BY MICHAEL FERGUSON
Following is the editor’s introduction to the spring 2026 issue of Academe, “AI in the Corporate University,” out this week. The full issue and table of contents can be found here.
The AAUP’S 2025 report Artificial Intelligence and Academic Professions concludes with a call for faculty members to assert authority over their working conditions and their students’ learning conditions: “It is essential that higher education workers are in control of technological advancements affecting their employment. Faculty members and other academic workers are the closest to these technologies and are intimately familiar with their benefits, shortcomings, and harms.” As the report documents, faculty senates and unions often are excluded altogether from critical decisions about technology. Universities launch AI initiatives without regard for the faculty’s primary responsibility for the curriculum; administrators sign ed-tech contracts without consulting faculty governance bodies; companies use student data and faculty intellectual property in ways that remain opaque to students and faculty alike.
This issue of Academe builds on the AAUP’s recent work on AI and takes a closer look at AI’s integration into higher education. That integration, as contributors to this issue make clear, has been accelerated by long-term trends that have substituted top-down management for shared governance and left underfunded institutions desperate for technological quick fixes. AI has found a ready home in the corporate university.
The issue opens with a pair of articles that examine AI’s reach into campus life. “What Does AI Do?” Daniel Greene asks in the title of his essay, and the answer is an ever-growing array of tasks, from aiding academic research (the “best use case”) to surveilling students and workers; above all, AI offers administrations another seeming way to do more with less. Heather Hax, meanwhile, discusses the disruptive effects of generative AI in the classroom, considering what is at stake and what is lost when technology takes over the labor of thinking.
Workers increasingly are organizing around AI, in higher education and in other sectors. “Organizing Against the Machines,” the series of articles at the center of this issue, illustrates the range of new threats academic workers are confronting: initiatives that supercharge the AI industry’s influence on campus, AI-informed austerity, “tech-enhanced militarism,” the environmental harms of data centers, and the displacement of human labor itself. Faculty unions have responded by building alliances on and off campus, by lobbying for regulations on AI, and by enforcing and strengthening collective bargaining agreements. Britt Paris and Rebecca Reynolds, in the article that follows, survey emerging work in the latter area and offer practical guidance on negotiating AI.
Jonathan Rees rounds out the features in our print edition with an article focused on what isn’t new about AI. Situating today’s AI hype in the context of rhetoric about previous “revolutionary” technologies, he underscores the enduring relevance of principles of academic freedom and governance that guided AAUP responses to past ed-tech trends. The conversation continues in the book reviews and online, where authors discuss big tech, academic publishing, climate change, and other topics.
As we contend with AI’s upheavals, the AAUP is continuing to advocate for protections for academic labor—including, most recently, by calling for AI “guardrails” in its joint policy platform with the AFT. Visit https://www.aaup.org/artificial-intelligence for the latest resources.
