BY JONATHAN REES
Do you remember MOOCs? I realize that that question is itself cliche now, but if you do remember massive open online courses you almost certainly remember the quote about how in the future there were only going to be ten universities and that “There’s a tsunami coming.” Needless to say, there are still no signs of either of those things actually happening.
There’s a better case to be made that online education in general has transformed higher education, but even there I would argue that the effect has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. I had the honor of writing the first draft of the AAUP’s 2023 revision (published in January 2024) of its Statement on Online Education. The original statement dated from 1999, and while I can’t link to it anymore,* I can tell you there was a remarkable amount of language with respect to concerns about online education that still applied twenty-five years later. A lot of that language remains in the new statement, even though the latest version is a “fresh discussion of the topic,” as its headnote in the Redbook indicates.
A few days ago, someone reminded me that that statement is the closest thing that the AAUP has in its Redbook (Policy Documents and Reports) to anything that pertains to artificial intelligence. That explains why the AAUP’s brand new report on Artificial Intelligence and Academic Professions quotes that statement in its very first paragraph. If you missed that AI report release because you had other things to do all summer, you really should go read the whole thing. I’m not going to summarize it for you here, but I will dig down on one point that I haven’t seen in all the hot takes produced since AI became such a huge thing about three years ago now.
To make a long story short, the AAUP’s report on AI does not take AI hype at face value. This is from the introduction (minus the footnotes):
“Technological interventions, especially those offered as one-size-fits-all solutions for educational problems, do not improve student, faculty, institutional, or research outcomes. In many instances, their use harms students as well as faculty members and staff. Adding to these harms, faculty members, graduate students (including graduate student employees with teaching or research duties), and undergraduate students—who experience directly the impacts of technological triage—are largely excluded from decisions about which platforms and products to develop or use.”
All the hype surrounding AI has already led to administrators and tech companies stomping over shared governance in order to rush unproven solutions for nonexistent problems onto the higher education marketplace.
Yet even some of the most reasonable takes out there treat AI as the inevitable future. To cite just one example, the American Historical Association’s “Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in History Education” is very thoughtful. Nonetheless, it also notes, “Generative AI can be a valuable collaborator for users who know what to ask and how to correct errors. It can enhance teaching and provide a resource for classrooms. It can speed up preparation and suggest alternative or enhanced learning assessments.” It feels like someone on that committee decided that they had to be 100 percent certain that they wouldn’t be labeled as Luddites so they needed to include a few sentences that could have been written by a Silicon Valley PR specialist. The AAUP report does not make that mistake.
Towards the end of their book The AI Con, Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna write, “Just as AI hypers say that the technology is inevitable and you need to just shut up and deal with it, you, the reader, can just as well say ‘absolutely not’ and refuse to accept a future which you have had little hand in shaping.” The fact that the AAUP’s new AI report gets that is what makes it so great.
Contributing editor Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University–Pueblo.
* The statement was originally approved with the title Statement on Distance Education and later retitled Statement on Online and Distance Education. It can be found under those titles in, respectively, the tenth and eleventh editions of the AAUP Redbook.
