Am I among the last generation of professors who still believe that a piece of chalk and a blackboard are perfectly respectable teaching technologies? I walk into a classroom, pick up the chalk, and begin — without taking any help from a piece of paper or a screen. A theorem goes on the board, followed by a derivation, and, occasionally, an embarrassing typo. I am strangely pleased when a student points it out. It means someone is watching — and thinking. The student hasn’t simply photographed the board.
There’s something wonderfully human about a mistake made in public. The blackboard also shows thought unfolding. A polished slide presents the answer; a board presents the journey — the false start, the crossed-out equation, the sudden “Ah!” In mathematics and statistics, that journey is often the lesson.
But the chalkboard may be facing its most formidable competitor yet — not the smartboard, not PowerPoint, but the professor who never needs to enter the classroom. Harvard Business School has recently put AI versions of seven faculty members to work in an eight-week online entrepreneurship programme, HBS Foundry. For $699, participants can use digital professors to refine business ideas, rehearse pitches, practice customer conversations, and simulate board meetings. Human faculty remain involved.
Still, the idea is unsettling. The AI professors have one advantage over us: they don’t become tired. A human professor may become impatient after hearing the same pitch repeatedly. The AI clone will hear it as though it were the first. It doesn’t need coffee between classes or recovery time after an uninspired faculty meeting. It may be the perfect academic colleague — if we can get over the slight inconvenience of being replaced by our own faces.
A former student of mine, now a faculty member elsewhere, recently told me the Harvard news made him a little scared. I understand that it’s one thing to hear that AI will teach students. It’s a different thing to imagine a digital version of oneself doing the job — perhaps more patiently and without ever forgetting what was taught last Tuesday. I had once taught him with chalk in my hand. Now he stands before his students. Both of us are wondering whether the next generation of teachers might be machines. His fear was not really about technology. It was about identity. If a machine can reproduce our lectures, answer our students, and imitate our mannerisms, what exactly remains that belongs to us?
For a long time, professors possessed knowledge. Universities were warehouses of scarce information. That world has disappeared. Information is now abundant. A student can ask AI to explain a complicated theorem. The professor’s monopoly over information is gone. Perhaps that’s not a tragedy. Teaching was never merely the delivery of information. A competent teacher notices the student who has stopped asking questions. She can tell when an answer has been memorised rather than understood. He notices the awkward question that sounds foolish, but the idea turns out to be profound.
An AI can say something similar, even more politely. But there is a difference between simulation and relationship. A teacher knows a student over time. She remembers the student who struggled with probability but suddenly produced an original idea. She knows who needs encouragement and who needs a firm push. These judgements grow from encounters. That may become the most valuable thing professors offer in the age of AI: not knowledge, but attention. Even there is a strange possibility here: AI may destroy the lecture and, in doing so, rescue the professor.
If a machine can explain a chapter more patiently than I can, perhaps I should stop competing with it. Let the machine explain, give examples and instant feedback, and remain available at 3 am. My job may become different. I may have to ask: Is the answer correct? What’s been left out? What happens when neat theory meets messy reality? Why does this matter?
AI can become the tireless tutor. So professors may spend less time repeating information and more time interpreting it; less time explaining what a formula says and more time asking why it matters. AI is extraordinarily good at producing plausible answers. Universities must therefore teach students to ask one simple, inconvenient question: “Are you sure?”
Perhaps classrooms will have different types of teachers. Technology may take over routine explanation, leaving human beings to do the difficult work of judgement and inspiration. And perhaps the chalkboard will also survive — not because it’s technologically superior, but because it slows us down. You cannot write a proof on a blackboard in one click. You write one line, think, write another, erase something, and start again. Students have time to follow the argument. I have time to discover where the argument goes wrong.
Yes, there may still be a few of us standing before a blackboard. Not because chalk is superior to technology — it isn’t. I use computers, projectors, and AI myself. But the slightly squeaky piece of chalk, the half-erased equation, and the student interrupting with “Sir, there may be a mistake here” — be that for a correct or a wrong understanding of her — represent something no technology should make obsolete: the classroom as a place where two minds meet in real time. The mistake matters. So does the moment when a student suddenly understands. Perhaps that’s what we should protect — not the blackboard itself, but the human encounter. One day, perhaps, my AI clone will do it too. I am not sure whether to feel flattered — or unemployed that day.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.