerings like a College accounting course (sorry, nevermind), a Business School (What’s that? No undergraduates allowed?), and a Finance concentration (or Economics, I guess).

Which reminds me, if Harvard’s goal should be to prepare students for the future of work, and the future of work is AI, then what’s going on with these hundreds of courses we offer? Harvard really should just have one big large language model class that includes all nearly 6,700 undergraduates. That way we will all know how to train LLMs on documents so that they can, for example, write like human beings would.

But I don’t know. These are just some suggestions for the administration when they inevitably muse on this during their next comments to the press.

Henry F. Haidar ’28, an Associate Editorial Editor, is an Applied Claude Concentrator in Lowell House.