David Deming
Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard, an economist who studies education, skill development, and economic inequality.
“So learning is communal in part because there's a little bit of suffering required for learning to be successful.”
Plain English with Derek Thompson · September 2026
Derek Thompson had just pushed back with the MOOC comparison: free lectures were supposed to remake education and did not. Deming, Harvard's dean of the college, concedes the point and argues the lecture was never the hard part — the difficulty is, and it is easier to bear alongside other people. He thinks AI can personalise the tutoring but cannot supply the communal half.
Transcript
…in community with other people who are talented and motivated like you. You still need to come to a place like this. And so I think it just acknowledges where we are that we have to innovate and we have to build on our strengths and build on what we think we can do best and what only we can do.
…were going to change the world. I think Clayton Christensen, the famous business theorist, said half of all colleges and universities are going to go extinct because of massively open online courses. Can you remind us what are slash were MOOCs? And why isn't artificial intelligence just MOOC 2.0?
…just as far as a lecture goes. But that's not the only or even primary purpose of an education. Part of it is to meet your individualized learning needs, to not just, you know, kind of deliver the content to you, but also help you understand it in a way that speaks to you, to meet, to diagnose people's gaps in their knowledge, and then to provide an experience that helps people learn together. So learning is communal in part because there's a little bit of suffering required for learning to be successful. Most of the important things I've learned in my life, I didn't understand the first time I learned them. And I needed a little bit of a push to focus on it. Some people are autodidacts and they can learn on their own, but most people don't buy textbooks and take them home and master subjects on their own, even though they'd like to, because it's hard. And so the community of learning together…
I want to settle down in this question of how colleges should treat artificial intelligence, because I think it might be the key question to answer today. There's a live and quite ferocious debate, I think, over how colleges should treat AI. And different schools are coming to very, very different…
Yeah. So here's what it means. I think that we have to account and honestly acknowledge the fact that everybody, not just our students, but everybody is using AI all the time for everything. And we have to design our education around that reality. And so what I said in my email was actually, I…
So let's be really specific here. Let's say that you're teaching a
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