What I Would Do if I Ran a Small, Private University

Small, private colleges are bleeding students. Many are shutting down. Some experts believe that nearly all will be out of business within a few years. Small colleges blame lower birth rates, AI, lack of government funding, and everything else but the ossified approaches to management that appear unwilling to innovate, adjust, stand on principle, or even put a toe outside the box. With institutional trust plummeting and Ivies devolving into AI-cheater paradises, small, private colleges have a once-in-a-century opportunity to rise to the top of higher education’s hierarchy.

The very first thing I would do, were I running a small private college’s strategy, is to move the campus to the beach. I don’t know who decided that being in a frozen hellhole is some kind of prerequisite for academic gravitas, but it isn’t true.

The second thing I would do would be to recognize that AI innovation has showed that small liberal arts colleges were right all along, that questions of ethics and philosophy shape societies and technology. At the moment, Anthropic is arguing that the most ethical AI will also be the most powerful AI, and that the ethical considerations translate directly into AI power. The evidence thus far shows that they’re right. Claude Opus dramatically outperforms any competing AI.

Here, at the boundaries of philosophy and innovation, is the natural intellectual home of the small liberal arts college. Were I running a small, liberal arts college, I would double the emphasis on philosophy, and change the school’s Latin motto to “We Told You So,” in Latin. I would remind everyone who was willing to listen, and everyone who wasn’t, that what separates the most powerful AI from the second most powerful AI is a different ethical approach. I would point out that the toughest questions for AI sit in the domain on philosophy, literature, and history. 

But, to play it safe, I would also make sure that my college had a world class pure math department. The great thing about pure math is that the only costs are professors. Pure math requires no labs, no expensive equipment, no computers. Unlike the natural sciences, which become obsolete every few decades, pure math is permanent. If I needed to sell the biology department to hire a few top-flight pure math professors, I would immediately do so.

I would also be honest about why students attend college. I would admit that most students attend college to get better jobs, not only for the pure love of academia. So I would make sure that the students at my college had a major competitive advantage over any Ivy graduate. Specifically, I would use AI-proof grading systems that would ensure that any cheater failed and only students with real skills could pass. I would then describe these changes to as many elite employers as I could. I would let them know that if you want an AI-dependent dullard, recruit from Harvard, but if you want someone who can think and work without a crutch, recruit from my college. I would show clear examples of just how impossible it would be to graduate from my college if your only “skill” is AI dependence. 

For any private college willing to think and innovate, to emphasize the power of the liberal arts in an AI era, and to make their grading systems AI proof, this can be a golden era.