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The AI Symposium. University Design by David J. Staley
In this episode of University Design, David J. Staley reflects on the ideas behind his new book, The AI Symposium (Innovation Press, 2026), using this month’s column—and its accompanying recording—as an opportunity to explore a provocative rethinking of AI, dialogue, and learning in higher education.
Rather than revisiting familiar debates about banning AI or defining its “ethical use” in the classroom, Staley invites listeners to step back and ask a deeper question: if large language models were explicitly designed to generate language, what does it really mean to treat that function as a problem? And what new possibilities emerge if we stop defending against AI and instead design with it?
Drawing on the work of David Graeber and Mikhail Bakhtin, this episode reframes thinking itself as dialogic—something that arises between voices rather than inside isolated minds. From this perspective, the traditional student essay begins to look less like a timeless measure of understanding and more like a historically contingent form of assessment.
Staley introduces The AI Symposium as both a conceptual experiment and a pedagogical provocation. In the project, multiple large language models are prompted to engage directly with one another in sustained dialogue, with the human designer acting as a “procedural author.” The result raises unsettling and generative questions: Can AI participate in dialogue in a meaningful way? Does dialogic exchange suggest a form of synthetic understanding? And what might this mean for how we assess student learning?
The episode ultimately looks forward, imagining a future in which students design and host their own AI symposia—selecting participants, framing questions, and interpreting dialogue—as a richer demonstration of understanding than the traditional essay.
In this episode, you’ll explore:
Why debates about “ethical AI use” often miss the point
Dialogue as the foundation of human thought
The limitations of essay-based assessment in an AI-enabled world
The concept of the human as “procedural author”
What happens when AI systems engage one another in dialogue
How the symposium could replace the essay as a primary form of assessment
This episode accompanies David J. Staley’s University Design column and is inspired by his new book, The AI Symposium, which expands on these ideas and their implications for education, technology, and the future of thinking itself.
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In this episode of University Design, David J. Staley reflects on the ideas behind his new book, The AI Symposium (Innovation Press, 2026), using this month’s column—and its accompanying recording—as an opportunity to explore a provocative rethinking of AI, dialogue, and learning in higher education.
Rather than revisiting familiar debates about banning AI or defining its “ethical use” in the classroom, Staley invites listeners to step back and ask a deeper question: if large language models were explicitly designed to generate language, what does it really mean to treat that function as a problem? And what new possibilities emerge if we stop defending against AI and instead design with it?
Drawing on the work of David Graeber and Mikhail Bakhtin, this episode reframes thinking itself as dialogic—something that arises between voices rather than inside isolated minds. From this perspective, the traditional student essay begins to look less like a timeless measure of understanding and more like a historically contingent form of assessment.
Staley introduces The AI Symposium as both a conceptual experiment and a pedagogical provocation. In the project, multiple large language models are prompted to engage directly with one another in sustained dialogue, with the human designer acting as a “procedural author.” The result raises unsettling and generative questions: Can AI participate in dialogue in a meaningful way? Does dialogic exchange suggest a form of synthetic understanding? And what might this mean for how we assess student learning?
The episode ultimately looks forward, imagining a future in which students design and host their own AI symposia—selecting participants, framing questions, and interpreting dialogue—as a richer demonstration of understanding than the traditional essay.
In this episode, you’ll explore:
Why debates about “ethical AI use” often miss the point
Dialogue as the foundation of human thought
The limitations of essay-based assessment in an AI-enabled world
The concept of the human as “procedural author”
What happens when AI systems engage one another in dialogue
How the symposium could replace the essay as a primary form of assessment
This episode accompanies David J. Staley’s University Design column and is inspired by his new book, The AI Symposium, which expands on these ideas and their implications for education, technology, and the future of thinking itself.