Earlier this year, education researcher Lixiang Yan realized that students could outsource all of their work for his university course to artificial intelligence. In praise of human teachers: universities must resist outsourcing everything to AI. Yan, who teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, was using an agentic AI called Codex to set up an online course on a learning-management platform. But it quickly became clear that the adept AI could independently complete all the assignments, answer questions and participate in discussions, “without the learner being intellectually engaged” at all, Yan says. The experience made Yan think that teaching students to reason and think for themselves “is more critical than ever”, he says. And he is hardly alone.