gosh, I see a lot of different concerns & attacks on #GenAI in #HigherEd...and I'm equally concerned...but this piece addresses the larger existential challenges for our students that we often ignore: https://slate.com/life/2025/05/college-student-cheating-ai-detector-chatgpt-school-education.html

@academicchatter

Apereo Foundation is deeply honored by the renewed and generous support from Kyoto University as a Member and a sustaining supporter of the Sakai LMS.
Dōmo arigatō gozaimasu – thank you.

Support #OSS in #highered by becoming a member of the Apereo Foundation today. www.apereo.org/join-us

Sometimes it's amazing to me that any significant resistance to autocracy comes from American public universities.

Because of historical accidents, I guess, our universities are almost all top-down authoritarian hierarchies with all meaningful power vested in the state governor, who appoints (or hires in increasingly rigged searches) a president or a chancellor managing multiple presidents, and who appoints a board of trustees who seem to always just be a bunch of wealthy cronies, often with little or no experience in education, let alone higher education. That is who is in charge of US universities and colleges.

Nearly every American university or college is an autocracy. The faculty usually have some body like a Senate, but that body almost never has more than "advisory" status. The president of the university--often taking orders from the chancellor of the system--has the final say on hiring, firing, budgets, salaries, policies, and pretty much everything else.

In some states unions have protected a few bits of involvement for faculty--like the tenure system making casual firing at least more difficult--but those bits are shrinking. I think striking is illegal for higher ed faculty in most states: strike = go to jail.

I think most American faculty are familiar with many of the patterns we see being run by the GOP right now, from living them on our campuses for the past 20+ years: autocratic power grabs, the richest people being in charge, those rich people using their position of leadership to become richer and invite rich friends to do the same, ongoing demonization of resistance, suppression of messaging about the situation to the outside world, isolation and small-scale marginalization of undesirable individuals or groups, degradation of transparency and shared governance mechanisms... so much is familiar.

Of course nobody is being locked in cages on campuses or deported to torture prisons in El Salvador (yet... though see Columbia for potential counter-examples). Universities are hundreds of tempests in their own little (or sometimes big) teapots. The harms done are limited to careers and personal happiness being degraded or destroyed by autocratic whim. Yes, that's awful, but it's clearly not on the same scale as what we're seeing in the US from the GOP government.

My point isn't to try to equate the suffering on campuses with the suffering being caused by the GOP's fascist policies or the much worse things happening elsewhere in the world. It is to point out similarity of patterns, and to provide an explanation for why US universities are not (and probably will not be) the defenders of constitutional and moral rights that some people (including me) think they should be.

We allowed populists and anti-intellectuals to turn our universities into authoritarian hierarchies nearly incapable of real resistance to fascism long before the fascists co-opted the media or Congress or the courts.

New in our electronic #collection:

Policing higher education : the antidemocratic attack on scholars and why it matters

https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/159026

If you believe in the hype about #AI disrupting education, you should read this small piece by Stefan Lang from Salzburg University

#HigherEd #EUAAIConf #EdTech

https://www.eua.eu/our-work/expert-voices/does-ai-risk-averaging-knowledge-and-sacrificing-creativity-in-academia.html

“You just assume that if you do your work, you’re going to be fine — until you aren’t.”

That’s the reality for students caught in the middle of flawed AI-detection systems and rising fears of academic dishonesty.

Highlights from the NYT story:
Turnitin and other detectors are flagging genuine work as AI-generated
Some students are receiving zeros — or nearly missing graduation — due to false positives
Students now screen-record themselves writing homework to prove their innocence
Studies show current detectors misidentify human writing 6–9% of the time
Non-native English speakers face even higher risks of being flagged

Several universities (Berkeley, Georgetown, Vanderbilt) have paused AI-detection tools. Others continue to use them — despite evidence of harm.

This isn’t innovation — it’s a trust crisis in the classroom.

#AIethics #AcademicIntegrity #HigherEd #EdTech #ChatGPT #Turnitin
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/style/ai-chatgpt-turnitin-students-cheating.html

"For example, about 10% of students selected Texas as a place they would prefer to live in after graduation. Looking at other states with similar preference levels, we would expect about 10% to 20% of students to say they are unwilling to live in Texas. Instead, this percentage is actually 37%."

https://www.fastcompany.com/91333722/states-scientists-move-to-avoid-after-graduation

"Here we finally have it: when the critics accuse the university of being some kind of Marxist indoctrination factory, they do not mean that the university is breeding actual Marxists. They believe that too many people come out of college believing that oppression is real and that it is wrong. That’s how DeLuz can call the Palestine protests the product of Marxist indoctrination. But the truth is that people join these protests because they see something happening that horrifies them: the killing of tens of thousands of people by a heavily-armed military backed by the world’s most powerful country. It’s true that this bears a resemblance to Marxism in the sense that Marx, too, looked out at his time and saw a horror: people toiling themselves to death in the “dark Satanic mills” of the British industrial system, people who did almost nothing in their lives but work and whose bodies and minds were being destroyed to produce profit. He saw oppression, just as people look at Palestine today and see oppression. But one needs no “indoctrination” in order to perceive that reality. All it takes is an open mind and a bit of learning, which can be a very dangerous thing to those who would prefer we swallow whatever dogmas we grew up with."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-myth-of-the-marxist-university

In a continuing revenge attack on #HigherEd and #PublicHealth, Feds yank funds from Harvard breast cancer, fertility, antibiotics research - #Academia #AcademicChatter #Harvard #Universities #Research https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/05/16/harvard-medical-research-trump-2-7-billion-cuts

My favorite part of teaching-related conferences: The people who run parallel sessions are educators, interested in actually getting a message across, not just talking at you.

At this week´s #NVMO (Dutch Medical Education Organization) I learned so much from the round tables and workshops- from poetry in education to why (or why not) send students abroad, to what motivates educators.... all in the space of a day in a way that hit home. Love this.

@academicchatter #higherEd #veterinary #VetEd

What’s so interesting in the post boosted here: students are using (implicitly Gen)AI because their teachers (and those teachers’ bosses) are boosting it so much. Students sense a double standard in the culture, and it’s further alienating them from their own learning. #highered

From: @benpatrickwill.bsky.social
https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:rl2szulxujlgdcmx4avx7jyn/post/3lpemnlt47k2q

#HigherEd #HBCU #BlackHistory #BlackExcellence

'Funded by Getty Images’ HBCU Grants Program, which started in 2021 with four institutions, the new partnership aims to digitize HBCU archival materials ranging from photos to student newspapers to course catalogs. Getty and Ancestry are working with 10 HBCUs—and counting—to create searchable digital archives for each institution, accessible to students and staff on Ancestry’s website.'

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/institutions/minority-serving-institutions/2025/05/16/new-project-preserve-hbcu-history

#Wikipedia #HigherEd #reference

"As of last month, Wikipedia now contains a lengthy article on travel training that [Patrick] McGee helped write, using—and citing—numerous primary sources in CUNY’s archives as part of an initiative led by Richard Knipel, who started in March as the City University of New York’s first Wikimedian in residence."

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/libraries/2025/05/15/wikipedia-giving-academic-resources-new-life-online

One woman's fight to remove barriers for aspiring doctors with disabilities

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/15/nx-s1-5272736/doctor-disability-medical-field

#Ableism #MedicalAbleism #Accessibility #HigherEd #Medicine @disability @academicchatter

"When ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022, it caused a panic at all levels of education because it made cheating incredibly easy. Students who were asked to write a history paper or literary analysis could have the tool do it in mere seconds. Some schools banned it while others deployed A.I. detection services, despite concerns about their accuracy.

But, oh, how the tables have turned. Now students are complaining on sites like Rate My Professors about their instructors’ overreliance on A.I. and scrutinizing course materials for words ChatGPT tends to overuse, like “crucial” and “delve.” In addition to calling out hypocrisy, they make a financial argument: They are paying, often quite a lot, to be taught by humans, not an algorithm that they, too, could consult for free.

For their part, professors said they used A.I. chatbots as a tool to provide a better education. Instructors interviewed by The New York Times said chatbots saved time, helped them with overwhelming workloads and served as automated teaching assistants.

Their numbers are growing. In a national survey of more than 1,800 higher-education instructors last year, 18 percent described themselves as frequent users of generative A.I. tools; in a repeat survey this year, that percentage nearly doubled, according to Tyton Partners, the consulting group that conducted the research. The A.I. industry wants to help, and to profit: The start-ups OpenAI and Anthropic recently created enterprise versions of their chatbots designed for universities."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/technology/chatgpt-college-professors.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-of-life/ “From 2001 to 2023, the cost of affording what amounts to a basic level of economic security doubled, according to LISEP's analysis. Housing and health care costs surged, while the amount of savings required to attend an in-state, public university soared 122%.” #housing #inflation #shortage #HigherEd