Very inspiring stuff from Anastasia. We need to develop this sort of language that can be used to articulate why humans are necessary in education and can’t be replaced by AI.
I love how the argument for throwing gen-eds in the dumpster is "We basically treat these classes and those that teach these classes like garbage and are surprised when students don't do well."
I have been an adjunct. My husband is an adjunct. He has a masters in English and can't get a full time position in higher education locally - everything is done with part-time faculty at the expense of students and education. You have the least paid, least supported faculty doing this foundational work with zero support from administration. No insurance. Abysmal pay. And then they act surprised when students fail.
Anecdote - my husband was slated to teach three courses last semester. The week before, two were canceled with zero notice. Zero recourse. We don't even qualify for unemployment because he still taught one class, but it was too late to go to other schools since he had blocked out time for these courses. If I were to do that as a private business owner, I'd get black listed. I'd have terrible reviews. It would have been financially better for us if they had cancelled all of his classes, lol.
But it's NORMAL for adjuncts to get treated like this. They are contract workers, not "real" employees.
This infuriates me to no end. You cannot make a living teaching these classes. And instead of addressing this very real failure of both students and faculty - administrations solution is to automate an already poor process and expect better results.
I wish this didn't surprise me. But here I am all hot and bothered again.
My deep compliments to those pointing out the massive flaws in logic. This was a great read.
I had thought that a liberal arts education was to make one more human. The response has been to complain about the precarity of work. The working classes have always dealt with this — being laid off when production was slow or changed back in the day. Now it’s even worse with gig work being the norm. So capitalism has reached your shores and this should teach folks that when you don’t advocate for a living and humane way of work for everyone — eventually it gets you too. This is what happens when you use your degree to make yourself feel like a superior class — that simply because you have a degree, it shouldn’t be happening to you.
My husband taught people transitioning careers English and writing - skills that apply to almost any job. I taught journalism part time while working full time as a... journalist. It's nice to know we're the elite. I really thought the elite got to take vacations or have new cars or something. I must have missed a meeting.
I appreciate the apology and honestly don't see that we are very far apart in our assessment of the situation. We both see the University as a place that sets itself apart from the regular working class - but they do it on the backs of their TAs and Adjuncts. Neither get insurance or any job security or even a pathway to a full time job with those things. Expecting adjuncts and TAs to bring the level of focus and care needed to these classes to make them meaningful.
Basic classes are HARD - especially if they aren't in your area of focus. You have to grind and study to get what you should be getting out of them. Engaging students and getting them to buy-in to these classes takes special skills. My husband worked with adults transitioning careers and was teaching his adult students Beowulf and Chaucer - folks going into welding, criminal justice and other careers - and he made them feel like they could do it and handle the material. Which is so important.
There is this very cavalier attitude that "we don't need to care about these courses" when they are the literal foundational blocks of the rest of your higher education. Critical thinking. Analysis. Basic scientific method. Cultural vocabulary.
Universities talk a good game about supporting students and how these gen-eds are important - but it doesn't align with their actions. If they truly prioritized these classes they wouldn't be taught by harried adjuncts who have to take on more classes than is practical to make ends meet and TAs that are balancing their graduate studies and often other jobs as well.
Universities would have better long-term results with a few full-time gen-ed faculty and have it be a genuine career path rather than an afterthought. But they have bought into their own attitudes that "real" professors don't teach general education. I saw it when I worked in admin for a time - and why I couldn't stay. This attitude sells the students, the adjuncts, and the education system short.
This is a startlingly cruel reply. So you just gloat when capitalism harms someone? What kind of politics is that? Even Trumpists aren’t generally so open in their spite and schadenfreude. Also pray tell us what you do for a living Mr. Self appointed representative of the working classes and what you personally are doing to advocate for humane work for everyone. You know besides being telling people who complain their work is inhumane to shut up.
You are right — that was inappropriate. I’m not myself these days. I rightly blame the higher-ed system for many things but, taking it out on her was not ok.
I hope I wasn’t too much of a dick. But man most academics aren’t any kind of elite. Even those of us lucky enough to get full time gigs aren’t rolling in money or power or influence. And adjuncts get screwed over and exploited to a degree that’s just unbelievable.
Anybody who has received an AI essay when they wanted a personally written essay will know that there was no work done. The hallmark card-level argumentation is not going to get any better, and the student is not going to learn anything from comments about work they didn’t write. I was sorely tempted to say, please direct me to the chatbot who wrote this so I can give them the feedback, they might actually learn something. AI is not a substitute for teaching, it’s a substitute for working, and if you want to have educated people they need to work on the process. AI is not a calculator helping you with a math problem, it is a friend doing your homework for you so you can play. Why is that degree worth anything when you didn’t do any work to get it?
It's wild that the pro-AI side chose to open with "so we all agree that that most gen ed classes are useless, right?"
Apparently we, as a society, really really want 90% of the population to have a piece of paper that says "B.A.", regardless of whether they learned or did anything to get it.
I propose we mail them out along with voter registration forms, in envelopes that say "YOU HAVE ALREADY BEEN PREAPPROVED FOR ENTRY INTO THE MIDDLE CLASS!!!"
Along with a bill for $80,000, of course. Think of the efficiency!
You don’t need a degree to be in the middle class. But that is what people with degrees think — that it makes them superior to other people just because they have a BA. FYI the BA is the new high school diploma — do you have a graduate degree? If not you are not in the middle class according to your own criteria.
Not sure where any of this is coming from. I'm a high school drop out.
I'd like to go to college in a couple years, but only if I can find a program that's not a complete waste of time. Getting through it without having to sell my kidneys would be a plus too.
Principia Mathematica being given a publication date of 1630? Russell must be laughing through his hat.
Apart from that, the assertion that 'general education' consists of 'things already known' is puzzling. Already known by whom? Not our students, who have not received very good integrative learning skills in high school. And certainly not now, that they've outsourced even the most basic cognitive efforts to LLMs.
Isn't it simple? You don't bring a forklift to the gym. Nobody really wants to lift heavier, bag skate, or do drills, but you do it because you get stronger if you do.
These are some of the most indecorous public comments I’ve ever seen from an academic leader. If you are an academic dean and the teaching graduate students and/or adjunct faculty in your college’s academic departments aren’t teaching well, guess whose responsibility it is to rectify that? Yours. If I were a teaching graduate student (or just a graduate student hoping for a teaching appointment) or an adjunct faculty member at the University of Utah, I’d be looking for an exit.
And then there’s the incoherence. “We should replace all of these ‘underperformers’ with A.I.” But also, “I talked to an undergrad working at my auto shop and she said she ‘was expecting to go to university and have strong, good professional relationships with professors, to work with experts.’” Guess what? Adjuncts have graduate degrees: that makes them--wait for it--experts.
Which is it, Professor Robbins?? Are you advocating that we give these students machines to ‘teach’ them? (This entails an information-transaction view of learning.) Or do you want them to have what they really want and need, which are professional learning partnerships with professors? (This entails mentorship and guidance in becoming a thinker with a specific set of skills and body of knowledge.) These aren't the same thing. And if, as a humanities scholar, you're in favor of the latter (I sure hope you are), then what are you doing to (a) fund those faculty, and (b) support them, which means not demoralizing them with careless public criticism? I mean, seriously--what if they actually READ this??
De clasé. You’re the kind of administrator that’s part of the problem in the university sector.
So happy to hear Robins call out the low quality of the MIT "AIs hurt learning" study that's been making the rounds. If you read the methodology, hard to see it as delivering any signal against the main claim
I see people siding with Hollis but Berg made the very good point that while Hollis was addressing teaching being augmented by AI, she didn’t address students using it for their work as Berg stated. If all the Gen Ed courses are meant to be taught the same exact way across public universities, I guess, to some extent, it could make sense to just use AI. I will say I disagree at a personal level. But if we really need to address students using the AI in question because if they all are imputing the same prompt into an LLM, you’re not even getting a diversity of thought anymore that is supposed to come from an array of students. I think AI teachers or offloading the teaching of Gen Ed classes to AI would only encourage submitting assignments produced by AI. At that point, slip the middle man and just have LLM’s talk to each other about the material in some sort of cyber echo chamber. I don’t think Hollis’ points about teachers being unqualified or overworked are invalid. I just don’t see why AI would necessarily be the solution instead of say demanding better pay for professors from institutions or employing workshops and/or hiring practices focused on producing quality teachers.
Some few schools will have enough sense to bring back blue books and oral exams, while the rest reduce their students to clicking through AI interfaces all day. The divergence in outcomes is likely to be one of the great revolutions of human history.
“It’s not academic integrity. It’s not pedagogical quality. It’s not some vague and bespoke and kind of sentimentally conceived humanistic value, important as all these might be, and they certainly are to me. The cost of relying on AI is a degradation of the most basic, fundamental, non-artisanal, non-specialized cognitive capacities. Using AI to perform intellectual tasks is destroying our students, as thinkers and as humans”
After opening with this, Anastasia cites the bullshit MIT study, briefly mentions AI making students “subcognitive”, whatever that means, and then spends the rest of the debate making exactly the kind of vague, sentimental, bespoke, artisanal arguments she said she wasn’t going to make. I wonder if she read the study herself or was just subcognitively parroting what was reported in the news.
Hollis totally wiped the floor here. She is absolutely correct that most professors are abysmal teachers and a good AI is better than a lousy human.
As if to prove my and Hollis’s point, this popped up in my feed the day after, about how Anastasia’s hallowed philosophy PhD sausage is made. There is no incentive to be a good teacher before, during, or after a PhD. It’s publish or perish all the way through.
“Kerr: What Jordan says is to a large extent true Blam. We might not be Sterlington, but even here at Prarieview, we very seldom think about our graduate program, including the structure of it like how much coursework, when people have to write a prospectus, the kind of exams we require, and how long the dissertation ought to be, in terms of the best way to staff other universities with teachers that inspire and sustain a certain tradition. We definitely don’t think of training some custodian of a tradition. We’re looking to teach people to make an original, publishable contribution to a literature, so that their career as a researcher can be established. You can see this by how little pedagogical training we have, and why we don’t look for anything teaching-related in PhD admissions, and we put so little weight on that in whom we hire for advising our graduate students. Its not that that kind of thing isn’t important, its just not a priority and we kind of assume that kind of stuff will work itself out. Plus, no one ever gets hired or promoted on the basis of that stuff, so we structure our entire program on what will get our students hired and promoted.
[…]
Kerr: I usually disagree with almost everything Jordan says, but I agree that we don’t conceive of ourselves as educators. We’ve worked incredibly hard as philosophers to get noticed and read by all the important people, and part of maintaining that is to stay ranked as highly as possible in our PhD programs. Its why other philosophers from higher and lower ranked place keep tabs on our work. They won’t pay any attention otherwise. PhD students are just miniature versions of us who aspire to the same careers.
Lin: All I want in my life is just a little bit of that, when I haven’t had any. Call it prestige-seeking if you’d like its why I got into this in the first place.”
Very inspiring stuff from Anastasia. We need to develop this sort of language that can be used to articulate why humans are necessary in education and can’t be replaced by AI.
I love how the argument for throwing gen-eds in the dumpster is "We basically treat these classes and those that teach these classes like garbage and are surprised when students don't do well."
I have been an adjunct. My husband is an adjunct. He has a masters in English and can't get a full time position in higher education locally - everything is done with part-time faculty at the expense of students and education. You have the least paid, least supported faculty doing this foundational work with zero support from administration. No insurance. Abysmal pay. And then they act surprised when students fail.
Anecdote - my husband was slated to teach three courses last semester. The week before, two were canceled with zero notice. Zero recourse. We don't even qualify for unemployment because he still taught one class, but it was too late to go to other schools since he had blocked out time for these courses. If I were to do that as a private business owner, I'd get black listed. I'd have terrible reviews. It would have been financially better for us if they had cancelled all of his classes, lol.
But it's NORMAL for adjuncts to get treated like this. They are contract workers, not "real" employees.
This infuriates me to no end. You cannot make a living teaching these classes. And instead of addressing this very real failure of both students and faculty - administrations solution is to automate an already poor process and expect better results.
I wish this didn't surprise me. But here I am all hot and bothered again.
My deep compliments to those pointing out the massive flaws in logic. This was a great read.
I had thought that a liberal arts education was to make one more human. The response has been to complain about the precarity of work. The working classes have always dealt with this — being laid off when production was slow or changed back in the day. Now it’s even worse with gig work being the norm. So capitalism has reached your shores and this should teach folks that when you don’t advocate for a living and humane way of work for everyone — eventually it gets you too. This is what happens when you use your degree to make yourself feel like a superior class — that simply because you have a degree, it shouldn’t be happening to you.
lol.
My husband taught people transitioning careers English and writing - skills that apply to almost any job. I taught journalism part time while working full time as a... journalist. It's nice to know we're the elite. I really thought the elite got to take vacations or have new cars or something. I must have missed a meeting.
My apologies — I’m not myself these days. I rightly blame the higher-ed system for many things, but taking it out on you is inappropriate.
I appreciate the apology and honestly don't see that we are very far apart in our assessment of the situation. We both see the University as a place that sets itself apart from the regular working class - but they do it on the backs of their TAs and Adjuncts. Neither get insurance or any job security or even a pathway to a full time job with those things. Expecting adjuncts and TAs to bring the level of focus and care needed to these classes to make them meaningful.
Basic classes are HARD - especially if they aren't in your area of focus. You have to grind and study to get what you should be getting out of them. Engaging students and getting them to buy-in to these classes takes special skills. My husband worked with adults transitioning careers and was teaching his adult students Beowulf and Chaucer - folks going into welding, criminal justice and other careers - and he made them feel like they could do it and handle the material. Which is so important.
There is this very cavalier attitude that "we don't need to care about these courses" when they are the literal foundational blocks of the rest of your higher education. Critical thinking. Analysis. Basic scientific method. Cultural vocabulary.
Universities talk a good game about supporting students and how these gen-eds are important - but it doesn't align with their actions. If they truly prioritized these classes they wouldn't be taught by harried adjuncts who have to take on more classes than is practical to make ends meet and TAs that are balancing their graduate studies and often other jobs as well.
Universities would have better long-term results with a few full-time gen-ed faculty and have it be a genuine career path rather than an afterthought. But they have bought into their own attitudes that "real" professors don't teach general education. I saw it when I worked in admin for a time - and why I couldn't stay. This attitude sells the students, the adjuncts, and the education system short.
Respect. I don't see people apologize on the internet often. Hope whatever's going on for you works out ok.
Many thanks for your kind words — I don’t deserve them.
This is a startlingly cruel reply. So you just gloat when capitalism harms someone? What kind of politics is that? Even Trumpists aren’t generally so open in their spite and schadenfreude. Also pray tell us what you do for a living Mr. Self appointed representative of the working classes and what you personally are doing to advocate for humane work for everyone. You know besides being telling people who complain their work is inhumane to shut up.
You are right — that was inappropriate. I’m not myself these days. I rightly blame the higher-ed system for many things but, taking it out on her was not ok.
I hope I wasn’t too much of a dick. But man most academics aren’t any kind of elite. Even those of us lucky enough to get full time gigs aren’t rolling in money or power or influence. And adjuncts get screwed over and exploited to a degree that’s just unbelievable.
Anybody who has received an AI essay when they wanted a personally written essay will know that there was no work done. The hallmark card-level argumentation is not going to get any better, and the student is not going to learn anything from comments about work they didn’t write. I was sorely tempted to say, please direct me to the chatbot who wrote this so I can give them the feedback, they might actually learn something. AI is not a substitute for teaching, it’s a substitute for working, and if you want to have educated people they need to work on the process. AI is not a calculator helping you with a math problem, it is a friend doing your homework for you so you can play. Why is that degree worth anything when you didn’t do any work to get it?
It's wild that the pro-AI side chose to open with "so we all agree that that most gen ed classes are useless, right?"
Apparently we, as a society, really really want 90% of the population to have a piece of paper that says "B.A.", regardless of whether they learned or did anything to get it.
I propose we mail them out along with voter registration forms, in envelopes that say "YOU HAVE ALREADY BEEN PREAPPROVED FOR ENTRY INTO THE MIDDLE CLASS!!!"
Along with a bill for $80,000, of course. Think of the efficiency!
You don’t need a degree to be in the middle class. But that is what people with degrees think — that it makes them superior to other people just because they have a BA. FYI the BA is the new high school diploma — do you have a graduate degree? If not you are not in the middle class according to your own criteria.
Not sure where any of this is coming from. I'm a high school drop out.
I'd like to go to college in a couple years, but only if I can find a program that's not a complete waste of time. Getting through it without having to sell my kidneys would be a plus too.
Principia Mathematica being given a publication date of 1630? Russell must be laughing through his hat.
Apart from that, the assertion that 'general education' consists of 'things already known' is puzzling. Already known by whom? Not our students, who have not received very good integrative learning skills in high school. And certainly not now, that they've outsourced even the most basic cognitive efforts to LLMs.
Isn't it simple? You don't bring a forklift to the gym. Nobody really wants to lift heavier, bag skate, or do drills, but you do it because you get stronger if you do.
"Apart from that, the assertion that 'general education' consists of 'things already known' is puzzling. Already known by whom?"
I also found that bit bizarre. There are students who have a strong knowledge base, but the idea that this is the norm is delusional.
Really impressed with Anastasia's clarity and cogency.
These are some of the most indecorous public comments I’ve ever seen from an academic leader. If you are an academic dean and the teaching graduate students and/or adjunct faculty in your college’s academic departments aren’t teaching well, guess whose responsibility it is to rectify that? Yours. If I were a teaching graduate student (or just a graduate student hoping for a teaching appointment) or an adjunct faculty member at the University of Utah, I’d be looking for an exit.
And then there’s the incoherence. “We should replace all of these ‘underperformers’ with A.I.” But also, “I talked to an undergrad working at my auto shop and she said she ‘was expecting to go to university and have strong, good professional relationships with professors, to work with experts.’” Guess what? Adjuncts have graduate degrees: that makes them--wait for it--experts.
Which is it, Professor Robbins?? Are you advocating that we give these students machines to ‘teach’ them? (This entails an information-transaction view of learning.) Or do you want them to have what they really want and need, which are professional learning partnerships with professors? (This entails mentorship and guidance in becoming a thinker with a specific set of skills and body of knowledge.) These aren't the same thing. And if, as a humanities scholar, you're in favor of the latter (I sure hope you are), then what are you doing to (a) fund those faculty, and (b) support them, which means not demoralizing them with careless public criticism? I mean, seriously--what if they actually READ this??
De clasé. You’re the kind of administrator that’s part of the problem in the university sector.
So happy to hear Robins call out the low quality of the MIT "AIs hurt learning" study that's been making the rounds. If you read the methodology, hard to see it as delivering any signal against the main claim
Good discussion here--I'm on your side, Anastasia :)
I see people siding with Hollis but Berg made the very good point that while Hollis was addressing teaching being augmented by AI, she didn’t address students using it for their work as Berg stated. If all the Gen Ed courses are meant to be taught the same exact way across public universities, I guess, to some extent, it could make sense to just use AI. I will say I disagree at a personal level. But if we really need to address students using the AI in question because if they all are imputing the same prompt into an LLM, you’re not even getting a diversity of thought anymore that is supposed to come from an array of students. I think AI teachers or offloading the teaching of Gen Ed classes to AI would only encourage submitting assignments produced by AI. At that point, slip the middle man and just have LLM’s talk to each other about the material in some sort of cyber echo chamber. I don’t think Hollis’ points about teachers being unqualified or overworked are invalid. I just don’t see why AI would necessarily be the solution instead of say demanding better pay for professors from institutions or employing workshops and/or hiring practices focused on producing quality teachers.
Some few schools will have enough sense to bring back blue books and oral exams, while the rest reduce their students to clicking through AI interfaces all day. The divergence in outcomes is likely to be one of the great revolutions of human history.
“It’s not academic integrity. It’s not pedagogical quality. It’s not some vague and bespoke and kind of sentimentally conceived humanistic value, important as all these might be, and they certainly are to me. The cost of relying on AI is a degradation of the most basic, fundamental, non-artisanal, non-specialized cognitive capacities. Using AI to perform intellectual tasks is destroying our students, as thinkers and as humans”
After opening with this, Anastasia cites the bullshit MIT study, briefly mentions AI making students “subcognitive”, whatever that means, and then spends the rest of the debate making exactly the kind of vague, sentimental, bespoke, artisanal arguments she said she wasn’t going to make. I wonder if she read the study herself or was just subcognitively parroting what was reported in the news.
Hollis totally wiped the floor here. She is absolutely correct that most professors are abysmal teachers and a good AI is better than a lousy human.
As if to prove my and Hollis’s point, this popped up in my feed the day after, about how Anastasia’s hallowed philosophy PhD sausage is made. There is no incentive to be a good teacher before, during, or after a PhD. It’s publish or perish all the way through.
“Kerr: What Jordan says is to a large extent true Blam. We might not be Sterlington, but even here at Prarieview, we very seldom think about our graduate program, including the structure of it like how much coursework, when people have to write a prospectus, the kind of exams we require, and how long the dissertation ought to be, in terms of the best way to staff other universities with teachers that inspire and sustain a certain tradition. We definitely don’t think of training some custodian of a tradition. We’re looking to teach people to make an original, publishable contribution to a literature, so that their career as a researcher can be established. You can see this by how little pedagogical training we have, and why we don’t look for anything teaching-related in PhD admissions, and we put so little weight on that in whom we hire for advising our graduate students. Its not that that kind of thing isn’t important, its just not a priority and we kind of assume that kind of stuff will work itself out. Plus, no one ever gets hired or promoted on the basis of that stuff, so we structure our entire program on what will get our students hired and promoted.
[…]
Kerr: I usually disagree with almost everything Jordan says, but I agree that we don’t conceive of ourselves as educators. We’ve worked incredibly hard as philosophers to get noticed and read by all the important people, and part of maintaining that is to stay ranked as highly as possible in our PhD programs. Its why other philosophers from higher and lower ranked place keep tabs on our work. They won’t pay any attention otherwise. PhD students are just miniature versions of us who aspire to the same careers.
Lin: All I want in my life is just a little bit of that, when I haven’t had any. Call it prestige-seeking if you’d like its why I got into this in the first place.”
source: https://open.substack.com/pub/hiphination/p/what-is-the-purpose-of-a-graduate
And William James wrote about this in 1903!
https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEJamesOctopusTable.pdf
Excellent.