One quarter of Harvard’s 2026 graduating class admitted to cheating with AI in a spring student survey. A similar share of Princeton graduates said the same in 2025. AI use has become ubiquitous on college campuses in a few short years, bringing with it rampant academic dishonesty. Its adoption threatens to drastically reshape learning in higher education.
Notre Dame is not spared from this crisis. A student survey published in the Scholastic last week found that 76 percent of respondents use AI at least weekly. The true number is likely much higher. Notre Dame Learning reported that “AI-related honor code violations have steadily increased.”
In the early days of AI, professors could easily distinguish between human and artificial writing. Those days are gone. Advanced models can now suggest grammatical, structural, and stylistic changes, blurring the line between what is human and artificial. This enables Notre Dame students to outsource much of their coursework—particularly in their humanities classes—in ways that professors cannot reliably track or prevent.
Although the university prohibits students from presenting AI produced work as their own, it leaves the implementation of specific AI policies open to each instructor. For professors, it is the wild west. Some have completely prohibited AI use. Others have accepted that AI is here to stay and are instead attempting to redesign assignments, exam formats, and grading policies to ensure that learning is not inhibited. Others embrace AI, even requiring its use, hoping that students will use it as a learning tool.
Some of these professors have found ways to effectively preserve rigor and student learning in their classes. But even so, the problem of AI continues to mount, particularly in the humanities. Here, practices essential for a student’s holistic development are effectively being outsourced.
In an op-ed published this August, university president Father Robert Dowd, C.S.C., argued that the humanities “have never been more important” in a world with AI. He writes, “We must encourage [students] to cultivate curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, moral courage and compassion through their study of the humanities.”
He continues, “These qualities cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence, and they are precisely the competencies our future leaders will need in order to navigate a world that grows ever more complex.”
A humanities education, in its current form, cannot continue to exist in a world where AI is ubiquitous. Many professors have realized this, eliminating take-home essays and implementing reading checks and bluebook exams instead.
Some may contend that assignments should remain as is—students should be responsible for making ethical decisions that support their own learning, and there is only so much that professors can do to ensure academic integrity.
But is this a fair expectation for students at an elite university like Notre Dame? Here, students are expected to maintain immaculate GPAs while balancing numerous demanding extracurriculars to secure prestigious positions after graduation. When students are crunched for a midnight deadline with such pressure, are grades or integrity more likely to give?
AI use reveals a much deeper problem at Notre Dame: the tendency to instrumentalize education for credentials. Classroom learning and teaching have already lost their primacy to careerism. As former Notre Dame professor Paul Blaschko notes, corner cutting ought to be expected in a system where students—and many faculty members—think that a Notre Dame education is primarily about getting a job.
But Notre Dame is not a trade school. It proclaims a different purpose of education, which is not merely instrumental. In its Mission statement, Notre Dame describes itself as being “dedicated to the pursuit and sharing of truth for its own sake.” Teaching and classroom learning form a necessary component of this mission. It is in this environment that students develop “disciplined habits of mind, body, and spirit that characterize educated, skilled, and free human beings.” This engenders a disposition necessary for the pursuit of truth. The humanities, and the core curriculum in particular, are essential for this.
Although it faces many of the same challenges with regard to AI, Notre Dame is unique among its peers. This is due to Notre Dame’s Catholic founding and character. No other top 20 university includes the pursuit of truth in its mission statement. Many have simply replaced it with “inquiry.”
This is because these universities, although they remain prestigious, lack a complete vision of the truth, and consequently of education. Notre Dame rightly frames learning in sacramental terms, as an encounter with God through the world he has created for us. In pursuing the truth, the students and faculty of Notre Dame are pursuing Jesus Christ. The university is tasked with forming students not only for this earth, but for heaven. The pursuit of truth for itself helps us to grow closer to the Truth Himself.
Notre Dame is responsible, therefore, for protecting its campus from the threat of AI and preserving it as a grounds for this true formation to occur. If Notre Dame fails to do this, it damages not only her students’ intellects, but their souls, too.
To accomplish this, Notre Dame must safeguard the core curriculum. It is in these classes that AI threatens the most important kind of learning—that which develops the wisdom and understanding constitutive of a free human being.
Furthermore, Notre Dame must reprioritize classroom teaching and learning above credentialism. Research is an important part of Notre Dame’s mission, but it cannot be prioritized at the expense of individual student formation. In the world of AI, professors must act more like companions in the learning process and less like administrators. They must recall that teaching is first and foremost a relational endeavor.
College is the last time that many Notre Dame students will consistently engage with the humanities, and through them, personally develop and grow their faith.
If a student were to graduate from Notre Dame without having done these things—wrestled with challenging ideas, reflected on his role in the world, and learned to integrate his faith into each part of his life—in short, if he never formed the habit of pursuing truth itself, then Notre Dame would have failed in its mission.
AI threatens to make this a reality. Notre Dame must combat this imminent danger by forming a learning environment that aligns more closely with its mission to pursue the truth for its own sake. Her students’ moral formation depends on it.
Gabe Hockstra is a sophomore from northern Virginia studying economics and history. He can be reached at ghockstr@nd.edu.