> If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else.

Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper.

> Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected.

Just like my on-campus classmates never smoked weed or drank underage, I'm sure.

This isn't aimed at you, but this strikes me as exactly the kind of divorced-from-the-real-world thinking that academia is pilloried for all the time. This kind of proposal will never happen, I'd basically stake my life on it. Students (and their parents) have zero interest in this kind of anti-technology nonsense, so it's DOA. College isn't compulsory, and those students aren't some captive audience you can do whatever you want with, they're customers. And I frankly doubt that most professors or administrators want this either.