A history professor says AI didn't break college — it exposed how broken it already was

• A University of Texas professor says AI didn't break college — it revealed how broken teaching was.
• Steven Mintz said that mass lectures and formulaic essays dehumanized education long before AI.
• He said that schools must automate rote learning so humans can focus on thinking and mentorship.

When Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, opened 400 essays from his students, he noticed something uncanny. The sentences were the same. The structure was the same. Even the conclusions matched.

In a LinkedIn post, Mintz said this wasn't a cheating crisis but a pedagogy crisis.

For years, he said, universities have operated like factories: mass lectures, standardized prompts, and rubric-driven grading handled by what he described as overworked teaching assistants.

Professors have called this mentorship, he said, but it's really "industrialized education," he wrote in a more detailed Substack post on the topic.And AI, he believes, has simply revealed how hollow that model had become.

"Machines can already do most of what we ask students to do — and often do it better," Mintz wrote on LinkedIn. "When 400 students can generate identical essays in 30 seconds, the problem isn't the students. The problem is the assignment."

The death of the take-home essay

In an email to Business Insider, Mintz said the traditional take-home essay is obsolete because it tests exactly what AI now excels at — research, understanding context, and constructing and developing an argument.

"AI can now do all that," he said.

As a result, he said he has moved away from essays done outside class and toward forms of assessment that demonstrate visible learning, including in-class writing assignments, oral presentations without detailed notes, and student-led discussions.

There should be "no outside of class graded assignments. Assessment will be based exclusively on activities that can be observed in person," he said.

Mintz envisions a system where AI handles what he called "mastery learning" — basic facts, chronology, and conceptual frameworks — freeing students to focus on what he described as "inquiry learning": asking students to pose questions and construct complex arguments.

He believes schools should double down on timeless literacies — research, writing, numeracy, and critical reading — but in ways that demand creativity and independent thought.

"We must ensure that students graduate with the ability to conduct research, write and speak clearly and analytically, read closely and critically, be numerate, culturally literate, and well prepared for their future career," he said.

If universities continue with "business as usual," he said, public faith in higher education and the value of a degree will "wither."

A final reckoning for higher ed

For Mintz, AI is a mirror, showing universities how deeply they've relied on mechanical learning, and how far they've drifted from the roots of education.

"AI doesn't threaten to dehumanize higher education," he wrote on Substack. " It reveals how thoroughly we've already dehumanized it — and offers us one last chance to recover what we've lost."

Looking ahead, he told Business Insider that the next five years must be a period of reinvention.

"We must reinvent assessment," he said, and offer courses that center on "slow reading, deep questions, ethical dilemmas, historical reasoning, data fluency, and creative problem-solving."

"We must invest in seminars, mentorship models, undergraduate research, and experiential learning," he said.

Now, colleges face a choice: double down on surveillance and standardization, or rebuild around what machines can't replicate.

"This is our moment to redesign — not defend — the future of learning," he wrote on LinkedIn.

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