Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”

Economist Cameron Harwick says it's on professors to respond, and it's going to look like relying more on tests and not on homework—which means a diploma will have to be less about intelligence and more about agency and discipline.

This approach significantly raises the stakes of tests. It violates a longstanding maxim in education, that successful teaching involves quick feedback: frequent, small assignments that help students gauge how they’re doing, graded, to give them a push to actually do it.... Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom is probably going to have to go. If AI makes some aspect of the classroom easier, something else has to get harder, or the university has no reason to exist.

The signal that a diploma sends can’t continue to be “I know things”. ChatGPT knows things. A diploma in the AI era will have to signal discipline and agency – things that AI, as yet, still lacks and can’t substitute for. Any student who makes it through such a class will have a credible signal that they can successfully avoid the temptation to slack, and that they have the self-control to execute on long-term plans.

The Trump administration is revoking visas for Chinese students “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields” and revising its “visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications” for students from China and Hong Kong.

This is both necessary and long overdue. For years, China has been engaged in a systematic effort to target U.S. universities, using Chinese students to conduct extensive espionage and intellectual property theft on elite campuses across the United States — which has helped fuel China’s technological and military growth.

To understand how China uses its students as spies, read the stunning investigative report published last month by Stanford Review reporters Garret Molloy and Elsa Johnson in which they documented the infiltration of Stanford University by the Chinese Communist Party. “The CCP is orchestrating a widespread academic espionage campaign at Stanford,” Johnson told me and my co-host, Danielle Pletka, in a recent podcast interview. “Stanford is in the heart of Silicon Valley,” she added, “and that’s a huge incentive for China.”..

Molloy, an economics major, visited China last summer and was shocked to meet with many members of the CCP who were educated at Stanford. “We’re educating the head of the Chinese [securities and exchange commission], we’re educating the head of Beijing’s tariff negotiators. I’m meeting all these people and they all say ‘I work for the Chinese Communist Party in a really high role. I hope that China beats the U.S. And I also went to Stanford for my undergraduate and master’s degree.’ And I’m putting this together and I’m saying it’s shocking that we are educating such high-level Communist Party officials. What’s going wrong here?”

It’s a fair question — one of many for which the Trump administration plans to get answers.