Barry Lam 🥢

Canvas, every cybercrime consultant company that took Uni $, every provost making instructors sit thru “phishing” training, should be made to pay every student’s identity theft insurance, as well as compensate student and faculty for their extra time having to navigate this bs.

I've now heard of plenty of cases of professors using AI to comment on student work, usually told to me by someone who is shocked. But what do we expect when everyone at all times is nudged to do the wrong thing? What do we expect to happen?

The collapse of the humanities in higher ed over the past 50 years--mostly self-inflicted as those disciplines made themselves noxious and hostile to students and society--is a major problem whose impact will not be fully understood for years.

My opinion, shared by seemingly nobody, is that humanities undergrad has been way over-focused on producing single arguments in the form of essay writing. I believe a modern rigorous humanities education should be primarily concerned with shoveling as much of the domain content as is physically and morally possible into the student, and then verifying it has all taken hold by pulling wet strings of it out of the bloated and grotesque skinsack via extremely long timed bluebook exams. Producing singular arguments does not do this, and they're annoying to write and read. Plus, I think broad domain knowledge and reading a lot improves essay writing skill somewhat even without direct practice -- but the domain knowledge is more important anyway. Also, the exams should be graded as harshly as a Physics exam. Or harder! For this reason, I am not overly concerned with AI in post-secondary education, compared to other things.

It's not surprising that professors come from highly educated families. Yet the extent to which the professoriate comes from families w/ a PhD-holding mother or father is striking. While <1% of Americans have a PhD, 22% of university faculty members have a parent with a Ph.D.