It's a challenge to supervise faculty/staff in #higherEd. The pressure our institutions put on people is inhumane, and austerity conditions breed exhaustion; asking people to improve performance is unethical. Best approach I have found is to gently mentor or advise. If someone is truly doing poor work, I understand the urge to demand better, especially if their students/colleagues are paying a price. But conditions are just too corrupt to pretend that evaluation is healthy in this environment.
🧵 What is this? After pushing UC for 4 years now to quit designing buildings where inaccessibility is the default, a main entrance to a building is wheelchair accessible?
Ah, there's the UC Davis we know. Unnecessary steps because you weren't specifically PAID to do your duty under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act nor to actually make a public university accessible to the public.
"ChatGPT Edu, powered by GPT-4o, is designed for universities to responsibly integrate AI into academic and campus operations. This advanced AI tool supports text and vision reasoning, data analysis, and offers enterprise-level security."
Based on everything we know about AI, I am sure nothing could possibly go wrong with this new tool to integrate it into our #teaching and campus operations more broadly.
/Obvious sarcasm
As the semester has ended for most folks, I want to remind all disabled students about the US Office of Civil Rights. If you were discriminated against for your disability or denied an accommodation, you have 90 days since the incident to file a complaint.
Office of the National Cyber Director told RSA Conference attendees the White House is developing legal clauses that shift software liability away from customers and more onto manufacturers.
"Another proposal on the table would be SHARED LIABILITY BETWEEN OPEN-SOURCE MAINTAINERS AND FOR-PROFIT FIRMS who integrate those open tools into their products, he added."
"The strikers are demanding amnesty for grad students and other academic workers who were arrested or face discipline for their involvement in the protests, which union leaders say were peaceful except when counter-demonstrators and other instigators were allowed to provoke unrest"
Season 1 of the Galactic Cow launched in 2023, and we're starting work on Season 2. It's a great time to revisit your favorite episodes, or listen for the first time. If you are interested in what role education could play in our growth as a species ♥
(PS - you should definitely subscribe to our Substack!)
Season 1 of the Galactic Cow launched in 2023, and we're starting work on Season 2. It's a great time to revisit your favorite episodes, or listen for the first time. If you are interested in what role education could play in our growth as a species ♥
(PS - you should definitely subscribe to our Substack!)
Over the past few years, Republican state lawmakers have introduced more than 150 bills in 35 states that seek to curb academic freedom on campus. Twenty-one of these bills have been signed into law. #Academia#HigherEd#Colleges
This is a very good piece by a colleague accusing university presidents of lying, in their own narrow self-interest, about what's happening on campuses. Their craven behavior barely protects them and makes everyone else far less safe. Including Muslim and Jewish students, faculty, and staff.
#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.”"
"AI has not created a situation where we need new principles. The established principles remain the crucial ones. But we do need to think through the changing situations anew, in order to figure out how to respond well to a rapidly changing landscape." Says Hallvard Fossheim from @UiB
"For more than 50 years, Asian American studies has been a recognized field at American colleges and universities. But outside of California, students who want to study it as a major or minor are usually out of luck.
@groink If this is a topic that interests you, I think you will really like our podcast "College Uncovered," which covers the financial and social realities of #highered in the US today.
#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.”"
Aftermath of #Petrocultures2024 last week: colleagues are now sending emails urging the Academic Senate to take up the matter of #policing on campus. Because there was a SERIOUS police presence/perimeter. A number of attendees dropped out in protest of that alone... & I don't blame them one bit
I think it's gonna take a lot more than eloquent letters... And unf I don't think we should plan any more conferences for police state campuses, ever again
A variety of pretty interesting thoughts in this Peter Beinart podcast (I skimmed transcript):
"among Jewish students who were involved in pro-#Palestine organizing, it is awakening a kind of much greater interest that they had in what it means to be Jewish"
"the more powerful they grow, the more the repression we will see... the US government at state & federal level will start to punish these universities even more severely"