News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
I teach both large courses, like Jurisprudence and Critical Legal Thinking (a.k.a Legal Argumentation), and small seminar-based courses at Edinburgh…
Surely there is an answer to the problem of AI cheating which averts the existential threat. . It’s not great,…
I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…
Hear hear
I agree with all of this. The threat is really that stark. The only solution is indeed in-class essay exams,…
I’m not sure I’d yet go so far as to call LLMs an existential threat to universities. But I do…
My big problem with LLMs at the present time, apart from being potentially the epitome of Foucault’s panopticon & Big…
Short answer: it looks mostly like additional funding of research, esp. salaries for post-docs, technicians, research staff etc. I've opened comments if any readers have comments on the linked analysis.
(Thanks to Chris Morris for the pointer.)
In order to obtain meaningful results, the author would have had to educe more granular information. Harvard's different schools and faculties are financially independent of each other: each has its own endowment, sets its own tuition and reimbursement rates, etc. Particularly insofar as the author's interest is in (undergraduate) tuition increase, s/he would need to focus on data about the Faculty of Arts and Sciences alone. Here's one example: available in the FAS budget statement, undergraduate financial aid rose (in constant dollars) from $100 million in 2004 to $200 million in 2019. That means that net of financial aid, the FAS actually took in less in undergraduate tuition in 2019.
The author does point to anomalous growth in the number of employees who are categorized as Non-Faculty Academic Staff. Here FAS statistics are provided, and we see growth in FAS + Engineering (counted as part of FAS in 2004 and separately in 2019) from 594.4 to 1280, i.e., more than doubling. This is a mystery even to me, an insider, and would seem to require more research rather than seat-of-the-pants speculation.
—–
KEYWORDS:
Primary Blog
Leave a Reply