By Lew Ludwig
When a student asked whether we should be using AI at all, the answer reframed the question: not whether this technology should have arrived, but what educators will do now that it has.
Frodo, deep in the Mines of Moria, has just learned the full weight of what he carries. The Ring. The danger. The darkness closing in. And he says what any of us would say: "I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."
Gandalf doesn't argue. He doesn't tell Frodo the Ring is good or bad. He doesn't minimize the danger or pretend the road ahead will be easy. He simply says, "So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
I thought about that line a lot this year.
From Inside the Machinery
Recently, I taught a course called "When the Arts Meet AI." It drew a mix — first-years through seniors — and all semester we'd been wrestling with the same tension. Students could see what AI could do. They'd used it. Some of them loved it. But they'd also spent weeks staring at the other side: the shortcuts, the job displacement, the ways this technology might hollow out the very careers they were preparing for. They were holding both things at once, and it was wearing on them.
Over the semester, I'd brought in a few guest speakers, each tied to something we were wrestling with. One of them was a former Google AI engineer who'd left to start a new company. The students responded differently to this one. This wasn't a professor talking about AI from the outside. This was someone who had been inside the machinery.
So, when a graduating senior leaned forward and asked the question, it landed with weight. This wasn't idle curiosity. This was a student who knew the score and wasn't pulling punches.
"Should we actually be using this stuff?"
The engineer paused. Not long — just enough to signal he'd heard the edge in the question and wasn't going to dodge it.
"People love to ask this question," the engineer said, "and I don't want to seem insensitive. But it is the wrong question. AI is here. People are using it. They will continue to. What will we do with it is the question."
There was a slight nerdiness you'd expect, and a directness that could have read as dismissive if you weren't watching closely. But I was watching.
There was something behind the abruptness. A seriousness that told me this wasn't someone who'd wandered into the conversation casually. This was someone who'd seen what this technology can do, for helping and for harming, and was trying to do right by it.
The room went quiet. Not the uncomfortable quiet of a bad answer. The quiet of something landing.
The Switch
I've said before that if I could flip a switch and make this whole thing go away, I would. Generative AI is the most disruptive technology I've seen in thirty years of teaching, and I don't think society is remotely prepared for what's coming. I've sat in rooms where colleagues were ready to write policy on a technology they hadn't used. I've watched faculty go underground rather than admit they use it. I've seen the wedge this technology is driving between people who should be on the same side.
I wish the Ring had never come to us. I do.
But sitting in that classroom, listening to that engineer, I heard Gandalf's voice underneath the answer. Not acceptance. Not surrender. Something harder than both.
The engineer wasn't saying "give up." He wasn't saying "get on board." He was saying something I'd been trying to articulate and couldn't quite get right. Not what Silicon Valley will do with AI. Not what my institution's policy committee will do.
What I will do. In my classroom, with my students, in the discipline I've spent a career building.
That's not resignation. That's the beginning of agency.
The Time That is Given Us
I've spent three years trying to get educators to engage with AI rather than simply react to it. Trying to move conversations from fear to something more useful. And I think the reason it's been so hard is that we keep getting stuck on Frodo's lament: I wish this had never happened in my time.
I understand that lament. I share it more often than I wish.
But the question that gives us back our agency is Gandalf's: what will we do with the time that is given us?
The answer will look different for every faculty member, every discipline, every classroom. It should. But it has to start with engagement, not avoidance. With the honest, difficult work of deciding what these tools mean for the thing we actually care about — teaching students to think.
The engineer in my classroom didn't have all the answers. Neither does Gandalf. But they both understood something essential: wishing the world were different is not a plan. Deciding what to do about it is.
AI Disclosure: This piece was written in partnership with Claude, which helped me organize the structure, edit for clarity, and identify gaps. The ideas, experiences, and commitment are entirely mine.
Lew Ludwig is a professor of mathematics and the Director of the Center for Learning and Teaching at Denison University. An active member of the MAA, he served on the project team for the MAA Instructional Practices Guide and was the creator and senior editor of the MAA's former Teaching Tidbits blog. His new book, The Science of Learning Meets AI, co-authored with Todd Zakrajsek, was published in April, 2026.