{"id":1416028,"date":"2023-12-28T07:00:28","date_gmt":"2023-12-28T07:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=308953"},"modified":"2023-12-28T07:00:28","modified_gmt":"2023-12-28T07:00:28","slug":"the-corporate-university-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/12\/28\/the-corporate-university-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Corporate\u00a0 University in the Age of Artificial Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
\"\"

Photo by Maximalfocus<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

\nChatGPT\/AI was supposed to be the next big thing to revolutionize higher education.\u00a0 But based on my students\u2019 comments, it is less than underwhelming.\u00a0 But that does not matter.\u00a0 AI will be the latest tool the corporate university uses to save itself from the neo-liberal education policies it has pursued for the last \u00a0fifty years<\/p>\n

At the beginning of 2023 ChatGPT\/AI took higher education by storm.\u00a0 It was heralded by the likes of The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>the voice of neo-liberal higher ed, \u00a0as the next big thing to change teaching and learning. Much like massive open online courses or MOOCs,\u00a0 clickers,\u00a0 interactive whiteboards, Channel One, and a collection of other ed-tech concepts<\/a>\u00a0driven by\u00a0profits and cost reduction<\/a>\u00a0and not\u00a0pedagogy or learning theory<\/a>, it was going to be the savior or demise of higher education as we know it. Yet the road to educational reform is littered with\u00a0educational technology failures and overhypes.<\/a><\/p>\n

I decided to see for myself what ChatGPT could do, and embraced it in all of my undergraduate courses in the fall 2023.\u00a0 What my students and I found was a trove of problems.\u00a0 Their ChatGPT searches produced false facts, yielded biased information, and did little to encourage critical thinking\u2014except when I asked my students to think critically about the role of AI in the classroom.\u00a0 They were underwhelmed by it.<\/p>\n

Yet AI\u2019s value as a teaching and learning tool is secondary to the broader implications of it as another artifice of the corporate university to leverage down costs and enhance revenues at a point when the business plan for higher education is broken.<\/p>\n

The corporate university emerged in the 1970s.\u00a0 It is one where colleges increasingly use corporate structures and management styles to run the university.\u00a0 This includes abandoning the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) shared governance model where faculty had an equal voice in the running of the school, including over curriculum, selection of department chairs, deans, and presidents, and determination of many of the other policies affecting the academy.\u00a0 The corporate university replaced the shared governance model with one more typical of a business corporation.<\/p>\n

The corporate university was created in response to the emergence of a neo-liberal political philosophy characterized by less government involvement and more faith in market structures. In the case of public universities, the corporate university emerged as a result of dramatic cuts in tax dollars to fund them, forcing upon them a new business plan.\u00a0 The new business plan relied less upon tenured faculty than upon a contingent workforce, standardization of and purchase of pre-paid curriculum, and a growing pool of baby boomers and students willing to pay increasing amounts of tuition for credentials and degrees in a crowded marketplace.<\/p>\n

Critical to the corporate university plan was technology.\u00a0\u00a0At best a review of the existing literature paints a mixed bag on the deployment of new technology in terms of improved teaching and learning.\u00a0 Yet the “genius” of Apple thirty years ago as I started to teach was to convince schools to overinvest in technology on the premise it improves learning and teaching.\u00a0 In effect, their mantra was “technology drives pedagogy,”\u00a0 not pedagogy drives technology.\u00a0 Over time, one learning technology after another was ostensibly going to revolutionize higher education, a code name less for improving teaching and learning and more as a way to leverage profits and augment the corporate university business plan.\u00a0 First, it was the for-profit colleges that employed the new technologies but then they were adopted by the rest.<\/p>\n

The idea was to use technology, including online courses, to teach more students per class or instructor.\u00a0 Create pre-packaged, recorded courses and curricula and sell them to schools.\u00a0 One could do this and reduce the dependency on full-time faculty. School administrators often speak of all these tech toys as part of “high impact” learning, a phrase that downplays the traditional emphasis on lecture, discussion, reading, research, and writing.<\/p>\n

The corporate business model survived until the Great Recession of 2008-09.\u00a0 Since then college enrollment has dropped by more than one million students.\u00a0 It will hemorrhage by 2026 as the so-called enrollment cliff kicks in and colleges will see even fewer students.\u00a0 Combine that with a $1.8 trillion student loan debt and tuition at pricy colleges that exceed $80,000\u00a0 per year and the result is that fewer and fewer students see a university education as worth it.<\/p>\n

Enter the new-found excitement for ChatGPT as yet another technological savior for higher education.\u00a0 When it comes to ChatGPT or AI in the classroom its hype and deployment may be driven less by its educational value than by corporate profits or efforts by schools to engage in further cost reductions.\u00a0 At some point, ChatGPT\/AI enters the classroom once the corporate university figures out how to monetize it.\u00a0 Look to see schools combine it with MOOCS or other mass curriculum deliveries in the near future as a way to salvage what is left of their failed corporate business plan.<\/p>\n

The post The Corporate\u00a0 University in the Age of Artificial Intelligence<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ChatGPT\/AI was supposed to be the next big thing to revolutionize higher education.\u00a0 But based on my students\u2019 comments, it is less than underwhelming.\u00a0 But that does not matter.\u00a0 AI will be the latest tool the corporate university uses to save itself from the neo-liberal education policies it has pursued for the last \u00a0fifty years More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post The Corporate\u00a0 University in the Age of Artificial Intelligence<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3403,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,266],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1416028"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1416028"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1416028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1417117,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1416028\/revisions\/1417117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1416028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1416028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1416028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}