As quickly as artificial intelligence models develop, so, too, their impact across different facets of higher education. It may be dizzying, but here are some of the most prominent ways AI affects your school.

More from UB: President moves: How experience in enrollment proved to be make-or-break

Admissions

Artificial intelligence is poised to streamline the workload of both the applying student and the receiving admissions officer.

Students today can ask ChatGPT to create a 500-word response to an open prompt that they’d otherwise feel paralyzed to complete themselves. They can direct the bot to write a dramatic story about an adolescent overcoming a significant life event that includes references to a city of the student’s liking. Admissions officers already struggle to detect college applications’ authenticity, and the prevalence of AI language modeling will make plagiarism that much more difficult. While new software aims to combat applications littered with AI, some leaders believe the next step forward is introducing video prompts instead.

However, AI technology might be an antidote to the  increasing workload and turnover rate for admissions officers. Colleges have begun employing technology that can sift through student transcripts and create preliminary assessments on students’ acceptance likelihood. Allowing software such as Student Select or Sia to do the legwork of review helps officers manage their time and compartmentalize their priorities. Colleges to embrace AI software in admissions include Rutgers, Rocky Mountain College and Maryville University.

Cybersecurity

The education industry experienced a 576% increase in phishing attacks in 2022, according to recent Zscaler research. While phishing attempts could once be easily detected by grammatical and spelling mistakes and an awkward tone, communication written by ChatGPT appears more natural, and by extension, easier to trust.

Additionally, hackers are finding ways to leverage ChatGPT’s coding capabilities to hack security systems, tricking the AI into creating malware strains. However, just as bad actors are using the emerging technology maliciously, cybersecurity teams can use AI to test their defenses faster.

Student Exams

Not only can ChatGPT ace the SAT and AP exams, but it’s also stunning scholars in its performance on licensing exams. It passed the Uniform Bar Examination by a “significant margin,” approaching the 90th percentile of test-takers. Additionally, ChatGPT passed three exams associated with the United States Medical Licensing Exam with a 60% accuracy rate. GPT-4, on the other hand, answered medical licensing exam questions with a 90% accuracy rate. “I’m stunned to say: better than many doctors I’ve observed,” said Dr. Isaac Kohane, the test administrator, according to Business Insider.

The accuracy of ChatGPT is prompting professionals to explore how students can use the software to augment their work. The America Medical Association’s medical education innovation unit has begun exploring some foundational AI modules, and it is also collaborating with the National Academy of Medicine to host a workshop on AI in health professions education this spring.

Class curriculum

Allowing ChatGPT to do the legwork of writing preliminary drafts frees up time for professors to judge the content of a student’s work by their content and ideas rather than by their ability to communicate via proper grammar, style and structure.

“I’m changing all of my assignments to involve more high-level concepts and more integrative knowledge,” said Adam Purtee, an assistant professor of computer science, according to the University of Rochester.

It is heightening the level of work students can do, but it’s also streamlining professors’ administrative responsibilities.

“ChatGPT can be used to help professors generate syllabi or to recommend readings that are relevant to a given topic,” said Manav Raj, co-author of the study that discovered college professors’ high exposure to AI language modeling.

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“The State of Educator Pay in America” from The National Education Association explores higher education faculty salaries and the factors leading to pay discrepancies so that all stakeholders of higher education can have a more informed conversation about educators’ quality of life.

“Equipped with our educator pay data, we are able to negotiate and advocate for the better wages and benefits that our educators deserve,” wrote NEA in a tweet.

The average salary for full-time faculty was $93,914 for the 2021-22 academic year, and although this reflects a 2.1% increase over the previous year, they lost $4,837 in purchasing power due to inflation compared to 2020-21. Faculty at public, four-year institutions made slightly more at $96,414, while public, two-year institutions made significantly less at $74,173.

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Union power

Educators that resided in states with faculty unions and had contracts in place made up to $15,000 more compared to those who lived in states without unions at all.

Research Universities

• Institutions with faculty contacts: $107,142
• In states without faculty unions: $90,930

Two-year colleges

• Institutions with faculty contacts: $85,154
• In states without faculty unions: $60,390

Pay discrepancies

NEA found that women earned 85 cents to the dollar compared to men in public higher education institutions.

Similarly, HBCU educators earned 75 cents to the dollar compared to faculty at other institutions, or about $24,000 less.

“Paying educators attractive, competitive salaries is an important sign of respect,” wrote NEA in a tweet. “It acknowledges their value and vital importance and allows them to keep their focus on their students’ successes.”

Faculty Salary, ranked by state

Here is a list of all 50 states ranked by their respective average salaries for higher education faculty.

1. California – $121,071
2. New Jersey – $121,056
3. Delaware – $116,394
4. Hawaii – $110,204
5. Connecticut – $109,530
6. Michigan – $104,706
7. Washington – $103,101
8. Massachusetts – $102,048
9. Pennsylvania – $101,519
10. Virginia – $101,425
11. Iowa – $101,207
12. New York – $100,189
13. Florida – $100,126
14. Maryland – $99,713
15. Arizona – $99,098
16. Rhode Island – $98,997
17. Illinois – $97,392
18. Ohio – $96,972
19. Minnesota – $96,553
20. New Hampshire – $95,237
21. Texas – $94,781
22. Utah – $94,364
23. Nevada – $94,143
24. Oregon – $93,307
25. Indiana – $93,107
26. Colorado – $92,181
27. Nebraska – $89,770
28. Wyoming – $89,741
29. Wisconsin – $89,651
30. Vermont – $88,273
31. South Carolina – $87,379
32. D.C. – $87,026
33. North Carolina – $87,011
34. Alabama – $86,762
35. Tennessee – $85,032
36. Georgia – $84,655
37. Maine – $84,209
38. Alaska – $84,063
39. Kansas – $83,153
40. Missouri – $80,980
41. New Mexico – $80,444
42. North Dakota – $80,213
43. Montana – $79,719
44. Oklahoma – $79,342
45. Idaho – $78,392
46. Kentucky – $77,923
47. West Virginia – $76,407
48. South Dakota – $75,541
49. Arkansas – $74,163
50. Louisiana – $73,995
51. Mississippi – $73,096

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Scholars Under Fire: Attempts to Sanction Scholars from 2000 to 2022 discovered speech-related sanctions against scholars in the last 3 years (509) nearly equals the last 20 years (571). To put this in perspective, FIRE recorded four attempted sanctions in 2000 and 145 in 2022. Students, administrators, the general public, politicians and even other scholars are the most frequent entities to have waged 1,080 total sanctions since the turn of the century so far.

2021 experienced the highest amount of sanction attempts at 213, followed by last year at 145.

Almost two-thirds of attempts resulted in sanctions, including 225 terminations. The majority of these terminations involved untenured professors (73%). Harvard (12); the University of Central Florida (10); and Columbia, UCLA, and the University of Florida (9) have the highest rates of attempts successfully becoming sanctions.

More than half (52%) of sanction attempts are most likely to come from the left of the scholar’s political viewpoints, the majority of which are waged by undergraduate students. In fact, undergrads made 37% of the sanctions. However, censorship attempts coming from off-campus entities are most likely coming from the scholar’s right. For example, TurningPointUSA, a conservative advocacy group, waged 61 attempts in 2021 alone. Government officials responsible for their own censorship attempts are most likely conservative.

More from UB: Students are likely to rule out your school based on state politics

Why the backlash?

Political, race-related and gender-related expression surrounding major national headlines has catalyzed a surge of sanction attempts from 2016 onward. Following Trump’s election, 83 sanction bids in 2017 targeted a scholar’s speech on partisanship and conversations surrounding specific politicians. The ensuing #MeToo movement that year also fueled the fire, with shots at censorship focusing on gender-related expression. George Floyd’s murder in 2020 opened a storm drain of sanction attempts, all focused on race-related speech, which contributed to 2021’s record-high.

The prickliest topic a scholar can engage in is race, 39% of all sanction surrounded this. Institutional policy and partisanship made up the following biggest troublemakers. Less than 10% of all sanctions over the past two decades had to do with a professor engaging in contemptuous or malicious speech.

Scholars were the most wide-open to attacks on their first amendment in the classroom or conducting research. Specifically, more than four in 10 sanction attempts were in response to a scholar’s teaching practices and/or scientific inquiry.

“Cancel culture is particularly pernicious when it targets people charged with discovering and disseminating knowledge,” said FIRE Director of Faculty Outreach Komi Frey, lead author of the report. “Vocal, dogmatic minorities on the left and the right are trying to restrict the range of acceptable ideas in institutions of higher education, and this should alarm us all. You do not need to agree with a scholar’s teaching, research, or extramural speech to recognize that censorship is not the answer.”

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“By exercising our right to withhold our labor, we will prove to the administration that we are the university,” said the Rutgers American Association of University Professors-AFT (AAUP-AFT), Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union and AAUP-BHSNJ in a joint statement.

The estimated 9,000 workers out on strike will affect basic school operations for its 67,000-student body across its main campus in New Brunswick (N.J.) and sister campuses in Camden and Newark. However, Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway urged students to attend class as they regularly would. Officials also promised Rutgers student residence halls, bus service, dining, counseling and other services would remain open. “The continued academic progress of our students is our number one concern, and we will do all that we can so that their progress is not impeded by a strike,” Holloway said in a statement on Sunday,” wrote Holloway in a public statement on the strike.

With the picket lines up at 9 a.m., however, students who tried to follow Holloway’s guidance, however, found it impossible to ignore.

“I just came from the business school and it’s usually packed on Monday in the morning,” said Rutgers-Newark Business School student Asad Saeed, according to NJ Advance Media. “This morning there’s almost nobody in that building. There’s just like one or two classes going on.”

One month removed from semester finals, NJ Media reports that some professors have made classes virtual for the remainder of the semester.

This is a big turnout at Rutgers Universitypic.twitter.com/lzZyPWKMxO

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) April 10, 2023

The strike is fueled by failed contract negotiations largely around faculty salaries and wages. The school’s proposed “enhanced compensation programs” addressed full-time faculty salary and adjunct faculty job security but it failed to meet their demands, claiming it did not protect Rutger’s lowest-paid workers, such as adjunct faculty and graduate workers.

“There’s been very few back-and-forths with the administration. It’s been a lot of waiting around and a lot of numbers being moved but not a lot of numbers being moved forward. It’s not for lack of trying that we now have to have a strike,” said Dr. Catherine Monteleone, a faculty member on the bargaining committee in an AAUP-AFT virtual town hall meeting. “We’ve done everything to try to get them to negotiate in good faith with us, and it’s just not happening, so we find ourselves here.”

The unions had been working under the conditions of a preexisting contract that expired back in July. Almost all union members were in solidarity with a strike with a 94% approval rating, according to The New York Times.

The president had originally planned to stamp down the strike threatening legal action, but Holloway now seems to be prioritizing reaching an agreement.

The school had closely averted its first union strike back in 2019 after reaching a last-minute deal. The union had originally rejected its contract offer, calling it “insulting,” according to NJ Advance Media.

Gov. Phil Murphy via Twitter offered on Sunday to facilitate private talks between the school and unions in order to prevent the strike, but it fell on deaf ears.

More from UB: Strikes and unions: Graduate students marshal their forces nationwide

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The study identified contingent professors as positions ineligible for tenure that are either part-time, full-time non-tenure-track or full-time no-tenure system. This group made up 68% of the academic workforce in the Fall of 2021, which is a 21% jump since the Fall of 1987 (47%). Part-time faculty, usually placed in adjunct appointments, made up almost half of the entire academic workforce at 48% in 2021 and are the primary driver behind the rise in contingent workers. In 1987, part-time faculty made up 33% of the workforce. Full-time non-tenure track faculty, usually in contract-renewable positions, rose by 8%.

As contingent faculty appointments rose, the proportion of full-time tenured faculty fell by 15%. In 1987, they made up 39% of all academic appointments, but in 2021, it shrunk to 24%. Full-time faculty on track for tenure also fell 5%.

Combining all institution types, as recognized by the Carnegie classification type, contingent faculty outweighed tenure and tenure-track faculty 67% to 32% in 2021. Contingent faculty outweighed their counterpart across all institution types, save R1: Doctoral Universities, where it was split evenly.

“Tenure is the primary means of protecting academic freedom and exists not only to protect individual faculty members but also to benefit students and serve the common good by ensuring the quality of teaching and research in higher education,” wrote AAUP in the report. “Overreliance on contingent appointments, which lack the protection of tenure for academic freedom and the economic security of continuing appointments, threatens the success of institutions in fulfilling their obligations to students and to society.”

AAUP does not provide any reasons as to why tenure and tenure-track professors are declining with respect to contingent positions.

More from UB: College professors face the highest exposure to AI tools, study finds

Women and underrepresented minorities (URM) make up a greater proportion of part-time and other contingent appointments. Among full-time employees, for example, 65% of men are tenured or on track, while the same is true for only 54% of women. By race and ethnicity, 67% of Asian full-time workers are tenured or on track, compared to only 58% of URM.

As the proportion of academic appointments has changed in favor of non-tenured faculty, the number of graduate student employees has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, increasing 44% since the Fall of 2002. In that same period, full-time and part-time faculty rose 19%. Many graduate students are tasked with teaching responsibilities, which could lend them the classification of contingent faculty, but the data lacked a definitive understanding of how many of those students are teaching. However, this significant increase in graduate student labor may support the claim that the proportion of contingent faculty is higher than AAUP’s report is willing to suggest.

The AAUP report amalgamated data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) database and the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF) to study patterns of academic appointments and graduate student employment trends.

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First-time president

Xavier A. Cole

Effective the first of June, the student affairs vice president at Marquette University, Dr. Xavier A. Cole, will become the president of Loyola University New Orleans. This will be the first time Cole assumes a school’s presidency, and it is Loyola’s first person of color and second layperson to take the helm at the 111-year-old Catholic university.

Cole led the Division of Student Affairs at Marquette for the past seven years and was recognized by his peers and students for his response to the pandemic and for cultivating an inclusive campus culture for first-generation students and those of color. He discovered his passion for student affairs first serving as a resident advisor and as a graduate hall director at Miami University Ohio, and he went on to develop his craft in a pair of institutions in Maryland.

Cole received his doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania where he studied the effectiveness of Jesuit universities in preparing future lay leaders. From 2017 to 2022, he was vice chair and director of the education committee on the board of Messmer Catholic Schools, a K12 network of Catholic schools serving Milwaukee’s north and west sides.

“We have found a real gem for our students in Dr. Cole,” said Robért LeBlanc, Chair of the Presidential Search Committee and Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees, according to a press release. “Throughout his career, Dr. Cole has been guided by Ignatian-influenced education ideals of fortifying the mind, body, and spirit.”

A trombone and euphonium player, Cole will most likely be found at Loyola University seeking permission to audition and play in the student orchestra pits and jazz bands. There’s no better place to greet the student body through jazz than New Orleans.

Daniel J. Ennis

First-time president Daniel J. Ennis will be leaving his current post at Coastal Carolina University as provost and executive vice president for a challenging position at Delta State University in Mississippi. The school’s last president was fired for witnessing a decline in enrollment and financial challenges.

Enrollment at Delta State has dropped 29% since 2014 and reversing that trend will be at the top of Ennis’ to-do list. In his time at Coastal Carolina, enrollment grew and their first-year retention rate bumped up 6%, totaling 73%, according to AP News.

A tenured professor of English, he has served in other administrative roles for the past 20 years.

Presidents picking up at new schools

John Nicklow

While the jazz-playing Dr. Cole takes his talent to New Orleans, civil engineer Dr. John Nicklow is on his way out of The Big Easy to The Sunshine State. While this isn’t Nicklow’s first rodeo as a school president, he does share one important similarity: he is walking into Florida Tech with a student-oriented approach.

“One of the things that I do love, what we’ve done in New Orleans, is really become part of the community. And build long-lasting, lifelong relationships and partnerships,” Nicklow said, according to Yahoo.

Since 2015, Nicklow served as the president of the University of New Orleans. He was the first president to leave the school with a positive enrollment rate since Hurricane Katrina, and he was also the first president to lead a major comprehensive fundraising campaign in the school’s 65-year history.

Located in Melbourne, Fla., Nicklow’s extensive STEM research background is a sensible fit for the school on the “Space Coast.” He has published over 75 articles and four books, which have focused on advancing STEM education and optimizing environmental and water resources. He received his Ph.D. in civil engineering from Arizona State University.

Joseph Foy

Dr. Joseph Foy joined Alverno College as Vice President for Academic Affairs two weeks after the pandemic forced the school completely online. His accomplishments through adversity pushed him into the school’s interim presidency, and now it has landed him a full-time president position at Benedictine College. Foy’s accomplishments in building Alverno’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Belonging are what helped Foy stand out to Benedictine’s Board of Trustees.

“As the next president of Benedictine University, it will be my responsibility to help build upon a foundation of excellence while concomitantly helping to meet the future of an increasingly globalized and diverse world,” said Foy, according to Market Insider.

Foy’s other accomplishments at Alverno College include his philanthropy, where he deepened engagement with existing connections and opened new pipelines for grant-seeking opportunities. Before Alverno College, Foy served as Dean of the Faculty at Marian University in Wisconsin from 2018 to 2020. From 2014-2018, he led statewide enrollment and recruitment strategies as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Wisconsin Colleges.

The Benedictine president-elect holds a Ph.D. in American Government and Comparative Politics from Notre Dame, Indiana.

Presidents stepping down

Frederick G. Slabach

Frederick G. Slabach, president of Texas Wesleyan University, has accepted the bittersweet call to serve as dean of the University of Mississippi Law School, of which he is a graduate.

“I love Texas Wesleyan,” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “But for [wife] Melany and me Mississippi is home. We are excited to the moon.”

“Being asked to return home to help lead my alma mater, one of the oldest public law schools in America, is a dream come true,” he added.

Since taking the helm in 2011, Slabach has helped the university reach new heights, including doubling endowment, increasing freshman applications by more than 280% and reinstating the football program after a 75-year hiatus.

“It was really a team effort,” the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports. “No one person can take the credit. I am very proud that we have accomplished several things that will last after I’ve left. The biggest thing is the quality of instruction, along with increased size and diversity.”

While Slabach gets to walk out in the sunset, others didn’t get that privilege

Jason Wingard

Following concerns over growing crime at the Philadelphia university, Jason Wingard, the board of trustees accepted Temple University President Jason Wingard’s resignation on Tuesday. He was the university’s first Black president.

While the board did not specifically mention the reason for his resignation, his stepping down marks the end of his less than two-year presidency shadowed by high-profile campus crimes, a graduate-student strike and dwindling confidence from faculty members, The Wall Street Journal reports.

“While I am confident in my ability to pivot strategy and lead Temple through this crisis, I understand, and it has been made clear, unfortunately, that too much focus is on me rather than the challenges we seek to overcome,” Wingard said in a statement Wednesday.

His last day was Friday.

Katherine Bergeron

Connecticut College President Katherine Bergeron will be stepping down at the end of the semester after facing criticism by students and staff over a planned fundraising trip to a controversial social club.

Scrutiny arose after students and staff became aware of the college’s decision to host an event at the Everglades Club in Florida. Students said the club has a racist past,” the Connecticut Mirror reports.

Students also protested after the school’s former dean of institutional equity and inclusion, Rodmon King, resigned. His decision came after the details of the fundraising trip surfaced, as well as the college’s treatment of students of color and LGBTQ students.

“Certainly, the road has not always been easy,” Bergeron said in a statement. “It never is, when the work is so important and the goals so ambitious. The past several weeks have proven particularly challenging, and as president, I fully accept my share of responsibility for the circumstances that have led us to this moment.”

Thomas K. Hudson

Following months of a no-confidence vote by the faculty senate, Jackson State University President Thomas K. Hudson is set to resign at the end of this month.

On March 2, the board of trustees for the state Institutions of Higher Learning placed Hudson on administrative leave but did not state why. However, according to the JSU faculty senate, they were uncertain whether the administration was promoting a “healthy, safe and secure environment,” the Associated Press reports.

They also cited issues surrounding his failure to consult faculty on decisions regarding curriculum changes. According to a statement, university faculty are calling for the “restoration of shared governance, transparency, accountability and academic democracy.”

More from UB: A regulation targeting tenure in Florida gains approval, big win for DeSantis

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Under Regulation 10.003, college deans at four-year public institutions will evaluate their academic faculty based on performance relative to assigned responsibilities, student complaints, compliance with state law and regulations and other unspecified measures of faculty conduct.

“Until recently, faculty saw themselves as part of the success of the system,” Deanna Michael, a member of the board who also is a professor at the University of South Florida, said during Wednesday’s meeting, according to The Tampa Bay Times. “Now the faculty feel as though they’re being pushed away.”

While schools across the country have publicly condemned Florida’s constraint on academic freedom, United Faculty of Florida President Andrew Gothard, whose petition against the regulation gained over 1,400 signatures, points to the dangerous implications such precedence puts in place.

“The way that many of our faculty are looking at it is that this is intentionally designed from the ground up to allow bad actors to cull faculty from departments with whom they personally disagree or who have politics that are inconvenient to the institution,” Andrew Gothard, president of United Faculty of Florida, told the Florida Phoenix.

One Florida school recently terminated the contract of an English professor for his racial justice unit after receiving a parent complaint “over something that never had been a concern for 12 years,” according to the professor, Sam Joeckel, who had taught at Palm Beach Atlantic for 21 years. While this school did not allow faculty tenure, this regulation provides public Florida schools the power to crack down on tenured faculty for a similar rationale.

Board of Governors Vice Chairman Eric Silagy, however, believes the uniform post-tenure review will create a “fair and objective” process that will serve institutions better than the individual versions schools currently have in place.

“This is a policy that has been well-developed and will serve the institution, will serve the system, and I believe ultimately will serve our faculty and our students well,” added state university system Chancellor Ray Rodrigues, according to Tampa Bay Times.

Legislation aimed at weakening faculty tenure stems from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ current disdain for Florida’s public higher education system, which he believes is plagued by a liberal ideology that curbs the free speech of conservative faculty and students. Regulation 10.003 is a stipulation of a senate bill pushed by two former state Senators Manny Diaz Jr. and Ray Rodrigues, who have each since been appointed to key positions in Florida’s public education system. Diaz now serves as the Florida Education Commissioner while Rodrigues is currently the state’s university system Chancellor.

More from UB: Florida, beware: DeSantis’ war on woke may decrease enrollment

As transgressive as this bill might seem to tenured faculty now, a proposed house bill would allow faculty tenure to be reviewed at any time if deemed appropriate by the school leaders, which would quickly obsolesce this approved regulation’s five-year review process.

As Florida dishes out blows to tenure, the pipeline of faculty coming to teach in Florida might begin to dry out.

“When we sit on search committees the first thing we do is reach out, emails, spend lots of time making phone calls. And more and more often, we are hearing ‘Florida? Not Florida. Not now. Not yet,’” said Mathew Lata, president of the Florida State University chapter for the United Faculty of Florida, told the Board of Governors, according to the Florida Phoenix.

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How will Language Modelers like ChatGPT Affect Occupations and Industries? found that of the 20 occupations most exposed to AI language modeling capabilities, 14 of them were postsecondary teachers.

The authors—Ed Felten, Manav Raj and Robert Seamans—specified that their definition of “exposure” does not delve into the specific effects of AI on an occupation, which leaves the question of whether these jobs will be augmented—or, as you may fear, substituted—undefined.

“Everyone’s focusing on how students are going to use AI, but there’s not a lot of focus on how it’s going to impact educators, the teachers themselves,” says Joseph Wison, co-founder of Studicata, an online bar exam preparation service. For context, law teachers were the fifth-most exposed occupation to AI.

To create the formula for this study, the authors drew from one of Felten’s earlier models that studied overall occupational exposure to AI. The AI Occupational Exposure (AIOE) model linked 10 AI applications – such as reading comprehension, speech recognition and language modeling – to 52 human capabilities defined by a U.S. Department of Labor database. As advances in language modeling capabilities like ChatGPT surged (there’s already a better version), the new formula used in this current study updated the AIOE to only account for AI’s language modeling application.

While only two postsecondary occupations featured in the top 20 on Felten’s original AIOE calculation, postsecondary faculty and staff make up almost 75% of the list when adjusted for language modeling. This doesn’t seem to be a coincidence either. Felten et al. found a 98% correlation with original AIOE scores.

Top 20 occupations after language modeling adjustment, of 774 different occupations

More from UB: Despite high interest, continuing education programs are sputtering

As axiomatic this study proves the impending prevalence of AI in higher education, professors are reluctant to take the leap forward. According to a report from BestColleges, more than half of all college students surveyed reported that “their instructors have not openly discussed the use of AI tools like ChatGPT” (54%) and “that their instructors or schools haven’t specified how to use AI tools ethically or responsibly” (60%). A considerable amount of faculty and staff are actively working against the wave of AI language modeling: 31% reported course materials and honor codes explicitly prohibiting AI tools. This does not bode well with the 9% of school assignments and college essays that Copyleaks flagged for containing AI-generated content across the tens of thousands of U.S. public research universities it looked into in January and February.

Wilson believes it would be a “disservice” to students to resist updating the way we teach the new generation of students if we only focus on the fear of cheating with A.I. tools. He believes Studicata’s online contact with students via Youtube directly contributes to his team “being on the pulse” of strategies to effectively engage students.

“The first step is to communicate with students what is acceptable use and then from there, it’s time to start building a framework. Are we allowing it? What’s okay? What’s not?” he says. “We have to mitigate cheating, but at the same time we have to teach familiarity of these tools because the future is going to be tech-enhanced lawyers.”

Wilson specifies recent development in AI-assisted legal brief drafting software and research platforms as tools many first-year lawyers will encounter.

He also notes how Microsoft and Google’s recent decision to integrate AI tools into Office and Google Suite will make student—and teacher— use of AI inevitable. “If that’s the way your technology is going, you would have to adapt,” says Wilson. “They have to build and articulate these guidelines.”

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The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveyed almost 1,500 faculty across four-year colleges and universities and found “more than half of faculty (52%) reported being worried about losing their jobs or reputation because someone misunderstands something they have said or done, takes it out of context or posts something from their past online.” Fearing reprimand, 25% reported being “very” or “extremely likely” to self-censor in academic publications. A similar study conducted at the end of the McCarthy era in 1958 found only 9% of social scientists had toned their writing believing “it might cause too much controversy.”

Furthermore, when taking faculty’s broadest channels of communication into account, such as social media, meetings, presentations and publications, 91% were at least somewhat likely to self-censor.

The proliferation of faculty fear seems to be linked primarily to undergraduate student backlash. In one figure the study cited, there were 450 attempts to sanction scholars from 2015 to the present, 328 of which came from undergraduates. Out of the overall sanctions included from graduate students and other scholars, 62 resulted in termination or forced resignation.

“We’re finally seeing the extent to which faculty have lost their peace of mind,” said FIRE Research Fellow Dr. Nathan Honeycutt, according to Diverse. “When professors across the political spectrum become terrified of losing their jobs for exercising their rights, true academic inquiry and diversity of thought become nearly impossible.”

More from UB: Higher ed’s worst free speech offenders of 2022

However, the study noted how the administration currently contributes to subtle forms of chilling speech among colleagues in what FIRE identifies as “soft authoritarianism.” For example, over 10% of faculty reported being pressured by their administration to avoid researching controversial topics at least occasionally.

Initiatives to restrict speech are pronounced across ideological lines: When only taking conservative faculty into account, the number of administrations pressuring faculty to avoid specific research topics jumped past 20%. Similarly, when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion statements being a mandatory hiring provision, 90% of conservative faculty and 56% of moderate faculty see them as political litmus tests; however, three-in-four liberal faculty support it.

The post The new Red Scare: Faculty is likely to censor speech more than ever appeared first on University Business.

Lawrence is one of academia’s earliest adopters of the controversial ChatGPT AI in the classroom, and thanks to it, Lawrence has witnessed a sizable elevation in student comprehension of class curriculum at a very early stage of the spring semester. He sat in the back of the classroom of one his first classes this spring semester, and, as he recalled, was “blown away.”

“This is the second week?” This sounds better in many cases than the end of the semester,” he said. “I mean, their starting point is just so much better than it’s been historically.”

Students will use it: Get over it

As a member of his school’s professional sales department, Lawrence believes it’s his responsibility to expose his students to any tool that maximizes student success. Before ChatGPT, his class used Gong.io, an AI software that studies customer interactions.

“My job is to bring my students the latest and greatest technologies in business, so they’re prepared and know how to use them, he said. “I’m not only going to allow them to use these technologies, I am going to encourage them to use it, and I’m going to teach them how to use it.”

It’s a losing battle keeping students away from technology that excites them, and Lawrence argues that any effort to keep a student away from it is futile. He believes it shouldn’t be a controversial practice for teachers to show students how to make a ChatGPT-derived answer undetectable to cheating software.

“I tell my students ‘I’m going to show you. If you want to do it, you’re going to find out anyway, so let’s just talk openly about this.’ Most of them know about it anyway, and if they don’t yet, they will.”

ChatGPT is a tool; not a tell-all

Some faculty don’t think it takes a complex software to detect ChatGPT’s output if you take a second to read the work.

“It’s a glorified search engine with a bland and awkward conversational tone that I wouldn’t recommend for any good writing,” said Valerie Ross, senior director of Marks Family Center for Excellence in Writing at University of Pennsylvania.

Allowing ChatGPT to do the actual writing is “very messy,” littered with plagiarism, incorrect information, and bias, not to mention the prose itself is sterile, vague, and wordy. Students’ papers, Ross argues, is still leagues ahead of the tool.

“Human writers draw from our experience, judgment, and intuition. It’s fascinating for me to compare what essays my students put out compared to ChatGPT puts out, and it was actually inspiring to see how textured students write,” she said. “I don’t think we appreciate that texture until you see the kind of Mad Libs writing that ChatGPT does.”

That being said, Ross does encourage students to use the AI. It can act as a quick remedy to finding new databases and resources for research, provide structural feedback on a paper and identify weaknesses, and format in-text citations handily.

Ryan Baker, an educational data mining and learning analytics professor at UPenn, believes we should leverage it as a tool as we would any other. He plans to implement a policy in his syllabus that requires students to cite ChatGPT and other AI when they use it.

“Instead of even thinking about it as cheating, we should encourage students to use these tools heavily, be open about how they’re doing it, and design assignments that leverage that rather than trying to ‘catch’ it,” he said.

Adapting the classroom

It’s the way students communicate their ideas that has to change, not what tools they’re allowed to use. Lawrence learned this in the new way he teaches.

Lawrence from Weber State changed his class structure to adapt to ChatGPT. A student who uses it on their assignments must do a presentation without the aid of the work they turned in. In this environment, they are open to real-time feedback and questions from his or her peers, which tests their understanding of material better than a paper would. The whole class has benefited as result.

“It forces them to internalize and think about and share this stuff in their own words, in language they can relate to,” he said. “It’s reinforcing the learning aspect of the discussion as well.”

Ross believes that the classroom has been overdue for an overhaul.

“Teaching has to move away from a memorization, fact-driven model because everyone has their cellphones,” she said. “It’s not about finding information; it’s about how you communicate it. That’s everything. And that truly is something that’s exciting, not something that should be feared.”

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