Dear Magicians,

When I was in college in the 1990s, our student newspaper ran a cartoon I still think about.

Panel one: the first day of class. A professor stands at the front of a packed lecture hall. Rows of students stare up at him.

Panel two: the next class. The professor is still there. The students are gone. On every seat sits a cassette tape recorder, red light on, catching every word.

Panel three: the professor is gone too. A tape recorder at the lectern plays his lecture to a room full of tape recorders.

We laughed. It was absurd. Nobody would pay tuition for that.

Classes started at UC San Diego last week. I walked into my first lecture of the quarter and looked out at the room. The tape recorders are back. They are thinner now, and they talk back. My students no longer sneak peeks at Instagram during class. They sneak peeks at an AI. Some are asking it to explain what I said a minute ago. Some are asking it to do a problem set I have not assigned yet.

I use these tools every day. I am not here to scold anyone. A tutor that never gets tired is a gift to the kid who is too shy to raise a hand. I would have loved to take a class from Albert Einstein. I can’t. But I own his collected papers, and a machine can now read every page of them before I finish my coffee.

Here is what bothers me. The cartoon was never about technology. It was about a deal. The student pretends to learn. The professor pretends to teach. The university sends the bill. The tape recorder only made the deal visible.

For centuries, the university sold something scarce: information, locked in a room, delivered by one person at a set time. That scarcity is gone. If what a college sells is information, the product is now free. At a private school, the price tag for it can top a quarter of a million dollars.

So what is left worth paying for? The things a recorder cannot catch.

The question a student asks in office hours that she would never type into a chat window. The look on a room full of faces that tells me the whole room got lost at step three. The moment I tell someone I respect, “That’s wrong,” and they come back a week later with something better. I go to my graduate students’ weddings. No chatbot has ever been invited to one.

The rabbis saw this two thousand years ago. Pirkei Avot says, “Aseh lecha rav.” Make for yourself a teacher. Not find a teacher. Not buy one. Make one. You make a teacher by showing up with your own confusion and letting another human being wrestle with it beside you.

The Talmud also records Rabbi Chanina admitting what every good professor knows: I learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and the most from my students.

That is the part the cartoon missed. Teaching is not a broadcast. It runs both ways. A tape recorder can play my lecture forever. It will never teach me anything back.

So this quarter I am offering my students a new deal. Use the machine. Argue with it. Check it. Then come to my office and argue with me. I promise to be harder to flatter.

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. week.

Brian