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Professor calls for a return to ‘uniquely human’ creativity in academia

Conservative professors and policy experts have proposed a “New Technology Agenda” for the future to prevent technology from dismantling the core tenets of the family unit and supplanting “the human person.”

The policy blueprint, “A Future for the Family: A New Technology Agenda for the Right,” details how the present technological order “attacks human life at its root by subverting and replacing the family.”

The analysis, published recently at First Things, lists ten recommendations, including safeguarding children from AI deepfakes and pornography, and reducing adolescent use of social media.

It also recommends “favor[ing] technologies that enhance human skill” in the workplace, and embracing projects that “elevate the human spirit.”

Brad Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and one of the contributors, said the proposal took over 18 months to organize.

Wilcox (pictured) told The College Fix that technology not only threatens families, but also higher education since more students are resorting to plagiarism and artificial intelligence to complete their assignments.

“A lot of the ‘knowledge economy’ is actually at risk to the rise of automation,” Wilcox said.

“Nothing more strongly illustrates this than the fact that cheating with chatbots is common now at most universities. We need to figure out how to address this issue head on if we wish to sustain the whole higher education undertaking,” he told The Fix in a recent email.

The professor said he believes higher education institutions must return their focus to creativity and originality and preserve the elements of expression that can only come from a human person.

He believes “higher education should focus on those things that are uniquely human—art, philosophy, thinking, writing, and the power to do mathematics using your own gifts.”

Jared Hayden, a policy analyst at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank in Virginia, told The Fix that he also believes modern day technologies are undercutting higher education.

“The rise of artificial intelligence is swiftly undermining academic integrity, and is poised to strip human beings of numerous functions in society,” Hayden said in a recent email.

The policy analyst, who was also involved in crafting the agenda, said “universities have been the epicenters of intellectual development and technological innovation,” but chatbots and AI may jeopardize their future success.

“Ultimately, the American higher education system is part of a larger eco-system. If it wants to help students, it should, of course, have policies that mitigate the harmful effects of technology in the classroom and on campus,” Hayden said.

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“But the academic community should also invest in research that deepens our understanding of the effects of screen-based and AI-based learning in the classroom so that we can better reform the education system,” he said.

Hayden said their proposal for the future came “on the heels of an election won by an unlikely alliance between tech elites and the working class,” since President Donald Trump’s second administration has embraced new modern technologies.

“Trump is both interested in protecting tech, AI, and crypto, and protecting the working class from tech-related job loss,” Hayden said.

However, with the rate that modern technology is consistently intersecting with everyday life, he said technology “unchecked, will result in the construction of a technological order animated by anti-humanism.”

“While Trump’s techno-populist fusion is complex and perhaps even delicate, we think our statement offers a timely vision for how the Right can augment tech innovation while meeting Americans’ growing demand for tech governance in a way that serves rather than harms the flourishing of the human person and the family,” Hayden said.

The agenda is part of a larger project, Future for the Family, which supports pro-life and pro-family principles.

Along with the technological recommendations, it also opposes “artificially accelerated death” through euthanasia and assisted suicide, and supports women’s “natural ability to conceive, gestate, birth, and nurture children, rather than seek to bypass or short-circuit the female body or reduce it to organs for rent.”

Other parts of the agenda call for mitigating the “compulsive use” of technology and favoring “technologies that enhance local and familial autonomy … [and] make technology less reliant on distant power centers.”

Others involved in the project include Brad Littlejohn, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, Princeton University Professor Robert P. George, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, and Georgetown University Professor Joshua Mitchell.

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IMAGE: A Future for the Family, University of Virginia

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