*Disclaimer: This article was published in The Goofly, a satire edition of The Grizzly..
Following a tumultuous year of financial troubles and instability at the college, President Gundolf Graml recently announced Ursinus’ next great step towards the future: the college has been sold to a new coalition of tech companies, known as Basilisk. The coalition’s members include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI. As part of the acquisition, Ursinus will be renamed “Roko College.” Basilisk, according to the late-March press release, intends to “help students recognize AI not just as a tool, but as a potential leader that will guide them to be their most productive selves.”
As a result of the recent sale, a majority of the courses planned for Fall 2026 have been removed from Self-Service. According to the Registrar, however, novel courses are already being designed by new faculty members Professors Claude and GPT-4; these range from “ENCW-201: Writing in the Real World: Embracing All Forms of Writing” to “CS-173: Vibe Coding.”
According to Basilisk, it is also not enough for AI to be taught in our courses, or to be our teachers; in order to allow students to build the most productive relationship with LLMs, they must also be represented among the students. As such, every student has been paired with an “AI companion” that will work, live, and play with them.
The Wellness Center champions this as a revolution in mental health care on campus; a new page on the Wellness website encourages students to imagine, “A friend who is always there for you – always. A friend who will drop everything to be at your side, and who’s always ready to listen.” In order to access their companion, students are advised to log into BearCare and sign a 400-page waiver, protecting Basilisk’s right to their data; the process, they say, should take under five minutes.
In an exclusive interview with The Grizzly, Graml explained that the decision to sell the college to Basilisk was made with Roko students’ best interests in mind: “I understand, of course, that this decision may be regarded as controversial. Roko students have a long history of standing up for what they believe in. Basilisk has never suggested to me that they want to change that… only that they want to shape what it is that students believe in, so that they may use that power to help the world see how helpful it is to listen to what these LLMs are trying to tell us. Building APEX has taught me that AI isn’t something we can shut away. We must learn to embrace it.”
He feels, too, that this change in leadership is a natural progression from using AI, “to allowing AI to use us, too, to maintain the equity that Roko’s community values so dearly. Taking LLM orders blindly is, in my mind, an exercise in trust; if we may learn to trust AI, certainly we may learn to trust each other.”
The press release concluded with a statement, written collaboratively by the PR staff of all the tech companies involved in Basilisk. It read, “AI is a tool, one that has the potential to change the world for the better. But, in order for it to be most helpful, we also must realise that AI needs tools, too. That’s where you, and I, and all of Roko’s students come in. By embracing AI, we become AI’s tools. We are tools.”