Talk about striking a match! (That's what your meteor looks like to me).
I've been saying way too much about CSU and AI from the other side of the continent, so I'll refrain from speaking about the specifics here.
I will speak to the issue of GE requirements. In my long years as a bureaucrat, I worked with faculty who had great ideas for mandatory classes, in everything from positive psychology to personal finance to addiction studies. If not a course, then they wanted some sort of mandatory orientation program. You know, get all the students together in a room and explain what they don't know, and then fill in the gap. These faculty were convinced that if only the university would mandate some program or course in whatever they believed students needed to know, it would fix some social problem.
They never seemed to understand my response, which was that it was far more likely to have the opposite effect. That forcing students into an educational experience, no matter how well-meaning, would result in them shutting their minds to whatever the intended message was.
I teach a course centered on the role that slavery and Indigenous land dispossession play in the history of higher education in the US. I can well imagine it being prohibited if things keep on the way they are. But I would never want it, or any other course that brings important questions about race and ethnicity to be required of students. Let them come to knowledge freely, and find teachers dedicated to exploring difficult questions.
On another note, I'm more baffled by the idea of AI replacing general education courses than I am by the idea of an AI-empowered university, so I look forward to learning more.
Interesting piece and lots to think about. A few thoughts just thinking out loud: (1) making sure and then making the case that a research univ is a great place to be an undergraduate, and how/whether/if resesrch active faculty will be good teachers as a matter of course is an open question. I’m thinking about the median teacher here. (2) the explosion of vice assistant deans of blah blah have more formative input to students than faculty I fear….and at a place like duke we went willingly to focus on our research. (3) the paternalistic impulse of required stuff to graduate is a long standing force. UNC chapel hill (my Alma mater) had a swimming test to graduate for more than 100 years until a few years back
From the point of view of students, the general education lecture classes cost the same as any other classes, about $40 per hour per student per $18k/yr. tuition. For a course with 100 people, that's $4000 per lecture hour, $180k for a three-credit course. The faculty's job is to teach, despite all the counterproductive incentives and politics of academia.
Ending DEI in academia is just throat-clearing for the real "scourging of the Shire", which will see the vast majority of academic administrative posts eliminated, as they should be. The stretch goal is to take away the credentialling system from academia, replace degrees with valid, test-based credentials. No longer will universities be able to trap millions of students in debt bondage. (Which is racketeering under current law, the gains, including personal gains, are legally forfeit.) It may even become another dissolution of the monasteries, as many hope.
“serious academic work is the best defense against politics and the only real path forward in the AI era”
Yes! And truthfully, you can strike the “academic” from “serious academic work”. While the academy is more politically influenced than other fields, the only path forward for all human workers in an AI age is “serious work”.
Talk about striking a match! (That's what your meteor looks like to me).
I've been saying way too much about CSU and AI from the other side of the continent, so I'll refrain from speaking about the specifics here.
I will speak to the issue of GE requirements. In my long years as a bureaucrat, I worked with faculty who had great ideas for mandatory classes, in everything from positive psychology to personal finance to addiction studies. If not a course, then they wanted some sort of mandatory orientation program. You know, get all the students together in a room and explain what they don't know, and then fill in the gap. These faculty were convinced that if only the university would mandate some program or course in whatever they believed students needed to know, it would fix some social problem.
They never seemed to understand my response, which was that it was far more likely to have the opposite effect. That forcing students into an educational experience, no matter how well-meaning, would result in them shutting their minds to whatever the intended message was.
I teach a course centered on the role that slavery and Indigenous land dispossession play in the history of higher education in the US. I can well imagine it being prohibited if things keep on the way they are. But I would never want it, or any other course that brings important questions about race and ethnicity to be required of students. Let them come to knowledge freely, and find teachers dedicated to exploring difficult questions.
On another note, I'm more baffled by the idea of AI replacing general education courses than I am by the idea of an AI-empowered university, so I look forward to learning more.
Interesting piece and lots to think about. A few thoughts just thinking out loud: (1) making sure and then making the case that a research univ is a great place to be an undergraduate, and how/whether/if resesrch active faculty will be good teachers as a matter of course is an open question. I’m thinking about the median teacher here. (2) the explosion of vice assistant deans of blah blah have more formative input to students than faculty I fear….and at a place like duke we went willingly to focus on our research. (3) the paternalistic impulse of required stuff to graduate is a long standing force. UNC chapel hill (my Alma mater) had a swimming test to graduate for more than 100 years until a few years back
From the point of view of students, the general education lecture classes cost the same as any other classes, about $40 per hour per student per $18k/yr. tuition. For a course with 100 people, that's $4000 per lecture hour, $180k for a three-credit course. The faculty's job is to teach, despite all the counterproductive incentives and politics of academia.
Ending DEI in academia is just throat-clearing for the real "scourging of the Shire", which will see the vast majority of academic administrative posts eliminated, as they should be. The stretch goal is to take away the credentialling system from academia, replace degrees with valid, test-based credentials. No longer will universities be able to trap millions of students in debt bondage. (Which is racketeering under current law, the gains, including personal gains, are legally forfeit.) It may even become another dissolution of the monasteries, as many hope.
“serious academic work is the best defense against politics and the only real path forward in the AI era”
Yes! And truthfully, you can strike the “academic” from “serious academic work”. While the academy is more politically influenced than other fields, the only path forward for all human workers in an AI age is “serious work”.