I Think I May be Onto Something: They’ve Cloned Justin Schwartz

Letter to the Editor

With the recent rumors that Chancellor Justin Schwartz’s email following the swatting of Norlin Library may have been composed with generative AI, I can’t help but wonder if this is revealing of something more sinister about the administration of CU Boulder.

I can’t lie; my first thoughts weren’t to see if the Chancellor’s trademark heartlessness was anything more than bureaucratic nothing-speak, but others’ investigations have really got me thinking: is it possible that Justin Schwartz is a cyborg clone of himself, a puppet fashioned in flesh and powered by large language models and a Rivian car battery?

History proves that it is possible to encounter human beings who entirely lack empathy and personality, and this evidence pre-dates any technologies enabling cloning or artificial intelligence. Additionally, it is very likely that all of Justin Schwartz’s job—for which he is paid $829,000 a year and was gifted a $4 million mansion with signing and moving bonuses—can be outsourced to unpaid interns with the free subscription to ChatGPT. So why make this leap when Occam’s razor would make answering this question so much easier?

If you came here for an elaborately argued conspiracy, I hate to break this news, but I’m not interested in gripping this idea by its horns and wrestling it into reality. The truth is I want to believe Justin Schwartz is a hologram of sorts… I know, how irrational. This finding gave me hope that the Chancellor Schwartz we know, in all his callous, rugged glory, is just an illusion you can swat at, your fingers just gliding through him like he’s made of mist. 

It’s comforting to think that he isn’t a natural-born human being like the rest of us as he goes about his days showing no remorse for his actions and delivering meaningless slop to explain himself. How could someone preside over intense student repression then laud campus free speech, and how can they declare both sides equally in the wrong when peaceful protesters were assaulted by CU staff? How do you half-heartedly investigate and whole-heartedly cover up the murder of a CU student, not whispering a word to a grieving community? How is it impossible to take a solid stance on behalf of academic freedom and students rights but you have the energy to stand resolutely for genocide and neglect your pulpit to advocate for divestment. How does Chancellor Schwartz sleep at night, cowering in the face of the federal administration and lining his pockets with defense contracts? I suppose, he can tell himself the dead never heard the missiles coming thanks to their brilliant engineering—or that the buildings collapsed onto them so resolutely they were crushed before they felt a thing—then he can roll over and sleep soundly.

But then, I ask myself: maybe he does feel remorse? Maybe long ago he snapped under the weight of all this evil, and just like so many things around here, they’re covering it up? Maybe the real Justin Schwartz—it sounds so silly to say it—is out there somewhere, reckoning with himself and the system that made him and so many others like him. Maybe the university has just locked him away and turns out this Alterschwartz whenever they need a handsome face to say some words and then go back to wherever university chancellors go when they’re done with a hard day’s work. A $4 million mansion perhaps.

That’s got to be it, it makes enough sense to me. They don’t let anyone get near him lest they hear the computer fans whirring and humming. Just think, have you ever seen Chancellor Schwartz submerged in water? Didn’t think so, because he may well short circuit if water gets in his ears. We don’t know if he doesn’t have an orifice where he can plug himself in to recharge—or however you politely refer to that sort of thing. Maybe they bought the new mansion to distract from the fact that they’re renovating the old one into a data center to house his advanced language model, periodically sapping the Boulder energy grid to push boundaries in the field of public relations. I’ve not quite grasped at all the straws, I’ll leave the rest to whoever else is as desperate and hopeless a humanist as I am.

It’s hard to humanize someone so fabulously wealthy and powerful, a supposed public servant, nonetheless. So I won’t: Justin Schwartz is a clone, a cyborg, a hologram, an android, or whatever have you. I’d rather hope all his inconsistency is merely the fault of an algorithm or some mad scientist’s tinkering than some resolute malice he chooses to live by. But reality’s reality, that letter to the student body was probably just written by ChatGPT because Schwartz had better things to be doing than addressing CU’s increasingly violent environment, and another attempt to uncover conspiracy results in sobering realizations that fantasy gets us nowhere when the real world and its real inhabitants are completely fucked up as they are.