“Total degradation”

AI is in the air at the university where I taught for thirty years. The news that a faculty member had ChatGPT design two senior-level courses and create reading material for those courses (in the form of authorless handouts) has led students to petition university administrators to create a university-wide policy governing faculty use of AI in courses.

The administrative response to the petition has emphasized the problems AI presents for branding (e.g., inaccurate depictions of university buildings and sloppy typography) and skirted the possibility of a university-wide policy about the use of AI in teaching, stating that such a policy would threaten academic freedom. Each department should establish its own policy: that’s the mantra, though a department policy could be said to pose the same threat to academic freedom.

To my mind, saying that faculty must not generate course design and reading material via AI should be no more controversial than saying that math classes must use Arabic not Roman numerals. (An alligator rule.) But I can’t imagine any department coming up with a policy that does more than leave decisions about AI use to the discretion of the individual faculty member.

At least some students already recognize that branding is not what’s most important. A student-government leader points out that the larger issue is the “total degradation” of academic integrity at the institution. Hitting the nail on its head.