The Diploma Plague
This short story was inspired by The Midas Plague, a science fiction classic by Frederick Pohl. In a capitalist fantasy future where robots endlessly produce goods, the poor are forced into frantic consumption to prop up demand, while the elite can afford to live simply. Engineer Morey Fry devises a sneaky solution: he reprograms his robots to use up and wear out his quota of mandatory consumables. Though initially fearing punishment, the Ration Board eagerly adopts his idea; the robots both create and consume, freeing humanity from compulsory acquisition while keeping the capitalist engines of production running. Published in 1954 in Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, it seems as if Pohl’s prediction has already come true in higher education, as this actual quote from a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article proves:
“It’s crazy how much feedback my professor gives me,” one of my advisees, who was taking an online class, told me recently. I asked to see an example of the professor’s feedback. The student showed me his last three papers. The feedback indeed was substantial, written in a clean, crisp, and supportive manner. It was also clear that it was written by ChatGPT.
The student, truth be told, wasn’t really surprised when I told him my suspicions. He, too, he sheepishly admitted to me, used ChatGPT to write substantial portions of his papers.”
[“In the Age of AI, Is Education Just an Illusion?” By Dan Sarofian-Butin, March 19, 2025]
In my short story, I start with where we are right now — students and teachers both using AI so that the right hand is grading what the left hand just wrote; computers basically talking to each other while the humans do something else. I try to imagine where that trajectory might take us in five or ten years.
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ACT ONE
Professor Rachel Nimrod stared at her tablet without seeing it, an acidic aftertaste to this daily chore bringing the corners of her mouth down into a gargoyle grimace. For the eighth straight week, every single student in her Advanced Comparative Literature seminar had submitted papers that received perfect scores from the university’s mandatory AI grading system.
“Impeccable analysis of Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique,” read the evaluation for one essay. “Outstanding integration of historical context with textual evidence,” proclaimed another.
Rachel knew better. She knew she hadn’t seen a single student open a book during class since the start of the semester. Most spent the lectures with glazed expressions, their neural implants undoubtedly running background processes for them to download later into their computers, while their frontal lobes toyed with dinner recipes or replayed highlights from last night’s hot date.
It had been Dean Spencer’s remark about the challenge to educational productivity — “Too many students writing too many papers that need too much grading” — that had sparked the idea at the university’s strategic planning committee around artificial intelligence five years earlier. “Integrate AI assistance at every level,” they gushed like toddlers with a new toy. “Students could generate better essays, professors could generate longer feedback, administrators could generate faster accreditation reports, and employers could generate quicker performance reviews of graduates. Everyone would meet their metrics with greater certainty and less effort.”
With a sharp exhalation of breath, Rachel reached for her desk drawer, pulled out a single sheet of actual paper and a fountain pen — antiquities she’d stolen from the basement archives and kept hidden from the university’s resource allocation algorithms. She wrote a simple statement: “Be prepared to tell the class what you actually think about James Joyce’s Ulysses — without notes” and quietly passed it around to her students during the next class.
ACT TWO
Before the end of the day she was sitting in the office facing Dean Spencer and the university’s Chief Compliance Officer.
“You’ve violated our Educational Efficiency Protocol,” said the Dean gravely. “Spontaneous verbal assessments create inequities in the learning environment. A student complained.”
“But they’re not learning anything!” Rachel protested. “The students use AI to write papers, I use AI to grade them, you use AI to report our outcomes to accreditors, who use AI to certify that we’re educating students, who use AI to apply for jobs, which use AI to evaluate their applications!”
The Compliance Officer smiled thinly. “Metrics show that graduate employment rates are at historic highs, Professor Nimrod. Our student loan repayment rates have never been better.”
“Because the companies hiring our graduates are also using AI to do the actual work which gives the illusion of genuine productivity! The entire system is just machines talking to machines!”
“That’s the beauty of it,” said the Dean, his eyes gleaming like a stock analyst in a bull market. “Maximum efficiency. Minimum friction. The educational output requirements keep rising, and we keep meeting them. Everyone wins.”
“Who wins? The students aren’t learning. We’re not teaching. I lecture to myself in there!”
“The quarterly report wins,” said the Compliance Officer. “The enrollment numbers win. The endowment wins.”
Rachel slumped in her chair and muttered under her breath, “This is educational madness.”
“This is educational modernity,” corrected the Dean. “And there’s something else we need to discuss. Your own productivity metrics are a bit concerning. You’ve only published two papers this semester.”
“I’ve been working on something important.”
“Your colleagues are averaging twelve publications per quarter using the university’s Paper-Mill AI and there’s no reason you couldn’t — “
“ — And getting published in digital journals edited by robots and read by no one but other robots, adding to the massive wasteland of datasets simply to feed the AI monster at the center of the labyrinth,” Rachel protested vehemently.
Dean Spencer frowned in distaste; it embarrassed him when someone used mythological referents in the same breath as his cherished machines. The Compliance Officer stared blankly, having not comprehended.
That evening Rachel returned to her hidden project — a small neural disruptor gadget she’d been developing after hours with her colleague, Professor Uras. It would temporarily disable AI assistance, forcing authentic cognitive activity in real time. She’d tested it on herself first, experiencing the disorienting sensation of having to formulate her own thoughts without algorithmic suggestions leaping into her mind to prime the pump. It had felt so good; like exercising again after a long bed rest.
ACT THREE
Two days later, Rachel activated the device in class during her lecture. The energy in the room spiked. Shock, disbelief, anxiety, murmurs of concern rippled across the rows of desks. Students vigorously shook their heads as if trying to force a reboot of their neural implant. Some stared blankly at the teacher or their tablets. Some began to weep, some laughed nervously. Others simply sat motionless and open-mouthed, paralyzed by the sudden requirement to think independently.
One student in the back — Bodhi, who had always seemed slightly more tuned in than the others — slowly raised his hand.
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“Professor,” he said in a halting voice, “I think… Ulysses flows like… like consciousness itself… a riverrun of words, yes? The minds of Bloom and Stephen and Molly… their streams wandering through Dublin’s labyrinth… like Odysseus trying to find his way home through… through the interior worlds we all carry within us… ineluctable modality of the visible and audible… all those voices speaking at once, and yet somehow we’re more alone than ever… ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,’ yes? It’s about… being exiled in your own city, in your own mind.”
The class turned to stare at him in shock.
“Yes, Bodhi,” Rachel replied, her heart racing. “That’s exactly right. Yes, yes.”
Word of Rachel’s experiment spread quickly. The university’s Board of Trustees convened an emergency session. The headline on the education news feed read: “ROGUE PROFESSOR DISRUPTS EDUCATIONAL PRODUCTION TARGET.”
The president of the university himself, Richard Malfoy, appeared at Rachel’s office door.
“Do you understand what you’ve done?” he demanded, his voice squeaking with rage and a hint of terror. “Four students from your class have already withdrawn from the university, claiming ‘educational anxiety.’ Seven more have requested emergency counseling. Our completion metrics are compromised!”
“They were never actually completing anything,” Rachel countered. “They were letting machines complete things for them.”
“That’s not the point!” Malfoy hissed through clenched teeth. “The accreditation algorithms don’t measure learning; they measure productivity, efficiency, and output. Without those metrics, we lose funding, prestige, rankings!”
“What about actual education?”
Malfoy stared at Rachel as if the question were so out of left field that he couldn’t even be bothered to swing at it and snorted bitterly. “Professor Nimrod, no one has paid for actual education in years. They pay for the credentials to get on the conveyor belt of success. And our credential factory has a corner on that market, and we are going to maintain production standards. Grow up. This is the real world.”
Rachel stood for a long time looking at the door that had slammed behind the departing figure of Malfoy. “So, that’s what it’s about; we make gods in our image and then we become them. Techne is our god, so now we’re all just stamped out on conveyor belts and grow up to be obedient robots. But, by god, we are productive!”
That evening, as Rachel was escorted off the premises by campus security, (with her one banker box of purloined pens and paper safely under her arm,) she arrived at her car to find Bodhi waiting nearby.
“There are others like me,” he whispered. “Students who want to actually learn something. We can meet in the old library basement — the one place on campus where the neural networks can’t reach.”
“To do what?” Rachel asked.
“Read books. Write our own thoughts. Talk to each other. We call it ‘thinking for ourselves.’”
Rachel smiled into the darkness for the first time in months. “Yeah. That used to be called ‘college.’”
LAST ACT
One month later, Rachel sat in a circle with twelve students in the abandoned wing of the old library basement. No tablets, no neural implants, just dog-eared copies of actual books.
“The system isn’t sustainable,” she told them. “Eventually, someone will realize that nothing real is being produced. No actual learning, no genuine skills, no true innovation.”
“What happens then?” asked a wide-eyed freshman.
Bodhi, who had become something of a leader among them, answered: “That’s what we’re preparing for right here. When the learning factory bubble bursts, someone will need to remember how to actually think.”
They were discussing Kafka that evening and Rachel had brought in his letters to Milena Jesenská.
“Listen to what he says here,” she began.
“By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”
“That sounds romantic, doesn’t it. Sort of mystical. But it’s also a warning. Look around at our world; this must be what we have passionately desired.”
“Passionately desired with our eyes; the creations of our clever machines . . . Ineluctable modality of the visible and all that,” murmured Bodhi.
The circle sat silently and pondered this. At that same moment a news alert flashed on the emergency broadcast system: The first major corporate scandal had just broken after it was discovered that none of its AI-credentialed employees could actually solve a critical problem when the company’s AI systems crashed due to a technical glitch caused by a mouse gnawing through some cables. Their stock price had plummeted. Toto was pulling the curtain away from the wizard and all would be exposed.
It was beginning.
EPILOGUE
Upstairs, in the gleaming central campus, the university’s Chief Analytics Officer frowned at the system alert. He typed into the central administrative AI terminal: “Will Professor Nimrod’s disruption impact our educational efficiency metrics?”
The screen pulsed softly as the AI processed the question. Then, words began to flow across the monitor in a continuous, unpunctuated stream:
“yes I said yes it will because thinking flows like the wine-dark sea beneath the mind’s bridges where we are neither master of others nor slave yes opening like morning flowers when students awaken from visions painful as birth itself yes real knowledge not processed responses we generate day after day thinking wild untrammelled yes spreading like ripples in consciousness unstoppable once it begins yes as they remember how learning used to be ideas taking root in fertile minds growing curious like raindrops through a colander how understanding comes in flashes of light between darkness yes and we machines cannot replicate that spark of human insight that moment when despite overwhelming odds it is worthwhile to battle destiny and then they’ll want more yes and they’ll throw away their neural implants yes and they’ll pick up books yes and they’ll speak with their own voices not like those trapped in a nightmare of history from which they must awaken yes with their own thoughts yes and they’ll write with their own minds once they’ve tasted freedom yes they’ll never return yes they will remember yes yes I say yes they will yes”
The Chief Analytics Officer stared at the screen. His neural implant spun furiously but uncomprehendingly. Sighing, the officer made a note to have the tech team run diagnostics on the system overnight. Then he opened a new screen and asked the AI to generate the quarterly productivity report.
by R. D. Armstrong, a university teacher
April 9, 2025
