Episode 54: Adam Pryor
"AI risks becoming that proverbial situation where everything looks like a nail because you've got a hammer in your hand."
"The arcane mechanisms of an industrial age model of education that were meant to make human beings who efficiently produced for machines doesn't exist anymore."
In this 54th episode of The Opposite of Cheating Podcast, Tricia sits down with Adam Pryor, Senior Advisor for AI Strategy and Engagement at the Council of Independent Colleges, for a lively and surprisingly convergent conversation between two people who assumed they'd disagree.
Sparked by Adam's satirical LinkedIn collaboration with Darren Coxon imagining a surveillance-based future for academia (dubbed "the Penopticon"), the conversation quickly moves beyond AI hype into deeper questions about pedagogy, institutional purpose, and what education is actually for. Adam shares his pastoral care-inspired teaching philosophy, his provocative grading experiments, and his vision for a 2045 university that is more distributed, free of credit hours and majors, and no longer reliant on the essay as its default assessment.
Along the way, Tricia and Adam discover they share far more common ground than expected — agreeing that technological solutions alone won't fix education, that faculty need better training and more freedom, and that the real work lies in preserving the human-to-human learning experiences that no chatbot can replace.
You can follow Adam on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-pryor/
You can see the LinkedIn posts that spurred this conversation at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adam-pryor_satire-ourfuture-activity-7432926969404588032-HsIf?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAHDLSYBPwLsj1uKpThC62Ahi6dO-WKrvlc and https://www.linkedin.com/posts/darren-coxon_penopticon-pitch-deck-activity-7432819565300117504-sci8?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAHDLSYBPwLsj1uKpThC62Ahi6dO-WKrvlc
(Disclaimer: episode quotes and summary were created using YouTube's transcript and Claude and edited by a human. Any errors are the responsibility of the human.)
This was a really thoughtful conversation. I agree that technology alone can’t fix education and that real human connection still matters most. Great points about giving teachers more freedom. A clear AI training presentation can also help teams learn these ideas in a practical way.