What Universities offer in the Age of AI
Featuring Joel Towers, President of The New School
F(r)ictions: Creative Work in an Age of AI {2026 symposium}
Joel Towers, President of The New School, reflected on the role of universities at moments like this. He drew a sharp line between The New School and the courts or the legislature, institutions that universities sometimes get mistaken for. Towers highlighted that a university is neither a neutral judge nor a lawmaking body, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to what it can actually offer: an openness to being guided by the facts rather than a verdict.
Towers reached backward rather than forward to build a comparison with Walter Benjamin's writing on mechanical reproduction nearly a century ago, and the observation that so many of today's questions about truth, authorship, and originality are similar to those made in the past, though they are happening at a different scale and a different speed. He resisted predicting what AI will look like five years out and instead argued that knowing how to work inside a world already altered by these tools matters more than knowing where the tools are headed. Watch the video for his full remarks.
At: The New School, New York City
On: Friday, May 1, 2026
Sponsored by: The New School's Office of University Initiatives
Video Production: Tatiana Stolpovskaya
Selected Works
We investigate how AI transforms the conditions, politics, and value of creative work.
