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I have taught liberal arts college students for nearly two decades. One of the privileges of the seminar table is candor and an intimacy that develops over many weeks. My students regularly and honestly tell me what they actually do: what they read and what they skim, what they trust and what they avoid. And for the past year, they have been telling me something that cuts against a steady stream of headlines about higher education: They have rejected artificial intelligence.
Not because they cannot use it — they are digital natives who master new tools in minutes. Rather, my students have tried AI, weighed it, and found it wanting.
Sarah Lawrence College students are not typical, and I would never pretend otherwise. But they are not as unusual as people assume. In my years here, I have learned that Sarah Lawrence students have been a harbinger of where American culture is heading. They were on the front lines and ahead of the curve on campus protests, the social justice movement, the rise of DEI, or the post-Oct. 7 protests, all of which took hold months or years before sweeping the rest of the country.
When my students move, America tends to follow.
The 2026 commencement season suggests that this pattern is holding. At the University of Arizona, former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt was booed repeatedly the moment he turned to AI. At the University of Central Florida, graduates jeered a speaker who called AI the next industrial revolution. At Middle Tennessee State University, a music executive answered the boos with “Deal with it,” quieting no one. These were not fringe protests at boutique liberal arts coastal schools. They were big public universities in Arizona, Florida, and Tennessee, and the reaction was spontaneous and fairly uniform.
New polling shows what my students are sharing may be a genuine generational judgment, too. The latest Voices of Gen Z survey from Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation, and GSV Ventures, fielded in early 2026 among more than 1,500 Americans aged 14 to 29, found that while weekly AI use has held steady at about half the cohort, feelings have soured dramatically over one year. Excitement about AI fell 14 points, to just 22%. Hopefulness dropped to 18%. Anger jumped nine points, to 31%. Even daily users, the people who know these tools best, are 18 points less excited than a year ago.
I suspect that many young people believe AI is costing them something real. The same Gen Z survey revealed that only 46% of Gen Zers now say AI helps them learn faster, down from 53%. More say it harms rather than helps their ability to think carefully about information, 42% to 25%. Fully 8 in 10 say relying on AI will likely make it harder for them to learn in the future. Among employed Gen Zers, 48% say the workplace risks of AI outweigh its benefits, three times the share who say the reverse.
The rest of the country seems to agree. Pew Research Center’s June 2026 report, based on a February survey of more than 5,000 adults, found people expect AI to do society more harm than good. Forty percent predict a negative impact over the next two decades, against just 16% who expect a positive one. Nearly two-thirds (63%) say the technology is moving too fast. Seven in 10 (71%) expect it to make their personal data less secure.
And here is the number Washington should sit with: 67% have little or no confidence in the government to regulate AI effectively, up 5 points from 2024. A 2025 Quinnipiac poll has found just 5% of Americans believe AI development is being led by people who represent their interests. Five percent. The tech industry has managed to build a technology that Americans use daily and trust almost nobody to steward.
The campus numbers sharpen the point. The Digital Education Council’s 2026 global survey of more than 45,000 students and faculty found that while 88% of students worldwide now use AI in their coursework, nearly three-quarters of American and Canadian students worry their classmates are using it to gain an unfair advantage (73%), and faculty enthusiasm for teaching with AI in North America has fallen to the lowest level of any region globally.
Quinnipiac’s April 2026 polling shows Americans oppose colleges using AI to screen applications by nearly two to one and oppose AI tutoring, even as three-quarters (74%) say students should be taught how to use the technology. The story is clear: the public wants LLM literacy, not dependence or surrender.
The new Pew report takes these ideas of AI dependency further and reverses the usual story about technological change with young people embracing new technologies while older generations remain skeptical. The data show that adults under 30 are the most frequent users of AI chatbots, but they are also among the most pessimistic about AI's long-term effects. Roughly half believe AI will harm society (48%), while just 14% expect it to help. The data show that the generation with the most firsthand experience using these tools is not necessarily the generation most convinced they are making the world better.
These new surveys are all consistent with what I have been hearing from my own students for a few years now. They came to college because they want to become stronger readers, better writers, and more careful thinkers. Many have experimented with AI, but they have little interest in outsourcing the very work they believe a liberal arts education is meant to cultivate. They are also entering one of the most difficult entry-level job markets in years, while many of the country's leading technology executives enthusiastically describe AI's expansion as inevitable progress. It should not surprise us that many students see the technology with far more caution than excitement.
There is a lesson here, and it is not that there is a need to demonstrate AI’s value and power. Universities are already racing to sign enterprise AI deals and administrators drafting mandatory AI curricula might pause to notice that their own students, and most of the country for that matter, are asking a more basic question: Who decided this, and for whose benefit?
LUDDITES ARE WINNING THE DATA CENTER DEBATE
My students and many others nationwide are not asking whether AI will shape the world; they already know that it is doing just that. They are confused as to why no one has bothered to ask them what kind of world we should have.
A generation that still wants to think for itself is not a problem for higher education. It’s a gift, and it is a reminder of what higher education is supposed to cultivate.
