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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back to Firewall. I'm your host, Bradley Tusk. My guest today is Adam Chilton. Adam is the dean at the University of Chicago Law School. Listeners already know that I went there for law school and believe it's the best law school in the world. And Adam just did something really interesting and in typical University of Chicago style, totally novel around AI and asked him to come on the podcast and he said yes. So, Adam, thanks for joining us.
- [00:31]
B
Thanks a lot for having me, Bradley.
- [00:32]
A
So before we even get into the work you're doing in AI, how does one become the dean of any law school, let alone the University of Chicago Law School?
- [00:40]
B
Oh, I'm not sure it's particularly interesting answer, but you become a law.
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A
I'll be the judge of that.
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B
Yeah.
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A
All right.
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B
You become a law professor and you hang out being a law professor for a while and you make the mistake of agreeing to too many service obligations along the way and be the person that.
- [00:57]
A
What was your. What did you teach?
- [00:59]
B
The main thing I taught is torts.
- [01:00]
A
Okay.
- [01:01]
B
Yeah, I taught torts. I do a lot of research around law and economics, sort of generally on different topics, studying. I'm interested in economic development around the world, human rights, politics, policy, and the legal profession, but pretty all over the place.
- [01:19]
A
And in terms of the study, right? I mean, for the class, obviously there are a lot divs. But then at any law school, just the basics like torts that people have to take. Does the school and Chicago and just law schools in general, do they care what you're interested in and try to sort of focus that, or is it basically as long as you're creating enough scholarship that's out there in the world, they're good with whatever you want.
- [01:43]
B
Got it. I mean, at a school like the University of Chicago, the truth is, I think the, the main thing that people are focused on is how good of a scholar you are, how much scholarship you're producing. Is it well received by people in your field? Is it having some impact on, I don't know, law or policy or judicial opinions, things like that? I think that's the real emphasis at top research institutions.
- [02:05]
A
I don't know a ton about this world, but it seems like the quantitative metric for impact of scholarship is, you know, how many times is it then footnoted in someone else's work or in a perfect world, an actual opinion from a judge, is that the best way to do it? And are there other ways that might better assess impact?
- [02:27]
B
Yeah. I mean, so that is citations by other scholarship or by judicial Opinions or policy reports, things like that is the way that people think about measuring the impact of academic scholarship. The there's huge differences across fields. And so, for instance, the citation norms in computer science are very different than they are in philosophy. And so you might be the best philosopher and you compare citations to a computer scientist and you'd look like the 10,000th best computer scientist. So you have to control within fields, but it's crude, it's not perfect. But just to do it quantitatively, that's the typical way that we do.
- [03:03]
A
So would you say being dean is an academic job or a management job?
- [03:09]
B
It is really mostly a management job. But so many of the choices that you're making are about academic choices. And so who to hire for these positions, who to interview? Now that's not a decision entirely made by the dean, but of course you're involved in those conversations in consultation with the faculty, what classrooms to offer, the direction of the curriculum. And the reality then is the people selected for these jobs at least have some academic background, so they come from scholars. There's some exceptions to that, but that's right.
- [03:39]
A
So are there ever people who are just really good managers and say, I'm running effectively the equivalent of a LISA nonprofit, if not a business, and I can hire four people to give me the right advice on someone's scholarship? When you saw all the. And Chicago obviously handled all very as a university differently than say the some of the Ivies and whatever, but all the tumult around the Gaza protest and the congressional hearings and everything else, one thing that seemed apparent to me is when you're putting academics in charge of massive businesses, oftentimes they're not the right people to lead that kind of institution. Is that true for something, a school within a school, like a law school? Or do you think fundamentally every university president should be an academic and that faculty senate should have input over anything other than actual pedagogy?
- [04:33]
B
So I do think that many of the universities in the United States, one thing that was exposed over the last four or five years is that they did not have the right people in place to lead them. But I think not necessarily in the direction that your line of questions might be implying, which is one way to think of it, to put it in tech terms, is that these universities are often thinking they won't talk in these terms. But the same choice that a tech company might have, do we put a sales guy or a product guy in charge? Right. Someone that actually knows the underlying substance of the work. In our case, the Academic work or a salesperson, which is someone that's going to appeal through fundraising, alumni, public policy, et cetera. I think the mistake that many top US Universities made over the last few years is that they put they were people with academic backgrounds, but they weren't selected because of their academic quality. They were selected for those sales skills. They put salespeople essentially in charge of some of our top universities. And I think that's what led to some of the drift from the academic commission. And for instance, this is one thing the University of Chicago got.
- [05:34]
A
So by being a salesperson, a salesperson inherently wants and needs other people to like them and therefore they're more susceptible to pressure on issues that are not really all that relevant to teaching itself.
- [05:47]
B
Yeah, you're more likely to be swept along with various trends. Right. You're thinking what's currently in the culture or whatever else. But for instance, the University of Chicago, our president is basically the world's best chemist. And so I mean on the quantitative citation impacts measures we were talking about earlier, he's just off the charts. You can't even believe it.
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A
Right.
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B
How cited he is in chemistry, which is a field I know nothing about. Right. But it's undeniable. He's just a top research scientist. And so he's focused on what are the choices that can make it so that we can support that like academic enterprise.
- [06:20]
A
There was a book that just came out a few months ago about Stanford called How to Rule the World from a former student who ended up from the Stanford newspaper taking down the president of Stanford.
- [06:30]
B
Oh, right, right. Yeah.
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A
I don't know if you read it.
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B
I haven't read the book. I'm aware of it though.
- [06:34]
A
And I'm aware it's a good book. It was, and I felt like it was not. It was sort of the opposite of Chicago, even though Stanford and Chicago are kind of the same grouping of schools. His point was Stanford is basically teaching you how to kind of make it in the business world by sort of evincing the right type of style and confidence. And you know, it's not that obviously they're academics aren't top notch. It was. But that, that really in Silicon Valley especially is not really what it takes. And it was, it was kind of reminded me of your analogy before where it's more about sales and less about product. Would you say, like what other schools? I mean, Chicago is definitely a product school. Right. What are the like in my mind, schools like Rice and Carnegie Mellon Hopkins are the one kind of pop into my MIT Are those the kind of schools that you say sort of product led schools?
- [07:34]
B
Yeah, I think those are great examples. MIT seems like a fantastic example of this. Chicago, et cetera. One kind of hallmark is some of the country's top colleges. You've seen these stories have had huge grade inflation, watering down of the academic requirements, and the students are spending their time focused on essentially being event planners and organizers. How can I set up a club and get as many people to show up to my events? And that, that's the mark of success in many institutions. Which is different than we're going to force you all to take organic chemistry and calculus and you know, Greek history and then grade you on a curve.
- [08:12]
A
Right. And friend of mine was, and I'll get to the. I think we're at this. But it was the COO of Columbia during all their tumult and when I was asking like, why is the president like doing things that sort of just don't seem logical and rational? The answer was, well, it's what the faculty senate wants and she can't risk a vote of no confidence from the faculty Senate. My response was, why don't the board abolish the faculty senate? Who needs them if you're a. It seems to me that the professors that are the most sort of focused on non product stuff are the liberal arts professors, not the science and math, not the STEM professors. Right. Because they're too busy doing the actual work. And the liberal arts professors, if it were me, and maybe this is why I could never run a university, but like, all right, you're a tenured professor in New York City and Ivy League school, you're going to threaten to leave if you don't have the power to do this. Great. Good luck to you. Where the fuck are they going to go?
- [09:13]
B
Yeah, I mean, one thing that does make these jobs hard running whatever top university is that you have many stakeholders that you all are held accountable to, more so than I think, a publicly traded company in that you have, you know, your staff, which is different than your academic faculty. You have your academic faculty, your students, your alumni, your parents and then politicians and really seem to care a lot about what you're doing too, and want to, you know, have a say.
- [09:43]
A
They care about it. If they can get attention for it in some way.
- [09:47]
B
Yeah, sure, right. If you can, you know, bash on.
- [09:49]
A
Which is why I think that probably university residents spend some more time trying to appease them is to avoid them from attacking them publicly.
- [09:55]
B
Oh yeah. Which, you know, Columbia, Harvard, it's been brutal some of the impacts of the attacks. But to go more directly to your last question, which is, I do think that the academic leaders that really are able to navigate these moments correctly are the ones that have a clear sense of values, know what their school's mission is, and don't get pushed off of it easily by any of those constituencies, whether or not it's the faculty or the students or the politicians telling them what to do, and instead say like, nope, we've got a strong mission. This is the direction we're going, and don't care what you think.
- [10:29]
A
All right, so let's turn to AI. So you just wrote a landmark report. So let's start with three things. One, explain what the key findings are and what you're going to do. Two, why did you do it? And then three, what did you think you were going to want to do when you were first choosing to do this compared to where you ultimately landed?
- [10:54]
B
So we just put out a strategy statement, a report on rethinking legal education in the age of AI. I think a lot of the ideas and the things that we're talking about are relevant for not just legal education, but higher education more generally, or Even K through 12 education in some cases. The idea that we came to and the thing that we say in the report is that our mission needs to be both to teach our students to think without the aid of AI or machines, to still have the kind of judgment and skills that a great lawyer would need, but also to be able to use AI effectively and ethically. And so it can't just be either one. And you can't just say we're shutting out technology from their school entirely and that we're going to pretend as if it doesn't exist, which is what a lot of universities have been doing the last four years. At the same time, you also can't just turn into some vocational school and think that we're doing is teaching just prompt engineering or something like that. So that's a core what the idea is the report. Now the question is, how do you actually do that, and how do you take that idea and translate into practice? We have a few things we're trying to do. The first is what we call AI resilient assessment, which is a mistake so many colleges, universities, and schools have been making, is to continue to give out the same assignments, but pretending like AI doesn't exist. So people will teach a seminar, they'll assign two papers. The homework assignment is write a short reaction paper summarizing the arguments of these papers. And raise one or two points. This is exactly the kind of thing any off the Shelf AI model right now you can upload the two PDFs and say, Give me a two page reaction paper. The response to these, even if you don't edit it, you're going to get a good grade because it's going to sound like you read the papers because the AI did. Or if you spend 10 minutes making sure you take out some of the AI looking language, you're fine. And this is the kind of thing that's proliferating everywhere, especially coming out of the pandemic. So many colleges moved to these big asynchronous learning classes where you have students that are partially learning online, they're uploading assignments onto these course websites that are graded by TAs. And everyone was just trying to scale in this way. And so at the exact moment that AI tools were being made available, higher education was such an easy target and people just weren't paying attention. And so this is why you now see left and right these stories coming about of professors realizing that most of their class was taking the midterm using AI or whatever it may be. So what we mean by AI resilient pedagogy is that we have to be honest with ourselves in a situation where someone has access to a computer and the Internet. Just saying, do this yourself, don't use AI. Not realistic. And so this means in many instances we have to move assessment into the classroom, fully proctored in the room, no access to Internet, no access to anything that could let you do that, or more oral exams, more parts of you write a paper at our law school, which I'm sure you did, you probably were asked questions about it from your professor, but now that's a requirement. At the end of the paper, the professor has to have a half hour back and forth with you of probing on what it is that you said. Why, what is your evidence? Why did you make this point? Not that point to make sure even if you use aisum that you at least understand why you said it, why you did it. So that's one part of what we're doing is trying to be honest at all points about the assessment. Another piece is that we're trying to get AI classes into the curriculum in a variety of ways. And so we have a range of upper level classes and seminars for the second and third year law students. The most prominent of that is a thing called our AI lab, which is run by one of our fantastic alums, Kimball Parker, where the students together as the Class build AI tools that are designed to bridge the legal services gap. For instance, they put out this great tool called Lease Chat. The idea is anyone can go right now and upload their lease and say, I live in New York City. My landlord is not giving my deposit back. What are my options? And ask it questions that are specific to the law of your jurisdiction, as opposed to just General chatgpt, which might give you an answer that's based on the law of California, even though you live in Florida or something. So that's the kind of thing they're doing. Our clinics at law schools have clinical education where the students work on real cases for real clients. They're explicitly incorporating AI into their work. For instance, we have an immigration law clinic. One of our alums designed a product called Visa Law AI, which is basically, you can ask detailed questions. If I've been in the US for this amount of time and this happened, can I get a J1 visa, et cetera. And so they've incorporated that kind of technology into their work. So that's those pieces. Another big part, though, that's gotten more attention is that as a mandatory rule for the first year classes and as a default rule for upper level classes. But the professors can change that default. We're getting laptops out of the classroom. So it's been the case for 25 years that if you teach a class at a law school or a major American university, when you're teaching, you're just looking out at a sea of Apple logos and it's just a wall of laptops in front of you, and the students essentially type the entire time. Now, for a while, schools were able to turn off the Internet in the classroom and not give the students free WI fi. But now everyone's cell phone plan has unlimited data and hotspotting. And so it's impossible. The students believe they can multitask. So they have notes open in one window and then they're just all tabbing back and forth to chat, which can
- [16:44]
A
really, in a place like Chicago, where everything is Socratic. And I remember times where I was being basically grilled for 30, 40 minutes. Sure, not paying attention is pretty fucking risky.
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B
Yeah, that's right. Yes. I do think that the grilling keeps our students doing this to a minimum compared to other lecture classes or whatever. And that is true. But ChatGPT and other AI models chat change this calculus a little. Right. So I'm sure you remember you would have taken your whatever, your con law class, and you've read some cases before and you Go in and you sit there seeing if you're going to get cold called and grilled and embarrassed a little bit. But part of what makes that experience stressful is that we assign you those cases, but we don't tell you why. Law is sort of unique. This case method, yeah, you don't get all the other material that like a normal sort of.
- [17:32]
A
But that's sort of the key to as someone is someone who never practiced law. When I later in life I went back and tried to figure out what I got out of it, one of the. To me, the most important thing was exactly what you just said, which is you're reading this 20 page case, that single space and tiny font, and you're taking in all this information and what you really have to figure out is within that there's like three sentences that matter. Right. And it's like, how do you find the three sentences? And once you develop that skill. When I was deputy governor, my whole job all day was just people lined up outside my office to help me out some problem and I had like a minute and they would like to talk to me about it for an hour. Right. And it's like, I need you to tell me the most salient facts. I'm gonna. Based on that, I'm gonna figure out what those three sentences are. I'm gonna ask you some questions and then I'm gonna make a decision and like it's applicable to almost anything.
- [18:24]
B
Yes, I think that's entirely right. That it's applicable to anything. And in so many styles of teaching, it's not actually the way the skill that people are teaching. Right. So many kinds of classes the professor will put on the slides, the bullet points. Here's the three sentences for you on a PowerPoint slide. In law school, we don't really do that. We're trying to teach exactly what you said. Here's this dense material. You figure out what matters and why and try to understand it. And the problem is though, I think you need that skill because in that meeting as deputy governor, you couldn't have been like, hold on, let me just ask Claude real fast what the answer is.
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A
Nor do I want Claude running the state of Illinois.
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B
Yeah, right, right, yeah, Maybe someday, but not yet.
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A
It's true. Give me some of our.
- [19:13]
B
But in the classroom, the student very easily, at the start of class could go to Claude and say, here's the three cases I was assigned to read today. Here's these 20 pages dense cases from the Supreme Court. Give me why the professor assigned this to me. Summarize it. What are those three sentences? What are the five questions I'm likely to be asked? Whatever. And they can just read that one page summary and then they can alt tab over to ESPN.com and just read about basketball for the next 40 minutes until they're called on. Because they now sort of can short circuit the process.
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A
Yeah. Except, I mean, it's funny, especially for law, the what is almost immaterial. Right. I mean, maybe you need to regurgitate some of it for a test or the bar exam or whatever it is. But like, you know, rgc, I mean, there might be some stuff she just does on her own, but she's basically hiring law firms.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So like, even if you know the what it's once you're actually in the practice of it, like the only. The people who. That's the only thing that they know, they're the ones doing it anyway.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So like, if you don't bother to learn the why, the whole thing is a waste of time.
- [20:17]
B
Completely agree. And that's. Right. I mean, especially if you go to a, you know, an elite law school, fancy law school. All of our students got great grades and great LSAT scores and they're going to pass the bar. And so they're not here just to, like, cram information into their brain. It's not that we have like some monopoly on the contract law that's going to be on the New York bar exam or something like that. The whole point is like, how do you get this skill set?
- [20:41]
A
Right. I oftentimes. So I'll, you know. And it's funny, my own aspect because my perspective has changed about the sibling. Right. So frequently some young person comes up to me and says, should I go to law school? And so I ask, well, do you want to be a lawyer? And I know the answer is no, because otherwise what are you asking me for?
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B
Right.
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A
And if you want to be a lawyer, then of course you should go to law school. Right. So I know they're going to say no, and they say no. And then I immediately say, well, then you shouldn't go. And then they get upset because they wanted me to tell them, yes, you should go anyway. Because either it gets their parents off their back or it delays life for three years or whatever it is. So they say, well, look, it worked out pretty well for you. And my answer is, yeah, but I got lucky in some ways and was entrepreneurial in some ways. And by the way, I think I told you this once, ironically, Chicago itself, because of the law and Economics kind of focus. And because at least when I was there, a lot of people were studying behavior and writing behavioral economics. Like I took five classes with Cass. Right. So like that it ended up being a great tool for early stage vc. Because what you're really doing as an early stage venture capitalist is you're assessing whether a behavioral norm shift can happen. Will someone get in the backseat of a stranger's car? Will they sleep on a stranger's car? The best startups are the ones that change behavioral norms itself. And that doesn't mean that all startups do or that the only those that do succeed. And so David Sacks was a year ahead of me. Antonio Gracias, I think was maybe like two years ahead of me.
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B
Something like that.
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A
Yeah. So you had all these people that became our fairly prominent. Those guys especially early stage VCs. And I think that while none of you or us could have understood that at the time, VC was barely even a thing at the time. Cause the Internet was just coming together. It did end up being that. But overall the point that I had made to them, cause I knew that they wanted me to help them get to yes. And why they could go to law school was if you can go to a top 20 law school where they're not going to worry about the bar exam, right? They assume you're going to pass the bar exam, so they're teaching you how to think. And if you don't have to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars. I didn't pay off my law school loans till my mid-30s. Right. And you don't have to take out massive amounts of debt to do it, then sure, do it. And plan on not practicing law. Except that the institutional pressure to go practice law is really tough. So you better be able to resist that. Right? But putting that aside, one, did you agree with that? And then two, here's my thinking has changed. And tell me if you agree because it relates directly to your report, which is that I have a 20 year old and a 17 year old and I don't really know what. Luckily they both seem to know what they want to do. But if they said what should I study to get ahead in the world of AI, I don't fucking know, right? But I know that the one skill set is critical thinking, right? If you have critical thinking skills, then you should be able to use AI in any industry as effectively as possible. And there is an argument that a law school, especially one that is Socratic, is the single best way to develop critical thinking skills. So one pre AI, if you didn't want to practice law, did it, it makes sense to go to law school. And then now, in a world of AI, is the calculus different because of critical thinking?
- [24:08]
B
Yeah. All right, so I can entirely agree with you in that it seems to me that if we think about what are the skills for someone that's a high human capital person, like a white collar worker, that are going to be the least replaceable by AI? A lot of them are exactly the kinds of skills that law schools are focused on, which is critical thinking, judgment, oral presentation skills, being able to argue with a judge, a client, a law firm partner, or whatever it is. Those are the skills that I think that robarts aren't going to replace very quickly. Whereas a lot of finance, management consulting, whatever, that to me seems just more automatable. Not all of it, of course, but on the relative scale. Now, this, I think, relates exactly to your answer. My view is what's going to happen is that most of our students and most of the students at the other top 20 law schools end up going right now to very large law firms, at least to start their career. That's the typical career path. And then after a few years, people bounce off and do other things, whatever, go to a nonprofit, go be a prosecutor, go be a law professor, whatever it is. My guess is that the variance in what they do is going to increase from those top schools. Whereas I think you and Antonio Gracias and David Sacks were real outliers from being graduates in the 90s and being immediately pivoting to other things. Of course, people with your kind of success are always going to be outliers. But the idea of I'm going to get this degree and then immediately I'm going to look around politics and tech and VC and finance and be like, where can I have the biggest impact and the most influence in my career? I think that kind of thinking is going to be more valuable. And so what we need to be doing as a top law school is be thinking, how do we make it so that the kinds of career paths that people like you had, where you just went into all these different fields are more easily available? Because again, right now I think that there's still going to be some law firms, they're just going to be different. And perhaps fewer of our students will go in that route and their careers will be more varied once they're there. But the general skill. Yeah, I agree.
- [26:17]
A
Are you seeing anxiety among your students about law firm associate jobs in an era of Harvey and legal AI?
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B
So it's interesting, there's this big dichotomy. So of our current students, the ones that are already there doing the program, finishing their one until year, they all have jobs and they have summer jobs lined up, firms that are recruiting them, et cetera. For me that was a real eye opening moment is we had our admitted students days. So students apply, they get in, they come visit campus. We have these days that they can come visit over the course of the spring. And the question that I was asked again and again and again was the question that you just asked me. So these students accepted to arguably the top law school in the world and they're saying, should I even come? Right? And because this is post February where everyone had a freak out after the latest models of Cloud and ChatGPT are released and saying, will there still be white collared work by the time I graduate? And so what they're thinking is I am the precipice of signing the document to take on student loans and agreeing to the debt, stepping into a future that we don't know what looks like. And so for the students that are considering going to law school, it's like the only topic of conversation is what
- [27:37]
A
they're so for career services, I do remember going again, well, I'm not blaming you because many years for your time, but going to career services and saying, I don't want to practice law, how can you help me? The answer was, we can't. Okay, I wasn't surprised, but I figured I might as well ask, right? Clearly that can't still be the answer.
- [27:54]
B
So what do you do? Yeah, so one thing that we've tried to do is that we've paired. Now we started this program last year. In the past, people would find mentors, they'd find you, for instance, and ask you questions about what to do or whatever else. We started a program to pair every incoming student right when they arrive so at orientation with a mentor that's one of our alums. And we say to the student, what are you interested in? And some students will say, I want to go work at the biggest law firm that does M and A deals in New York City. We've got tons of alums that do that. But others are saying things like, I want to go into vc, I want to go into tech, or I want to go be an immigration rights lawyer in San Diego or something. And so we're then looking through our alumni and saying, all right, who has that career path? Who can give them some advice on that? Because in part our career services People, they know the world of law firm recruiting. That's their universe. They know the firms, they know the firm cultures. They can give you good advice on firm A versus firm B. But if you start saying, what's the difference between going into this kind of startup versus going to this established tech company? It's not their world. And so that's the main thing we're trying to do, is leverage our alumni network to give that kind of advice.
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A
One of the pillars of the report and something you and I have been talking about in general is sort of the ability to. Yes. You don't want AI to block people from developing the critical skills that are the reason to go to law school in the first place. There's also the ability to use AI to extend the capabilities of lawyers and law in totally new ways. So you mentioned one example. What else is being worked on kind of at the clinic or lab or whatever you're calling it.
- [29:37]
B
Yeah. So the AI lab, they're trying to find projects, like I said, where the goal is, where can we build AI tools that will give people more accurate answers for low income people that currently can't afford lawyers? Because one reality in the country is that there's so many tasks. For instance, people that have consumer debt of various kinds, like your credit card company is coming after you for not paying your debt or whatever it is, where there's really no lawyer that is willing to take on this case because these are people that low income people that just can't afford lawyers. And so there's a real legal services gap in the country that exists all generally. Now AI has this great potential in that everyone is realizing, wait, I can go ask ChatGPT this question and get not bad answer on what I should do or how I should respond. But right now people don't know what to ask it and they don't know what to say. So it might be someone that's in Utah and has a problem with their consumer debt and they just go on to ChatGPT and say, how can I get out of this? And chatgpt behind the scenes is scanning whatever learning material it learns on, which is actually looking at California law. It doesn't know to tell you that you don't know to ask that, but that's sort of the default answer or whatever it is.
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A
It might be a little different than Alabama law.
- [31:03]
B
Yeah, right, exactly. And so part of what you need is not just any answer, but the right answer. And so we're trying to look for spaces that are like that. There's I think a few things that are being considered for this next year's project. There'll be a project for the next year. I don't want to jump the gun and say what they've selected, but we've been looking in employment law, consumer debt. A range of topics are what's being discussed. And as I mentioned, our alum, Kimball Parker runs this. He previously himself had several startups that were working in this space and then said, all right, build profitable companies that have had profitable exits doing this. Why don't we now do this for things to train students? So the students not only are learning the skills of how to build the product, but also learning how to do something entrepreneurial, which relates to what we're talking about a minute ago. How do you help the students that want to go in these other kinds of career paths?
- [31:56]
A
Right. All right, so last question, which is what do you want other law schools to take from the report? And then let's say I'm sort of some association of university presidents.
- [32:09]
B
Yeah.
- [32:09]
A
So they call it something. Right?
- [32:10]
B
Yeah.
- [32:10]
A
And they said, adam, please come address us and just tell us as universities, not just our law schools, what can we learn from you? And what if we, if you had two or three recommendations, what would they be?
- [32:22]
B
Yeah, sure thing. So I really do think that over the last four years, so much of higher education has been, as I mentioned before, just not keeping up with the change in technology and they're moving far too slow. So the schools are, I mean, talk to professors that are still assigning take home assignments because that's the only way they're able to do it because they're teaching these huge classes with space constraints or whatever it is where they know full well they're now four years into having students that have had free access to AI models to do their work. And so my mind is the first thing that university leaders need to get through this head is we're not talking about some future state way AI might be changing educations. It's already happened for four years and we need to move immediately, not slowly. And for instance, since we put out this report, I've been asked by dozens of law school deans have wanted to talk, how did you produce this report? How did you get your faculty to agree to it? How did you get your faculty to agree to take on more work? The thing I keep saying is I'm shocked that your faculty doesn't get that we're at an existential moment for higher education. We need to be thinking boldly. And the most dangerous thing you can do is nothing. I think that they have to first, be aware that this is the reality, second, be willing to make changes and then third, to revisit them. And so I don't think any of us know where this is all going, but what we need to be willing is being willing to experiment, start new classes, start new programs, start new policies, see what works, what doesn't, and being willing to reevaluate as you go, but the whole time being aware that these models exist. We cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube, nor can you prohibit your students from having access to them when they're gone. It doesn't matter if you give your students a Claude password or not, they have access. You've got to figure out how do we design education to make sure that you are teaching students skills that are going to be value add above what the robots can do, like what we talked about before, the critical thinking skills, the judgment, the distilling complex information, how do you get to that? And that's what we need to be focused on. Got it.
- [34:44]
A
Normally I say to people or how do people follow your work? But I think your work is probably not something that tort scholarship. But how do people read the report?
- [34:52]
B
Yes. Okay, so and if they want to
- [34:54]
A
learn more about towards scholarship, how do they follow that?
- [34:56]
B
Yeah, sure, I wouldn't recommend that for the average listener, but for the report itself at the University of Chicago Law School website, you can go to our website. We have an AI portal that has the report has scholarship that me and my colleagues have done on the impact of AI in law. Talks about the different things that we're offering and it should be pretty easy to find.
- [35:17]
A
All right, Adam Chilton, thanks for joining us.
- [35:19]
B
Thanks, Bradley.
- [35:21]
A
Firewall is recorded at my bookstore, PNT Netware, located at 180 Orchard street on the Lower east side of Manhattan. We'd love to hear from you with questions, feedbacks or idea for a guest. Just email me at Bradleyirewall Media or find me on LinkedIn. And to keep up with what's on my mind and my latest writing, please follow my new substack@bradleytus.substack.com. thanks again for listening.