College Archives - Public Seminar

What If Using AI Isn’t Cheating?

Meghan O’Rourke’s essay about technology’s uses and abuses makes me wonder if students can help us reinvent the humanities

September 22, 2025 • by Claire Potter

In the last 18 months, publicly available artificial intelligence (AI) programs have turned conversations about the humanities on college campuses into conversations about cheating. Do you remember when life was easy, and all you had to detect was whether a student had purchased a paper or plagiarized portions of it? I ...

Education

Biden Must Not Bail on Four Million Older Americans

The President is quietly betraying a generation of indebted students

November 15, 2022 • by Chivas Sandage

The fact that representatives referred only to “students” and “young people” suggests that they didn’t yet know it is older Americans who are being abruptly left behind. We were never warned that we could soon be treated as “a separate and unequal class.”...

Biden Must Not Bail on Four Million Older Americans

Higher Ed

“God Is Dead”

And other memories of coming of age gay and Catholic in the sixties

October 12, 2022 • by John D’Emilio

I was flabbergasted. The idea that someone not only didn’t believe in God but also had grown up without God was something I couldn’t take in. All I could think was, “Wow. Without God, he’d never have to worry about whether he was going to hell, whether he’d make it ...

Higher Ed

The Best Student Debt Forgiveness? Discharge Loans Already Paid

But to do that, the Department of Education would have to release its data

September 21, 2022 • by Susan F. Feiner

Today, in some states you can even lose your driver’s license due to unpaid student debt. Senior citizens on Social Security can have their monthly checks garnished by student loan debt collectors without a court order, an authority that is unique. Other borrowers have had wages, alimony, or IRS tax ...

The Best Student Debt Forgiveness? Discharge Loans Already Paid

Education

The Politics of Student Loan Cancellation

The American Left needs to keep pressing for more ambitious solutions to the problem of student debt

September 15, 2022 • by Jackson Todd

Biden’s action on student debt indicates that Americans may be ready to move on from the austerity politics that defined the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump....

The Politics of Student Loan Cancellation

Higher Ed

Is Emma Camp Correct That College Students Silence Themselves?

Perhaps she is, perhaps she isn’t. But the core issue may not be free speech, or even education, but more enduring American fears about the dangers of conformism

March 11, 2022 • by Claire Potter

Free speech undergirds democracy. I am uncompromising on this point and dislike being distracted by concocted hysteria about free speech. All the same, a guest essay in the New York Times by Emma Camp engaged me. Camp, a senior at the University of Virginia, argues that students and faculty on ...