A new survey conducted by Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center and the American Association of Colleges and Universities found that 95% of college faculty fear that generative artificial intelligence will increase student overreliance on AI. The study also discovered that large majorities of faculty believe that AI will diminish critical thinking while decreasing attention spans.
Director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center Lee Rainie said the survey shows that faculty are worried and skeptical about AI’s place in universities.
“They've got lots of concerns about the way that AI is used by students and the broader impact on culture and society that it's having,” Rainie said. “There's a lot of concern that the sort of basic elements of human agency and individual initiative and curiosity, and basic research skills that these things are in jeopardy now.”
The survey was released Jan. 21, polling over 1,000 faculty across the country in November of 2025 and comes after a Jan. 2025 survey that polled university administrators.
The survey also found that faculty members are concerned about how AI will impact their jobs. Eighty-six percent said they think it is likely that AI will impact their work and 79% said their typical teaching model will be affected. Rainie said this is largely due to the emergence of cheating on college campuses due to AI, which 78% of respondents said increased.
“The job of being in a classroom on campus is going to change radically because AI raises the prospect of cheating,” Rainie said. “Lots of them reported that they were in the midst of academic integrity challenges for students who used AI. So they've encountered it in their classrooms with their specific students.”
Rainie said that he believes professors want more screen-free time in the classroom, but that not all faculty think AI is bad. He said the survey shows that faculty believe there are some potential benefits and that AI may be able to personalize learning for some students. The survey found that 61% believe AI could enhance learning in the future. Rainie said faculty are actively figuring this out.
“What you hear a lot from them, and you hear it on Elon's campus, is that a lot of professors are experimenting, and they are sort of co-learning, at the same time their students are, what these tools are potentially good for and what they can be potentially harmful for,” Rainie said. “It's a very experimental kind of wild west phase of operation with AI tools in the classroom.”
The survey also found a lot of worry regarding the long-term problems that AI could bring. Almost 50% said AI’s impact on students’ future careers will be more negative than positive and 74% believe that AI will negatively impact the integrity and value of academic degrees.
Rainie said that it is important to note that university administrators were more hopeful when it came to AI when polled last year.
“It's striking the degree to which the faculty members, who are at the front line actors in this drama, have a more negative view than the administrators who are trying to orient their institutions in a smart way about how to deal with it,” Rainie said.
Despite the survey finding that 59% of faculty believe that their institution is not well prepared to use AI effectively, Rainie said that Elon has a strong passion for being involved in the conversation about what AI will do to higher education.
“The overall philosophy among the leaders on campus is look at it, try to figure out what its place might be in your classroom. There's no pressure to use it if you don't want to use it,” Rainie said. “There's some programs that are available to help you think about embracing AI in your classroom. So it's a very sort of wide open invitation to what's going on, but without any insistence that one direction or another is the right one.”