Academic Teaching Staff (ATS) Constituency

Spend part of the year as off-contract @ATS_UofA at @UAlberta? Want to receive updates early in the semester when we don't yet have updated membership lists from the Employer? Take a minute to give @TheAASUA your alternate contact info! actionnetwork.org/forms/aasuaneg…

I’ve been teaching Gen Z for 7 years and I can tell you right now, the issue isn’t intelligence, it’s skills. Writing, note taking, studying, close reading. We’ve replaced those skills with Chrome Books and AI and then wonder why they struggle. We failed them, not the opposite.

FOURTEEN MILLION. And that's just one university. @BBCNewsnight please do as ABC did in Australia and put a spotlight on just how much money gets funneled from public institutions to private for-profit firms & the harm this causes: abc.net.au/news/2026-03-3…

Join @PIAlberta on April 8 for an urgent online townhall on the future of post-secondary education in Alberta. Registration is required to attend: pialberta.org/pse_answer_for…

What if we just went back to reading a bunch of books and thinking about them together, and that was the class? With syllabi no longer than three pages.

Universities have adopted a retail model. Students are customers, and professors are service providers. In that system, anonymous evaluations are just one piece. A single complaint can derail a professor’s career. That fundamentally changes behavior. Universities claim to uphold academic freedom and free speech, but those principles are often set aside as soon as there is any concern about the institution’s bottom line. Until that changes, rigor and standards will remain impossible to enforce.

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what's not being talked about enough is the ways that AI is expanding adjunct exploitation and how departments (at least mine) are doing little to nothing to either mitigate its use or support adjuncts who teach the kinds of classes it is most used in: intro writing courses

AUSTRALIA IS DOING AN INQUIRY INTO THE OVERUSE OF FOR-PROFIT CONSULTANCIES IN UNIVERSITY MANAGEMENT. FINALLY. So much money being leaked out of the public sector for the sake of blandifying the sector. May #UKHE join the inquiry NOW. abc.net.au/news/2026-03-3…

@LiseGot The AI might, at least, require fewer "networking" trips to Tuscany and dinners at RGE RD.

Maybe AI could replace a few highly paid administrators if this is the level of strategic thinking.

Sorry for the paywall, but the lead quotation is too, too good. We got stuck with access, community, and belonging because it's AI slop. "'We took all of those consultations and fed them into some remarkable AI machine that produces a word cloud." #UAlberta #abpse

🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now. Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible. Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it. They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks. The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory. Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word. Then it got worse. The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else. It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors. One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked. Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted. Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher. That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites. Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights. This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s, lowering their chances of getting university jobs, tenure and reducing their publication output, finds a large analysis of academics in Denmark. go.nature.com/4tcouqQ

"This is the seventh consecutive year BoG has approved tuition increases. Additionally, BoG approved a new recruitment policy, which excludes equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) language." #UAlberta #abpse

The University of Alberta Board of Governors has voted to approve the new recruitment policy that removes the equity, diversity, and inclusion language. All student representatives voted against the new policy.

This is literally what my students say when they get busted using AI. “I didn’t use it to write my paper just for brainstorming, outlining, and editing.” Yeah that’s most of what writing is.

Sorry, no you're still not 'doing the work'

Despite completing far more than our teaching contracts require, and despite outperforming many faculty in the same departments, our jobs are always at risk as contract academic staff. This is exactly why we need conversion to permanent positions.

Not sure you can really call it "consultation" if you show your draft to multiple campus groups, they all express in great detail their valid concerns, then you ignore all the feedback and proceed with your draft as is. #UAlberta #abpse

The University of Alberta votes tomorrow on removing EDI from hiring policy. There have been several new articles about it leading up to the vote. But these are missing something important. This is about government censorship and institutional freedom. thegatewayonline.ca/2026/03/studen…

@AndieWinnipeg Oooh, it worked for me without any paywall! Although maybe I've turned off my ad blocker for them and that's why I could read it?

@ATS_UofA Anyway I can get this without the paywall?

"The cumulative effect is a shift away from institutional autonomy and toward a more centralized, government-directed model of higher education." I wouldn't say that it's a "quiet restructuring," though. The interventions have been brash and entirely without nuance.