The university has long been understood as a site of contestation between different modes of knowledge production and institutional authority (Becher and Trowler 2001; Collini 2012; Readings 1996). Yet I want to explore whether we are on the cusp of a transformation in this struggle that recalls, for me, the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, though now inverted by the computational capabilities of large language models.[1] One way of helping us to think about this is to use the concept of the inversion to examine how artificial intelligence can exceed a critical threshold where fake discourse becomes indistinguishable from, and potentially dominant over, genuine academic argument (Berry 2025). This we might call the quarrel of the artificials and the moderns. What distinguishes this moment is not merely the use of artificial intelligence for administrative tasks, but rather the emergence of what we might call the augmented bureaucratic subject, one equipped with the rhetorical and argumentative capacities that previously remained the province of academic expertise.
Editors’ Choice: Scholarslop: The Dangers of an Algorithmic Idea of the University
