![\"University](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1779456550_185_0x0.jpg\")
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Mortar boards or birds? <\/p>\n
Getty Images<\/p>\n
Somewhere between Pomp and Circumstance and the president\u2019s closing remarks, more than one commencement speaker this year mentioned artificial intelligence \u2014 and met a barrage of boos. <\/p>\n
To be clear: I am not here to celebrate rudeness. Somewhere in those bleachers sat parents who drove through the night, grandparents dabbing their eyes, younger siblings squirming in rented chairs \u2014 all there to watch someone they love walk across a stage.<\/p>\n
This was a complicated boo. Lurking in the graduates\u2019 response was the paradox that Gen Z hasn\u2019t had it with AI. In fact, they use it more than anyone.<\/p>\n
For anyone who cares about education, the past few months have been a whiplash of AI editorials. The catastrophizing is familiar: AI is destroying the essential friction that leads to real learning. Widespread cheating must be stopped. Nobody reads anything long or hard anymore. Bring back proctored exams and ration the A\u2019s.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, no demographic uses AI more than Gen Z. It\u2019s their productivity tool, their brainstorming partner, their 2 a.m. confessor. They know that AI fluency will be part of the price of admission to whatever job market awaits them. AI tools are showing up on resumes and job descriptions the way \u201cproficiency in Microsoft Office\u201d did a generation ago. Students who graduate without knowing how to work with these tools risk irrelevance. <\/p>\n
Booing graduation speakers is a time-honored varsity sport \u2014 I say this as someone who went to college in the sixties \u2014 and so is existential dread about the future. I\u2019ve experienced several waves of technology panic wash through higher education. In my era, parents worried about television (and rock and roll) eating our intellect. Then it was the calculator and cries to save the slide rule. Then came the internet, which would make the library a wasteland. Search engines would kill research skills. Wikipedia was the end of citation standards. <\/p>\n
Each time, institutions responded by treating the technology as a discipline problem rather than an opportunity — an imperative! — to pursue knowledge creation and dissemination in new ways. Isolating instead of innovating. <\/p>\n
We are doing it again. The honor code is updated while the curriculum and the classroom stay the same.<\/p>\n
Consider will.i.am \u2014 yes, that will.i.am, the Black Eyed Peas frontman \u2014 who just completed his first semester as a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. His course, \u201cThe Agentic Self,\u201d teaches students to navigate AI and build their own agents, a kind of personal force multiplier for tackling real problems. No computer science prerequisite required. On the last day of class, students presented projects they\u2019d built from scratch: one applied his agent to veterans\u2019 services; another wrote a song tied to a healthcare journey, another to the needs of small business owners. will.i.am\u2019s framing was blunt and useful: \u201cYou could use AI or AI could use you.\u201d<\/p>\n
The paradox is real but Gen Z doesn\u2019t need us to resolve it. They\u2019re already straddling both sides: using the tools, doubting the hype, making their own calculations. The booing at commencement wasn\u2019t only about AI. It was also being lectured by people who presented a formulaic perspective on a complicated future that the class of 2026 is already navigating.<\/p>\n
That paradox may be the most interesting thing happening in higher education right now, but most universities are playing around the margins. <\/p>\n
What would it actually look like to learn from the generation already living in this? Start by asking them. Not in a focus group, not through a student satisfaction survey \u2014 in the classroom, in office hours, in the genuine spirit of inquiry that higher education is supposed to embody. Ask a student to show you how they use these tools, where they trust the output and where they don\u2019t, what they\u2019ve figured out through trial and error that, most likely, no professor has taught them. The answers will be instructive, sometimes humbling, and occasionally brilliant.<\/p>\n
Commencement season may be over, but the era of AI is just beginning.<\/p>\n
Full disclosure: I am also a Professor of Practice at ASU, though I\u2019m pretty sure that neither my coding nor my singing skills were what got me there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mortar boards or birds? Getty Images Somewhere between Pomp and Circumstance and the president\u2019s closing remarks, more than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,6416,4034,76,1087,2962,130,134,28742],"class_list":["post-48197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-commencement","tag-edtech","tag-education","tag-gen-z","tag-harvard","tag-internet","tag-technology","tag-wikipedia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}