Nils Gilman at Persuasion:
The shift from grants to loans, from tenured faculty to mass adjunctification, and from a broad education in the liberal arts to vocational credentialism all occurred under the banner of making universities more “responsive to market demands.” In practice, this has meant transferring cost from the public to the individual “student consumer,” while defunding the parts of the institution that didn’t produce monetizable outputs. The net result has been the ever-upward-spiraling costs of undergraduate education, without a corresponding increase in the value of educational training or credentialling, and a loss of political support for the mission of universities. These financial and political travails have heightened the contradictions between the disparate missions and functions of the multiversity.
Into this increasingly unstable compound, add AI.
The arrival of large language models is acting as a catalytic solvent, titrating out the incoherence that was always there.
More here.
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