Doctored Doom

Back in 2012 ("the year of the MOOC"), when Sebastian Thrun told Wired that, in fifty years time there would only be ten universities left in the world and his startup Udacity had a chance to be one of them, I admit, I laughed. I laughed and laughed and laughed – mostly at the idea that Udacity would still be around in a decade let alone five. The startup, while never profitable or even, in the words of its own founder, any damn good, was hailed as a "tech unicorn" and valued at over a billion dollars... at least until it was acquired by Accenture last year for an undisclosed amount of money and folded into the latter's AI teaching platform. So I'm pretty confident in saying that no, in fifty years time, Udacity will not be around.

But the question of whether or not there'll be ten universities left in the world remains an open one, sadly, as the attacks on education have only grown in the past few years.

I gave a talk back in 2013, speculating what would have to happen to whittle down the number of institutions from the tens of thousands to just ten. We'd have to change college sports in the US, for starters. Ten universities couldn't sustain football bowl games or March Madness. Unlikely – then and now. To reduce higher education to just ten universities, we'd have to scrap taxpayer funding at the state and federal level. We'd have to undermine tenure and faculty control. We'd have to dismantle research institutions. We'd have to ditch graduate student training and funding. Everything would be privatized – research, "content creation" and "content delivery," and credentialing – shifted to for-profit companies, and re-oriented around compliance and job training. All of this, of course, has long been the dream; and, uh, all of this is well under way.

When the technology industry – its entrepreneurs and its investors – gleefully tout the coming end of the college as we know it, they are not so much predicting the future (they're really not that smart or insightful) as doing everything they can to bring that future about, believing that they can profit mightily from education's collapse. It's not that their technology is that powerful or amazing (it's really not that good); it's that these are the richest men running the richest companies the world have ever seen. Their shaping of the future reflects oligarchy, not an oracle.

The Trump Administration, along with Silicon Valley, are fully committed to the destruction of higher education – the destruction of specific institutions to be sure (Harvard and Columbia, most obviously), but to the entire university project. What we are witnessing is an attack on public institutions certainly, but also on the whole idea of education as a public good. It is, as Adam Serwer argues in The Atlantic, an attack on knowledge itself.

Artificial intelligence is absolutely key to this endeavor. (A reminder, once again, that AI was also an integral part of the push for MOOCs – a fantasy about teaching at scale that emerged, according to the mainstream press at least, from Stanford's AI Lab, from Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, from Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller.)

Artificial intelligence is already embedded in the worst educational practices and has been for a while – the "cop shit" that schools have embraced to "discipline" professors and students (and that continues to do real and substantive harm). Artificial intelligence is already bound up in the promise of "unbundling," of push-button learning and push-button control, of indexing the world's information and making it useful generate ad revenue.

The more recent embrace of "generative" AI by faculty and staff and students (hashtag not all faculty and staff and students) should not come as a surprise. Higher education has been primed for this – the increasing cost of tuition; the inability to push back on the all-too-convenient story that a shitty labor market is the fault of schools (all while agreeing with the narrative that everyone needs a college degree); a culture that is both risk-averse and cutthroat – obsessed with hierarchy and ranking; a sales pitch to student-as-consumer rather than student-as-student; the refusal to move away from lecture-hall pedagogy; "publish or perish"; the spread of bullshit bureaucracy within the academy, much of which involves the data-fication of all aspects of student and faculty life; the swelling of the administrative ranks alongside the advance of austerity; a reliance on adjunct teaching labor and an utter lack of professional, let alone, political solidarity.

The notion that college campuses are overrun with "woke"? Hahahahaha. Certainly, the right wing is mad that the majority of college students are now women, that there are people of color and international students in, not to mention at the front of, the classroom. But conservatives are also clearly very very concerned about any critique of the status quo, not simply those from radical leftism and critical race theory; and they are doing everything they can to prevent people from learning about, even thinking about alternatives. This means seizing control of information institutions, of information infrastructure.

Artificial intelligence – not just generative AI but particularly generative AI – is one way to do this, and it functions quite neatly as a package of ideologies and practices that seeks to destroy education. I mean, I know that many folks think they can bend these technologies to "make easy" and "do good," but under our current political and economic conditions, that is dangerous, if not impossible. I am appalled – truly appalled – to read calls to "reconsider reading" because of AI; to outsource not just teaching but thinking to AI; to shrug off research and writing because of an imitation of inquiry that comes packaged with a friendly chat interface; to allocate care and service with AI; and, in the end, to mock those who question and refuse AI – to actively undermine others' choice and autonomy – just because the marketing copy insists "things are changing so fast" and someone's got the stats to "prove" it.

To be sure, educational systems are broken; they've never fulfilled for everyone (hell, for anywhere near the majority of people) the aspirational promises of "attainment." Or perhaps more accurately, even as college campuses have opened to more students, many schools have held on to the values and practices that exacerbate rather than ameliorate inequality, embodying class distinction rather than knowledge- or self-discovery. And so to address the challenges of AI and more broadly of authoritarianism, schools should not retreat into some mythical, elitist "tradition" – a return to oral examinations and blue books feels like an inadequate and unimaginative response to this crisis. (Not as fucked up as suggesting schools implement Sam Altman's new eyeball scanning technology to stop students from cheating. But still pretty fucked up.)

To retain any institutions of higher education in this onslaught from techno-authoritarianism requires – now and hereafter – we redesign them, reorient them towards human knowledge and human flourishing, away from compliance and cowardice. This means quite literally an investment in humans, not in technology infrastructure – particularly not infrastructure owned and controlled by powerful monopolies, hell-bent on profiteering and extraction, hell-bent on creating a world in which we're all drained of agency and autonomy and, above all, of the confidence in our own intelligence and capabilities. Building human capacity in schools requires supporting more teachers and researchers and librarians, not fewer – people whose understanding of information access, knowledge sharing, and knowledge development exists far, far beyond the systems sold to schools, systems that actually serve to circumscribe what we do and how we think; people who care about people, who care about knowledge as a collective good, who care about education as a core pillar of democracy, as practice of freedom not as a market, not as a credential.

You can't automate or "effective altruism" all that. You simply cannot.

Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.

I want to write something about navigating the politics of book bans and cellphone bans. Me, I worry less that calls to take away kids' phones and social media access during the school day are "not supported by the science" and more that these initiatives are also efforts supported by some fairly conservative factions within education reform and are, at the end of the day, expressly aimed to curb students' access to information (particularly about LGBTQ topics). So, how does one make a progressive case for a classroom beyond the control of the tech industry and beyond the control of right-wing censors? More on that later...

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