“Know your enemy” seems to be the new approach to artificial intelligence.
At first, academic institutions reacted to AI with fear and concern. Now, AI is being integrated and accepted across universities.
Last year, the California State University System entered into a contract with OpenAI to provide students, faculty and staff with ChatGPT Edu. The contract was recently renewed despite many students and professor encouraging the university not to continue the deal.
Just recently, here in Ohio, the University of Cincinnati did the same, offering BearcatGPT to all their students and faculty for free.
Ohio State University is no exception. The AI Fluency initiative is in full swing and has recently broadened into the Arts and Humanities AI Institute.
Should universities conform to AI in academic spaces? What are the potential negative consequences of AI use in higher education?
We're taking a deep dive into the subject of AI's impact on higher education on this hour of All Sides.
Guests:
- Linda Kinstler, reporter, New York Times
- Chris Coleman, director, Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, Ohio State
- Martha Kenney, women and gender studies professor, San Francisco State University
- Martha Lincoln, anthropology professor, San Francisco State University
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to "All Sides" with Amy Juravich. It's been four years since ChatGBT's original model came out. And at first, universities rushed to take a defensive measure stressing their academic integrity policies. Now schools like the University of Cincinnati and the California State University System have signed deals with OpenAI. Know your enemy seems to be the new approach to artificial intelligence. With academic institutions around the country now embracing a technology they once feared. New York Times reporter, Linda Kinstler, recently wrote an article titled, "A University System Went All In on AI, and Now It's Tearing Itself Apart." She did a deep dive on California State University's Open AI Deal, and she joins us today. Welcome to All Sides, Linda.
Linda Kinstler: Thanks so much for having me.
Juravich: So from your reporting, you spoke with over 60 university students, faculty members, administrators. Tell me about your reporting process. What were you trying to find out related to this AI system in California?
Kinstler: Yes, I spent a year speaking to as many people as I could across the Cal State system and also nationally educators who were involved in thinking about what AI is doing to higher education writ large. And what I found was a wide array of kind of reactions that all kind of were uncertain about this new world that AI is bringing us into and what it means for future of education in the United States. You know, some faculty were embracing it with open arms and, you know, willingly integrating it into their syllabi and their curricula, assigning it even and asking students to engage with things like chat GPT. Others were banning it outright and refusing to engage. With it, you know these are the so-called AI vegans and students are kind of left in the lurch. I think a lot of them are quite confused about what is acceptable and what is not. And, you know, as one professor described it to me, we are currently in a condition of normlessness where a lot of people don't know how to use this new technology and how it's going to transform their jobs and their futures.
Juravich: I hadn't heard that term AI vegan before and I think that is going to be continuing hard to do because sometimes AI mode takes over my Google when I'm searching something without me even wanting it to. I think it's going to be hard to be an AI vegan in the coming years. Okay, so anyway, back to California State's deal, a $16.9 million open AI deal, but it's become controversial. Why has it become so controversial amongst the people involved?
Kinstler: Well, it generated a kind of perfect storm because it came at a time of a budget crisis for the California State University system. They were facing a massive budget shortfall that has necessitated the closing of several campuses, mass layoffs of lectures, the shuttering of various academic departments. So you are really seeing a consolidation of the system. At the same time as you're also seeing at the administrative level, this really historic investment in a new technology that is quite speculative and unproven and is seen by a lot of faculty as threatening their jobs. And I think there's this question about, is this technology being integrated with the purpose of replacing faculty and giving students a 24-hour tutor as it's sometimes advertised? And does that mean that the human element of education will no longer be as important?
Juravich: What did you hear from people in favor of this deal, who wanted this open AI deal, they wanted California State to have this technology, despite the budget problems? What were they saying, like, why did they do this?
Kinstler: I mean, it's what we're hearing across the country. It's that if we don't adapt, we will be left behind. And because the Cal State system is historically extremely important as a vehicle of social mobility in California, it educates a vast majority of Hispanic students, first generation students, people who might not be able to afford to pay for their own access to AI technologies. The school reasoned that they had an obligation into. Introduce their student body to what these tools can do. And I think there is a genuine argument that this is a historic reorganization of knowledge and how we think about the generation and the production of it in society. And so they think they absolutely need to do it. I think the question is on whose terms? And Are the corporations themselves setting the terms by which universities have to sign on and does that ultimately benefit students?
Juravich: And prior to this open AI deal, CSU was fairly anti-AI. They had to change classroom policies to integrate this.
Kinstler: Well It's kind of been classroom by classroom. That's what we're seeing. It was a very abrupt switch. California as a state, Governor Gavin Newsom has really gone all in on AI, has formed multiple deals with the major tech companies in the state to bring it into education. There's a new master plan for education at every level, not just the university level, but starting even in K through 12 schools, thinking that. If you integrate this technology, you will be creating a new kind of worker. You will be ensuring that California will have a kind of store of educated and skilled people who are ready for whatever the AI economy might look like. The question is, no one knows what the AI economy is going to look like in even two years, let alone 10. And so I think this is what everyone is trying to understand and anticipate. Is precisely how to educate people for jobs that we don't know will exist in the future.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about AI in higher education with New York Times reporter Linda Kinsler. In your article, you also spoke to a sociology professor who develops his own chat bots. Tell me some of the ways professors and others maybe have changed their courses to adapt to AI, embracing it.
Kinstler: Absolutely, yes, that was a fascinating conversation with a professor Nikianos at Chico State who largely teaches in online classes. And what he's done, you know, he teaches classical social theory, which requires students to engage with thinkers like Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim, W.E.B. Dubois. And he created a bot of Carl Marx, among others, so that students could ask the bot questions about what Marx thought about the theory of labor and capital and the role of the worker in society. And I think of all the applications of chat GPT, this is actually has shown to be quite promising because it allows students to engage with complicated philosophy in language. That can be accessible. And one student went so far as to tell me that it totally revolutionized how she thinks about her own value as a worker, which I think we can't discount as a benefit of this technology. I think the broader problem though is that that was a very thoughtful deployment of chat GPT that was used alongside the original text. The students were engaging with Kapital itself. And I don't know that as we see this technology integrated in education across the board, it will always be deployed in such a considered manner. I think that's really what's at stake here. And so, yeah, I think that was a very promising example, but we don't how widely that kind of approach might be used.
Juravich: Yeah. Well, and there's also open AI itself is facing major privacy controversies. Did students and faculty bring up these privacy concerns to you, you know, with all of with the bots that the university is developing and everything?
Kinstler: All the time. And I think it should be said that according to the deal, it's an enterprise deal with OpenAI. And one of the terms of these deals is that the company cannot train its models on any data collected from CSU licenses. So it's supposed to be what they call a walled garden However, what I heard from people is just real uncertainty and skepticism about privacy protections. The uncertainty was that they don't know who has access to their interactions with the bot. And a lot of students were fearful that administrators or even professors could see what they were using it for. And I think a lot of people were also skeptical about how robust the kind of training protections are. We kind of just have to take open AI's word for it until further information presents itself. I think in general, and I even talked to a lot of students who were choosing to use the kind publicly available version of chat GPT rather than the university provided one because of these concerns.
Juravich: They felt the public, the open AI everyone's using was more trustworthy than their own universities.
Kinstler: Yeah, or rather that they would rather have the company have full access to their information rather than have the university have perhaps partial access.
Juravich: Fascinating. Okay, well then you also wrote that some California State University campuses are relatively empty because of remote learning as well. How is AI impacting that existing problem when it comes to the buildings they have and whether there's humans in them?
Kinstler: Yeah, I mean, I think this will absolutely exacerbate this ongoing trend in higher education, which is toward, we know, started even well before COVID with this, with MOOCs, you know, this transition towards virtual learning environments. And I don't think that many campuses ever recovered from the abrupt transition to virtual learning that COVID brought. Um, and increasingly, you know, it costs a lot of money to maintain facilities across the state. The CSU system was really, really historic and transformative. And I think the administrators are asking themselves how much can they afford to maintain in this environment? And at a place like Sonoma State University, which I visited, which is the liberal arts college of the CSU System, they had kind of mass closures of departments last year and it's unclear. If they will ever be able to recover. So on the one hand, this is a kind of specific story about California, but I also think this is a national story about a real transitional moment in higher education in the United States. We're already seeing the closures of both small colleges and some large universities declining enrollments in some places and in general kind of consolidation across the board.
Juravich: Can you tell me about the CHAT GPT campus ambassador program?
Kinstler: Yes, I mean, so it's interesting. Open AI is among several companies who have created ambassador programs for students essentially to advocate for their technology on campus. And I met with ambassadors both at San Jose State University and at San Francisco State University. These were people who were extremely enthusiastic about what AI can do. And were using it on a daily basis. You know, some told me that they were using it like even to vet their text messages, to see if they were using the correct tone or interpreting things in the right way, using the voice function to practice for job interviews, using it to adapt their resumes for specific postings, using it indeed to like study for exams. You know one student told me that he. Know, his professor's slides were hard to understand. So he would just upload the professor's slides and ask the chat GPT to explain it to him. And that was actually way more helpful. So, so I think, like, we can't argue that it's not having an effect on learning. I think the question is, what is lost along the way? And do we need to adjust how we think about, you know, higher education as a result?
Juravich: Another New York Times reporter, Cashmere Hill, recently wrote an article that says the professors are using chat GPT and some students aren't happy about it. And that reporter spoke with a student who basically filed a report against their professor for using chat GBT in a class presentation because the student wasn't allowed to use AI, you know, it was in the syllabus not to use it. So it was like a contradiction. Are universities taking these reports seriously where there's a student versus professor AI controversy.
Kinstler: I mean, I think that there is an imperative to take it seriously because precisely because we're in this position condition of normlessness that I that I previously described, you know, what I have seen in my reporting is often students being accused of using AI when they and not really having recourse of how to prove a negative.
Juravich: How do you prove you didn't do something?
Kinstler: Exactly. So one student told me that she was failed in a writing class because she had used an Oxford comma correctly and her professor didn't believe that it was her own work.
Juravich: Oh, I love an Oxford comma.
Kinstler: Yeah, me too, but I think it's putting everyone in a really, really tough position. One student told me that she had applied for over 70 jobs in the San Francisco area and she got an interview, drove an hour to show up for it only to find that the restaurant was closed and that's when it dawned on her that she has been in touch with an agent who had not coordinated with the physical establishment of the restaurant. And with its human employees. And so I think we're seeing this real moment of disjuncture between the capacity of the technology and its actual real-world effects. And universities obviously are not famous for being the most fast movers on technology. And I think that's kind of where we're seeing a lot of this friction between students and professors arise.
Juravich: We've been talking with New York Times reporter Linda Kinsler about her reporting on California State University's deal with open AI. Thank you so much for joining us today, Linda.
Kinstler: Thank you, it was a pleasure.
Juravich: And coming up, we're gonna hear how Ohio State University is leaning into AI and wants all of its students to be fluent in the technology. That's when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides, I'm your host Amy Juravich. AI has made its way into academic institutions and it's raising a lot of concerns. The University of Cincinnati recently became the first Ohio University to offer an AI chat bot in partnership with OpenAI. It's called Bearcat GPT. Ohio State is no exception to adopting AI. Last year, it launched the AI Fluency Initiative. Which requires all incoming freshmen to graduate from Ohio State fluent by integrating AI into their coursework. And now it's being broadened into the Arts and Humanities AI Institute. Joining us now is OSU Art and Technology Professor and Interim Director of the Arts & Humanities, AI Institute, Chris Coleman. Welcome to all sides, Chris.
Chris Coleman: Thank you, Amy.
Juravich: So what is the Arts and Humanities AI Institute, and how did it come about?
Coleman: Well, it's a brand new venture, but I think it's part of the bigger picture, as you suggested, that was put into place by provost and now president, Belham Conda, to think about what AI fluency even means. And I think Dean Dana Renga, who oversees arts and humanities, really saw early on that some of the things that were coming up in the arts and humanity Peace. Needed particular kinds of attention, both in terms of faculty and student needs. So, her and Dean Horne envisioned an institute that might sort of really focus that energy and be a place where we could have different kinds of conversations. And I say all of this because, as you can imagine, the conversations we're having in the arts related to AI might be very different from the conversations about chatbots that everybody else are having.
Juravich: Yeah. Well, and it's safe to say that humanities and arts professors are worried overall, especially following layoffs and funding cuts in those departments. You know, the future of the humanities, the future of the arts. So how do you feel like this AI institute will support the future of Humanities at Ohio State.
Coleman: You know, part of it is to help. So, I mean, you know, our very first part of our initiative is this AI Explorers program, where we're really trying to give some of the faculty at OSU the time and space and assistance to understand where AI technologies might be useful in their research. And again, this is a voluntary program, but I think you can imagine that there are groups of very AI proficient professors that are suddenly being bombarded with lots of questions and lots of demands as these AI fluency things come into bear, come into place and We needed some more faculty who were AI curious to sort of have the resources and time to think about what that means for their work and trying to expand a little bit the community and thus expand the conversation and do it in a really sort of like healthy and critical way.
Juravich: Yeah, I started this conversation by saying at the very beginning four years ago when the first chat GPT launched, universities were very skeptical. They kind of like leaned into their policies and said, no, we're not going to use this. And now four years later, everybody's changing their tune and saying, this is the future. We need to embrace it. So I used the phrase kind of, like, know your enemy. So it was basically like all the universities were like, this isn't going away. We need. To lean into this. Is that how you feel? This institute and is is what the arts and humanities at Ohio State. Is that what you're doing? Know your enemy.
Coleman: Well, yeah, I think it should be said that one of our biggest tasks is really defeating the hype machine. There's a lot of money involved in AI, and there's a lot of massive promises and very vague notions of what it can and can't do. And I think we have a lot work to do to tell students and faculty like, hey, okay, this is actually how this works. This is where this data came from. This is how its data was actually understood and processed. I mean, I think a lot about what it means to generate images with AI. You know, all these images were actually broken into chunks using surveillance technology, you know, that's underneath it. And so I don't actually want to describe the way I want a picture made in the way that I want surveillance technology to operate. But that's, there's sort of these like really strange combinations. Of where the data comes from, how it's utilized, how it is put into the system and how we're supposed to derive new things from it. I don't know, I find problematic, but I think also we need to understand deeply if these tools are gonna continue to be put into use. And they are, they're shortcuts for all of us. I also sometimes use AI to save myself an hour when I have something I need to do.
Juravich: When you say you want to understand the hype machine, is that something like, I mean this isn't arts and humanities related, but I've been told and I've heard someone say AI will cure cancer in five years, right? And we don't know whether that's true or not, but it sounds like a lot of hype and a good thing. So is that what you mean when you want like be in touch with the hype machine.
Coleman: Yeah, I think, you know, I think especially around this notion of the AGI, so like incoming, all knowing God like a AI that's going to solve all of our problems and tell us what to do. I think there's some really problematic language and thought processes around these things and the leap between, you know, a very complex word predictor system and picture maker system and all-knowing AI system are, it's a pretty massive thing. And this isn't to say that the technology is not gonna continue to accelerate and get interesting, but I think we have to be really careful about how much agency and magical powers we grant to these technologies.
Juravich: We were just speaking with a reporter who covered California State University and their deal with OpenAI to make a chatbot. The deal has not gone well. It hasn't gone over well with faculty and students for the most part. Are you hearing from faculty at Ohio State who are expressing disapproval of what OSU is doing with AI?
Coleman: I think faculty at OSU are still very tentative, and as I said I think a lot of them still aren't completely on board or engaged with AI technologies and are still trying to learn what they don't know. You know, I work in technology, I've always worked in technology and so I've actually been teaching AI classes since 2018 in a way.
Juravich: Oh, yeah. It's been around that long, just not called what we all call it. Yeah.
Coleman: That's right. So yeah, I think there's a lot of tentativeness. I think I've been really excited to hear a couple of things, whereas the university is kind of buying taste tests from lots of different companies. And so we're actually encouraged to try Copilot, try Gemini, try some of these other things, think about how they're different, think about different versions of these things might be applicable to what we do. Um, but also like the fluency initiative really is driven by, you know, for each major. So the English department has to figure out what that means to them. And that might be very different from how the art department thinks about it.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about AI in higher education with OSU professor and interim director of the Arts and Humanities AI Institute, Chris Coleman. The University of Cincinnati partnered with OpenAI to launch Bearcat GPT, their own chat bot. We spoke recently to University of Cincinnati Vice President and Chief Digital Officer Bharath Prabhakaran, and we talked to him about cheating. And here's what he said.
Coleman: Historically, I mean, even before AI, cheating has always been there, right? There's students finding creative ways to cheat. If they want to take a shortcut, they will do it. So AI maybe, you know, is taking that to a completely different level, but I think we, and I'm not a faculty member, so I can't speak for them, but, you know, they need to pivot.
Juravich: OK, well, you are a faculty member. I mean, do you agree with that, that cheating has always been a thing? And so whether or not AI is being used to cheat is neither here nor there. What do you think of the cheating? And what is cheating now? Because we don't know anymore.
Coleman: Oh goodness. Yeah. Yeah, I, you know, I have also taught like the history of digital art and so I had lots of writing assignments and I have seen AI writing show up and had some interesting conversations with students about that. You know, every major has a different notion of what cheating is, I think, and so I can't speak for all of them, but I will say that hopefully it's encouraged some professors to really think about what it is they want from students. And if something can so easily be cheated, then maybe they need to rethink how they're engaging and getting something from students, like I gotta be honest, like if you give students busy work and you can't construct for them a reason why they need go through that busy work as part of a process, The students are going to be like, ah, this is busy work. That's AI's job. Um, cause I think that's how we're functionally as a society starting to think of AI, it's like, Oh, anything that is, is basically just fluff and unimportant, we should just let AI do it really quickly for us. I think we have some really hard conversations. I think Linda really, and you had a great conversation about normalization. It's still something that we're settling into, but I think us, you know, all of us as teachers need to continue to think about. How do we invite students to gain knowledge and how do we test that knowledge with each other? It's a real big and interesting, I don't know, puzzle.
Juravich: Well, so the University of Cincinnati partnered with OpenAI. They launched this Bearcat GPT chatbot. Do you think Ohio State is working on something similar? Buckeye GPT, maybe? Thank you. Bye.
Coleman: You know, like at the admin level already, I think they fed all of our documents, our giant bureaucratic system documents into Copilot and you can actually get pretty good quick answers from the layers of bureaucracy in Copilot these days. I think a lot of departments are actually spinning up little micro-focused tutor chat bots as other people are suggesting. I don't know if we're gonna have a big mega one. I'm so much more interested in like small bespoke tailored models as a sort of way into the future as opposed to this all-knowing thing as I described earlier. Well.
Juravich: We've danced around a little bit, but you're a professor in the Arts and Humanities Department, and AI is a major point of contention in arts fields. People using AI to make art, some asking if it's truly art, if AI is making it. How are you approaching these conversations with students and your colleagues?
Coleman: Yeah, you know, on one hand in this field, I make digital art ever since the 1950s when the first artists started using computers. People were like, that's not art, it's made with a computer. Like, are you even serious now? And so I think there's a layer of just like, okay, a tool is a tool, is a a tool. I think there's a different... Conversation, which is like, if you type a sentence into a chatbot and it makes you a picture, does that make an artwork is a really interesting question. So there's a spectrum there of like, can AI be a fruitful tool to make art? Yes, absolutely. And I think there's a really interest thing even with the copyright office, right, where they were saying like, If you just type some sentences of text into a bot and you get a picture, you can't actually copyright that. But if you then start to manipulate that, if you take control of that, and you put some more authorship, another layer of authorship on it, then it can be something that you can copyright. I think, again, this hasn't been normalized yet, but I think we'll continue to have conversations about, Yes, it's a tool, it is a technology. It shifts the idea of agency and creativity, but at the same time, like the notion of art itself, like coming up with the idea, executing that idea, expressing something human to other humans, which I think is the essential nature of art, that is still there no matter what technology you use.
Juravich: Well, as you know, AI can be wrong. AI hallucinations, AI sometimes makes up information. This is very common. Does the AI Fluency Initiative at Ohio State help students navigate that? What to do if they figure out that AI is hallucinating something? Or what to do, if they don't figure it out? Yeah. Yeah.
Coleman: Yeah, you know, I think we continue to tell people, like at the end of the day, you're responsible for what you turned in. Yeah. You know, you can't say like, well, AI told me that was true. Like that's not an acceptable answer. And I think that's going to continue to be true. The moment you put your name on it, then you're for that content. So, Yeah, that is part of the learning process. We have a really great freshman module that just helps get every student the basic knowledge of how an LLM, a large language model operates and what they need to watch out for and how they're responsible for things like citations and checking those citations to see if they're actually real. So, yeah, it's all part of the fluency. Initiative is to know that these things exist, that these are problems, but at the end of the day, you're responsible if you turn this thing in.
Juravich: What are the next steps here? You're the Interim Director of the Arts and Humanities, AI Institute, the AI Fluency Course just launched for freshmen last year, so now they're sophomores, so a second class will be taking it and growing up with it through their four years at OSU. What's our next step? Because AI moves so fast, I don't even know, do you know the next step.
Coleman: Yeah, so right now, every single major at the university is basically this coming year starting to either initiate new AI-related classes for their major or weaving sections of AI conversations into their classes. So we have to have a certain amount of credits or content. Related to AI that is being inserted into every major. So that's moving forward. And I think, you know, so students are gonna start in encountering, encounter that, you now, as a class or as part of several classes in their required, in their major requirements. So that the really the next big step beyond that, you know all of us need to try and keep up and try and maybe steer the ship a little bit in the conversations that we have with students. I think there's nothing better that we can do than just having real person to person conversations with the students about this technology, about what it means for the class, about what means for how they're learning and where it's gonna hurt them if they just skip steps.
Juravich: We've been talking about how Ohio State is leaning into AI, and we've been with Chris Coleman, an OSU Art and Technology Professor and Interim Director of the Arts and Humanities AI Institute. Thanks for speaking with us today, Chris.
Coleman: Thank you so much.
Juravich: And coming up, we're going to talk with two California State University professors who have been advocating against AI. That is when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. At first, academic institutions reacted to AI with fear and concern. Now AI is being integrated and accepted across universities. Although university officials are giving AI the stamp of approval, faculty and students are not always nearly as enthusiastic. Following the $16.9 million deal California State University signed with OpenAI, two CSU professors are petitioning that decision. We'll learn more about why these professors see AI as detrimental to higher education. Joining us now is Martha Kenney, Women and Gender Studies Professor. Welcome to All Sides Professor Kenney.
Martha Kenney: Thank you, Amy.
Juravich: And also with us is Martha Lincoln, anthropology professor. Welcome to All Sides, Professor Lincoln.
Martha Lincoln: Thank you.
Juravich: So you both are known as the Marthas and you have been recently featured in many articles for your strong criticism against AI. So can you tell me how you both became a team on this issue? Maybe we'll start with you, Professor Lincoln.
Lincoln: Sure. So we're both tenured faculty at San Francisco State University, one of the Cal State universities, and we have collaborated for many years around issues related to science and technology studies. And prior to the announcement of the CSU's AI Empowered University initiative, we were in fact collaborating on a themed year with some other colleagues who have various research projects underway. Related to the critical study of artificial intelligence. So we were really fortuitously prepared when our university administration announced without any prior consultation with the CSU community that they would be expending this large sum of money on a general purpose chat bot for all of our students, faculty and staff.
Juravich: And Professor Kenney, can you tell me what are the main risks of this general purpose chatbot? What are you most worried about?
Kenney: We're worried about the effects on teaching and learning. We're concerned with the working conditions for academic workers at the university. We're concern that this may introduce new forms of discrimination and inequity on our campuses. And we also have concerns about the mental health effects. Of this technology on our students because general purpose chatbots have been shown to affirm suicidal ideation and also to create a phenomenon called AI psychosis. And the version of ChatGPT that we have, ChatGPDU, is the exact same version of chat GPT that has created these mental health harms.
Juravich: And Professor Lincoln, you said that basically, I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but this came out of nowhere. So like your university basically just said one day, announcement, we have partnered with OpenAI, here's a chat bot. Did you feel like it was that out of no where?
Lincoln: That's exactly right. It was that out of nowhere. All faculty, maybe all CSU members, last February 2025 got an email from the chancellor's office essentially saying, great news. And for a lot of folks, this was a real shock because we have expertise in artificial intelligence and data science and the ethical dimensions of technology all across the CSU system. And so folks really wondered, why Was there no prior consultation? Our union, the California Faculty Association, also really wondered, why has there been no conversation with us about the obvious changes that this will pose to the teaching, learning, and working conditions that we all have system-wide? So there's currently an unfair practice charge that's been filed by the CFA against the Cal State University administration. And it's slowly working its way through adjudication. But even as that's the case, that contract has been re-upped for another three years.
Juravich: Yes. Yeah, they renewed the contract for three years and it'll be reviewed each year of those three years. Professor Kenney, what's your experience been like speaking with other professors? Are you against the tide? Do most agree with you? Have you done a professor survey? Do you know?
Kenney: The CSU did a survey, the report is out, you can see it on the internet, but it was just about general attitudes towards AI chatbots. It didn't actually poll people, whether or not they felt that this contract, which as Martha Lincoln mentioned, was signed during a period of extreme austerity in the CSU system during a budget crisis.
Juravich: Yeah, continue. Sorry, I know you've got to clear your throat. Here, we'll tag team to Professor Lincoln. The other Martha. So tell me more about how other professors are reacting, especially at a time of a budget crisis. I mean, $16.9 million is a lot of money to spend on a piece of technology when you have a budget crises.
Lincoln: You're so right, Amy. And a lot of faculty do agree with that point. Resources are really scarce in our system right now and we feel those effects everywhere in our teaching, in our contact with students. So there are many faculty members who feel with us that while there might be some valid uses for large language models in a higher education in teaching and research, that now is not the time to be making a blanket adoption. Of this costly technology, which is free online to our students, especially without having any prior policy developed to guide students, faculty, staff, administrators in their use of this tool. So it's kind of like we're flying blind. And
Kenney: I should also add that on our petition, we had the ability to offer comments for people when they were signing, and lots of people left comments showing us that they did not agree with this contract for lots of reasons, but some of the main reasons were the environmental impact of data centers, the recent contract between OpenAI and the U.S. Department of War. And also the perceived value of the CSU degree, that we will not be offering the high quality education that the CS U has been known to offer. For right now we have 460,000 students. So we didn't know whether people would wanna use the comment box at all, but lots of people did and they told us that they were really frustrated with this contract. And the faculty think that it's making their jobs harder. Like we're giving students access to a technology that they can use to complete their assignments. So we basically are creating an arms race. So faculty are trying to AI proof their classrooms. And, but at the same time, we've had absolutely no guidance from the university system itself about. How to use it, how not to use, it and we've really created a climate of confusion for both faculty and students.
Juravich: This is All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about AI in higher education with San Francisco State University professors Martha Kenney and Martha Lincoln. And either of you can take this question, but one of you is a women and gender studies professor, the other is an anthropology professor. Those are two majors that I would say are probably at risk of being cut. I've done shows on. You know, consolidating colleges and universities. The state of Ohio is doing that. Anthropology came up as one where it's at risk, depending on how many students major in anthropology. Women and gender studies is at risk because of policies from the Trump administration. So do you two worry, like you're speaking out against this, but are you also worried about the future of your majors? Either one of you can take that.
Lincoln: Yeah, you are you are in fact right on the money because my program at San Francisco State is currently under suspension. We had multiple faculty members from our small department. Retire owing to an incentivized retirement program that the university introduced as part of its cost savings and so three of my four colleagues are stepping away from the department and what that means is. We will be teaching out our anthropology majors over the coming years, but my appointment is going to be moving to the public health department and whether or not anthropology even continues as a major on our campus is a question.
Kenney: Yeah. And Women and Gender Studies is also under threat. All small liberal arts departments in our university are currently under threat of being canceled or merged with larger departments. And one month before the OpenAI announcement, in January 2025, Sonoma State, another of the CSU campuses, closed six departments and laid off all of their tenure-tenure track faculty. And one of those departments was Women and Gender Studies. So at the time I was chair of a Women and gender studies department. So I did a lot of running around and trying to figure out how we can stave the department during this budget crisis. At the same time we also laid off all of our lecturer faculty because the university would not provide the budget to continue their appointments. So the backdrop of the budget cuts It was definitely important to our activism around the OpenAI contract. CHAT GPT-EDO is not non-educational technology, so spending $16.9 million of the CSU budget on a technology that does not have any proven educational value while laying off professors at the same time can only harm the CSU system.
Juravich: What do you say to someone who would say that the CSU system has to lean into AI? This is the future, and if they don't, they're going to get left behind. University of Cincinnati here created Bearcat GPT. Ohio State has an AI fluency initiative. If California State doesn't keep up, then you'll be left behind, Professor Kenney.
Kenney: Yeah, we argue that this narrative that the AI future is inevitable is a marketing narrative that's being sold by OpenAI to their investors to show that they are a growth company. And that, you know, that as the faculty, the staff, the students, like we're the people who make up the institution and we should decide the future of higher education. And if these technologies are not the right fit, there's no reason that we should at all bow to this narrative of inevitability that's being sold by AI companies. So we think this is a fight for the future and that we, as people who are invested in education, whether it's being invested in an education, as a faculty member, a student, a parent, somebody who pays taxes, we should be the people to chart that future. And not just to accept these narratives that we're being sold that, you know, don't actually work in our benefit.
Juravich: Yeah, Professor Lincoln. So basically, it's not the universities being left behind. It's open AI saying they will be left behind, is that how you feel like it is?
Lincoln: We see it that way. And there are also, of course, really important questions about student capacities for attention, focus, deep learning and creativity that are actively eroded by the use of AI technologies. When students essentially outsource their cognition to machines, they don't develop. Those critical humanistic skills that the enterprise of higher education is here to foster. So if we are exposing students to a technology that reduces their abilities over their four years with us getting a bachelor's degree, say, I think it's really hard for us to say that we are doing them a service and that they're not getting left behind in a different way. Um, I think there's been a as well a big conversation about the use of AI tools for students to cheat. But the deeper question is not are they cheating us when they use ChatGPT to write an essay and submit it as their work, but are we as an institution, by spending their money on this tool and calling it education, are we not cheating them?
Juravich: We're gonna leave it there. You've been listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We've been talking about AI and higher education with San Francisco State University professors. Martha Kenney, Martha, thank you for your time today. And Martha Lincoln, thank Professor Lincoln for your your time. Thank you so much. And you have been listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. I'm Amy Juravich.