Academia Should Serve the Country

Harvard professor Christopher W. Stubbs has joined Anthropic’s oversight board. In doing so, he follows a litany of his academic colleagues who have played an outsized role in the governance of our society: as advisers to artificial intelligence companies on mathematical research, advisers to the Pope on Catholic social teaching, and — as any attentive freshman enrolled in Economics 10: “Principles of Economics” knows — chairmen or members of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Unfortunately, the centers of power in today’s America are rife with people who are woefully ignorant about the ways in which their decisions affect the country. Look no further than the successors of Jason Furman ’92 in Washington: The president might still be getting economics advice from Ph.D.s, but I’m not sure his tariff policy would hold up on an Ec 10 midterm.

In a better functioning America, academic experts would play a greater role in public and private decisions affecting the country.

Perhaps I’m just revealing a latent technocratic impulse installed in my mind by a succession of social science readings. In the wee hours, writeups on randomized control trials that contravene popular sentiment read very convincingly. It often feels as though the solutions to problems like healthcare underinsurance and the racial achievement gap lie within a narrow range of empirical disputes hidden away in academic journals, rather than in sweeping public discourse too often defined by ideological differences or divergent gut instincts.

Predictably, the issue of governance comes to a head as AI — the most revolutionary technology in human history — develops at rapid speed. I’m no computer science whiz; I’m happy to leave the nuts and bolts of coding ChatGPT to the engineers at OpenAI. But when it comes to less technical second-order problems posed by AI proliferation, such as data set bias and ethical boundaries, I’m less confident in the capacity of engineers — or even of embedded evaluators dedicated to AI model and training process safety — to successfully take the lead.

I don’t mean to suggest to a campus still aggrieved by a faculty-imposed grade cap the heresy that we should hand control over not just our education, but also the technological future, to a bunch of professors. But we live in a world where a senior member of Congress says he didn’t know what ChatGPT or Claude were until this summer. And more broadly, whatever the virtues of rule by the everyman be, optimal problem-solving usually requires a familiarity with data, precedent, and alternatives — a familiarity, in other words, possessed by few but those who have spent their whole careers cultivating it. We would be better off with such experts having a meaningful, if not final, say.

For instance, as far as remedying AI bias in resume screening goes, who better to provide insight than a sociologist who has researched the racial achievement gap for years? And when ethical concerns about AI-dependent autonomous weapons systems arise — as they famously did between Anthropic and the Department of Defense earlier this year — shouldn’t we desire that tech executives at least receive input from a philosopher who has systematically mulled over military ethics? Surely neither the sociologist nor the philosopher has all the answers to these problems. But I, for one, trust them a little bit more than the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of those who simply are not trained to resolve them.

To that point, academia ought to remain first and foremost academia — not a funnel into advisory committees and Dario Amodei’s hotline. Research institutions like Harvard exist in large part to provide academics a venue to do research, an endeavor that yields the ripest fruit when it is given form by their interests — not some vision of which line of investigation might prove most needed down the line.

If one thing is true of large, pluralistic societies, however, it is that they will extract from their multitudes those who are best equipped to deal with a moment of need. I believe in the liberal arts, in and beyond the undergraduate education. The spellbound stargazers should, as Professor Stubbs has done, study astronomy; the enthralled Shakespeareans should do the same in literature.

Then, those who can serve will answer the call.

Michael Isayan ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Cabot House.