Jodi Kantor on Harassment, Hope, and Higher Ed

You were confronted with a problem and started reporting, which feels very on brand.

I have been thinking a lot about these same issues because we talk to students and professors about kind of this air of desperation.

And one of the things that I noticed about your book is that it is kind of like a glass of cold water in the desert.

Well, it is mercifully short.

It is optimistic without being naive, and it's solution-oriented, but at the same time, the journalist in me says it's very hard to argue with young people who say this moment is actually different, that AI actually is coming for us all, that housing issues, the systemic issues that you're sort of alluded to a few minutes ago are quite real and profound in a way that other generations have not confronted.

And I'm wondering where you fall on that spectrum.

Do you feel that we are in the throes of a technological and cultural revolution that actually warrants some degree of panic or do you find that to be overblown?

So my mantra as a reporter and like an expert in evaluating what information do we have and what information do we not have My answer is, I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

It's too early.

This hasn't shaken out yet.

And I am skeptical both of the total doomsday scenario in which entry level work is left as a shell of its former self.

And then, of course, I'm also skeptical of these rosy scenarios about how AI is going to be the redemption of us all.

But here's the thing.

We can't know what the workplace is going to look like in four or five years.

But here's what we can say.

we can say no one can afford to give up on work.

Nobody can afford it personally, and we can't afford it collectively.

Work is our means of progress as a society.

If we take the collective hive mind of education and everything we're trying to effectuate for the next generation, Work is how we get there, right? If we want new cancer therapies or fabulous new novels or new commercial aircraft, like for all of its problems, and the workplace has a lot of problems, work is still our engine of progress.

And also, maybe it shouldn't be this way, but it does tend to determine our personal happiness.

I mean...

I have never met anybody who was a happy person who was miserable at work, if you know what I mean.

Maybe there are a couple of exceptions, but for better or worse, work does set our emotional temperature to a large degree.