# On Intelligence and the Ruin of Learning: A Meditation Upon the Present Distress That intelligence should be a matter of some perplexity to those who possess it is perhaps inevitable; for we are all, in the strictest sense, measuring ourselves by instruments of our own devising—a circumstance that ought to humble us more than it commonly does. Yet I confess myself moved to a melancholy reflection upon the present state of our universities, where a great and terrible clarity has arrived: the machines now execute, with mechanical perfection, those very operations which the learned institutions labored for centuries to refine and measure. And having witnessed this displacement, the universities persist—not in error, but in something more culpable, which is the continuation of error after its nature has been revealed. Let us speak plainly. Intelligence, that faculty which we invoke with such confidence and such vagueness, comprises at least two distinct orders of operation, though our instruments measure but one. There is, first, that facility of recall and recombination—the ready retrieval of fact, the apt quotation, the demonstration of acquired knowledge set in orderly array. This is the intelligence of the well-stocked mind; it is measurable, it is teachable, and it is, as we have now learned to our astonishment and shame, entirely susceptible to mechanical performance. A machine may be taught to retrieve and to arrange with a facility that exceeds our own; it asks nothing of us but sufficient data and computational power—commodities which this age possesses in abundance. But there exists another order, which I shall venture to name—though the naming itself betrays the poverty of our language—*judgment*. And judgment is not the mere accumulation of particulars, nor their ready deployment, but rather that faculty by which we perceive the weight of things, the consequence of choices, the texture of human circumstance as it actually obtains, distinct from how it might be represented in the abstractions of learning. Judgment understands that the young man of brilliant memory may be a fool in the conduct of life. Judgment knows—and here I speak from a long acquaintance with my own deficiencies—that to know the good is not to do it, and that wisdom is purchased, if at all, through suffering and error, not through the perfection of one's catalogue. Now, the universities—those great engines of civilization—did not fail to perceive this shift. The administrators are not ignorant men. The scholars are not without perception. Yet they continue, with a kind of institutional inertia that resembles nothing so much as a ship whose captain sees the reef and nevertheless maintains his course. Why? The answer, I fear, lies in a matter so elementary that we are inclined to overlook it: *the institution can measure what it measures*. One may examine a student upon his knowledge of languages, his command of historical dates, his facility with mathematical operations. These things yield to examination. They may be ranked, compared, certified. The dean may report to the board that his graduates score thus and so. But how shall one examine judgment? How measure the capacity to see truly into a difficult matter? How certify in a diploma that a young woman understands the proper weight of ambition, or that a young man has learned to distinguish between his appetites and his good? These things are learned, if learned at all, through the long friction of living—through disappointment, through moral choice, through the observation of how one's own errors reverberate in the world. And therefore, the institutions optimized for what they could measure, which is to say they optimized for the very tier that machines would eventually master. It is not that the universities failed to see the shift coming—this would be too charitable. Rather, they saw it, understood it, and could not alter their course, because to do so would require abandoning the very apparatus by which they justify their existence and their claim upon resources and prestige. To teach judgment is to accept uncertainty in one's outcomes. It is to admit that some students will not demonstrate their learning through examinations. It is to acknowledge that the university's role is not to produce standardized outputs but to midwife a long and often painful development of character and understanding. This is not a task for which institutions are suited. Institutions require metrics. Institutions require efficiency. Institutions require that one may point to a graduate and say: *this person has been certified*. But judgment cannot be certified; it can only be cultivated, and cultivation takes time, and time is precisely what neither the institution nor the student believes himself to have. And so we arrive at a circumstance of peculiar cruelty: those students who might have most benefited from the slower, more exacting development of judgment—those for whom mere recall is insufficient, those capable of genuine thought—are precisely those whom the institution cannot afford to fail, and therefore cannot afford to teach in any way that does not yield to measurement. The cost is borne, as costs always are in such arrangements, by those least able to bear it: by the poor student who cannot afford to spend years in uncertain development; by the young person whose family requires demonstrable credentials; by all those for whom the university remains the only avenue of advancement, and who therefore must accept whatever the institution offers, however poorly it addresses the true exigencies of intelligence. The machines have not created this problem. They have merely made it visible. And in making it visible, they have posed a question that the universities cannot avoid, though they may postpone answering it: *What is intelligence for?* Is it the accumulation and display of acquired knowledge? Then machines are superior, and the universities are museums of obsolescence. Or is it something else—something that involves the capacity to see truly, to choose wisely, to bear the weight of one's own ignorance and fallibility with some degree of grace? Then the universities must be transformed entirely, and they must accept a kind of failure that no institution willingly embraces. I do not know which course they will take. But I know that the evasion of this question—the continuation of measurement and certification in the face of a shift that has rendered such measures nearly meaningless—is itself a kind of moral failure. It is the failure of an institution to serve those whom it exists to serve. And it is a failure that will be paid for, as all such failures are, in the diminished lives of those who pass through its halls believing themselves educated, when they have merely been processed. The question, then, is not whether intelligence can be defined—it cannot, finally, be defined without remainder. The question is whether we possess the courage to teach it, knowing that we cannot measure it, and accepting that we ourselves may fail in the attempt. This is the wisdom that the present moment demands. Whether the universities possess it remains, I fear, an open question.