Giving or Wasting Time? A Tale about the Presence of ChatGPT in the Academic Citadel

This essay reflects on the presence of ChatGPT in the contemporary university by situating it within a broader philosophical and institutional history of authoriality and time. Rather than framing generative AI as a disruptive innovation or predicting the future of education, the article interrogates the temporal logic that structures current debates – namely, anticipation as the dominant mode of social and educational organization. Drawing on Derrida’s metaphor of the university as an ‘exposed citadel’, the analysis explores how ChatGPT intensifies the convergence between authorial production, market rationality, and algorithmic prediction. Through an autoethnographic account of an experiment conducted in a Cultural and Media Studies course at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ (2024-25), the essay examines the competitive framing of human and machinic authorship, the platformization and militarization of educational practices, and the acceleration of academic labor. It argues that predictive technologies do not open the future but rather reinforce the present by operationalizing statistical repetition and algorithmic ‘common sense’. Against this anticipatory regime – which risks producing institutional collapse and a ‘textpocalypse’ of machinic writing – the article proposes the necessity of suspending accelerated temporality in order to reclaim education as a space for critical reflection. The central question is therefore not whether AI will replace human authors, but whether time for thought can still be given.