It's also as I recall when tuition and student costs started to spike in the US which is probably more directly related than some "philosophical" change in the zeitgeist[0]. When students and parents start racking up debt like this, you become very interested in the fastest way to pay it back.

For me the impact of the university administrators as they chased higher endowments for more buildings with naming rights and expanded their own bureaucracies with direct hires that did not directly contribute to the faculty mission did more to alter the university experience than anything else.

[0]: https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year

This really isn’t true in principle. The current LLM ecosystems can’t do “meaning tasks” but there are all kinds of “legacy” AI expert systems that do exactly what is required.

My experience is that middle manager gatekeepers are the most reluctant to participate in building knowledge systems that obsolete them though.

No, the humanities won't survive.

The problem with humanities is that the "state of the art" is about only saying something "new". For example, the author thinks that discussing Kantian theories of the sublime and “The Epic Split” ad (a highly meme-able 2013 Volvo ad starring Jean-Claude Van Damme) is "straight A" work.

It is irrelevant nonsense masquerading as intelligent discourse much like most of this author's actual published work and it is also something at which LLMs excel.

To be a "rockstar" humanities professor at Princeton, you have to make up something "cool" to fill the seats to keep the attention of 17-25 year-olds.

With LLMs that have encoded snapshots of the entire literary corpus that humanity has produced, those students can make up whatever connections they want and justify their worldview. No humanities courses required beyond maybe some introduction to vocabulary / prompting.

It’s well-known/textbook that there is an indirect correlation between animal stress levels and both milk quality and yield.

https://extension.umn.edu/dairy-handling-and-best-practices/...

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