Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities#AcademicChatter#neoliberalism
I agree with Kenan Malik; behind the increasingly instrumental view of university education (that it should be judged by what it does for your subsequent career & earning potential), lies a class-based assessment of who should benefit from education at all.
The working class do not deserve the humanistic value of education but rather must be trained in work skills... while the privileged should be able to buy the benefits of enlightenment!
Are you a university and you want to use AI? Check out the new ChatGPT Edu. Wile many universities are using ChatGPT Enterprize already, this is a special version with features for universities. https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-edu/#openai
Perhaps unsurprisingly in a cost of living crisis (alongside rising costs for attending university) most prospective students rate gaining a better salary as a key (if not the most important) motivation around course choice.
And around half of all applicants/students are worried about managing personal & family commitments around study (with more women than men expressing this concern - well, there's a surprise).
In its justification, it commits itself to the principles of the #Fediverse and #OpenScience:
"Freie Universität Berlin has been present on Mastodon since December 2022. #Mastodon is part of the decentralized Fediverse network. Compared to large commercial social networks, Mastodon relies on chronological feeds and reduces the algorithmic sorting of posts. This ensures that information is always openly available and reduces the likelihood of so-called filter bubbles forming."
#Students#Universities#HigherEd#Neoliberalism#Capitalism#EffectiveAltruism: "Some faculty see the influence of effective altruism among this generation: In the last five years, Roosevelt Montás, a senior lecturer at Columbia University and the former director of its Center for the Core Curriculum, has noticed a new trend when he asks students in his American Political Thought classes to consider their future.
“Almost every discussion, someone will come in and say, ‘Well, I can go and make a lot of money and do more good with that money than I could by doing some kind of charitable or service profession,’” Mr. Montás said. “It’s there constantly — a way of justifying a career that is organized around making money.”
Mr. Desai said all of this logic goes, “‘Make the bag so you can do good in the world, make the bag so you can go into retirement, make the bag so you can then go do what you really want to do.’”
But this “really underestimates how important work is to people’s lives,” he said. “What it gets wrong is, you spend 15 years at the hedge fund, you’re going to be a different person. You don’t just go work and make a lot of money, you go work and you become a different person.”"
Academic associations: when you are looking for graduate students to do work for a conference, perhaps don't offer an honorarium equivalent to less than minimum wage in 12 out of 13 provinces and territories.
That's not even counting the unknown (uncompensated?) time for the mandatory orientation session.
#AI#USA#Universities#HigherEd: "The student cofounders of an AI studying tool won a $10,000 entrepreneurship prize from Emory University for their idea, were championed publicly and repeatedly by the university’s business school for creating the software, and then were promptly suspended by the school for a semester for building exactly what the school had just given them money to build.
The students were suspended by the school’s Honor Council because their AI tool “could be used for cheating” and because they connected it to a software platform used by the university to host course reading material, homework, and other assignments without obtaining express permission, though this feature was mentioned at the competition it won $10,000 at. But the school’s Honor Council did not actually find evidence that it was ever used to cheat, and a review of the Honor Council’s writeup shows an incredible misunderstanding of how the specific tool, called Eightball, was designed and a misunderstanding of how large language models are trained and what they can do.
“While nothing about Eightball changed, Emory’s view of Eightball changed dramatically,” a lawsuit filed by Benjamin Craver, one of the suspended students against the university reads. “Emory concedes that there is no evidence that anyone has ever used Eightball to cheat. And to this day Emory advertises Eightball as an example of student innovation and entrepreneurship.”"