AKA Review - 10.04.2024

From Chicago Booth Review
Capitalisn’t: Universities and Politics—Should They Mix?
By Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean

In this engaging podcast interview (with written transcript), former University of Chicago President Hanna Gray revisits her assertion that the modern university rested on faith in "the potential for education to produce both social mobility and a meritocratic society that would realize the true promise of democracy." Through insights and anecdotes about today’s universities, Gray considers whether—in light of waning public trust in universities and their place as culture war battlegrounds—this promise has been kept. Read this article

From Chronicle of Higher Education
Squeezed From Both Sides
By Karin Fischer

Higher education increasingly faces criticism across the political spectrum. Republicans, long hostile, focus their ire on perceived liberal biases. Democrats, historically friendlier, now criticize the sector for rising tuition costs and the unclear ROI of degree programs. Recent surveys show that two-thirds of Americans see higher ed heading in the wrong direction. The author traces shifting attitudes and argues that the polarization of college-educated and non-college-educated voters complicates higher ed’s ability to advocate effectively for itself. Read this article

From The New York Times
Take It From a Scientist. Facts Matter, and They Don’t Care How You Feel
By Francis Collins

Covid vaccine misinformation accelerated a deterioration of confidence in scientific evidence, observes this former NIH director. Noting that many believe political allegiances or faith are a better source of wisdom than truth or science, he proposes a model for what we mean by "truth" and how we might use it to separate evidence from opinion. Doing so, will help us "move from our current divisiveness to an era of empathy and understanding and become comfortable having conversations with people who have very differing views." Read this article

From Inside Higher Ed
The Prestige Factor Propping Up Academic Publishers
By Kathryn Palmer

There’s a paradox in the recent antitrust suit accusing six academic-journal publishers of collusion—paying scholars nothing for peer review and charging them huge processing fees to be published. By judging scholarly work based on how much academics have published in a few high-prestige journals, tenure committees created the niche that publishers fill. Academics have become their own worst enemies by evaluating scholarship on the prestige of where it is published rather than "actually reading the articles…when making tenure decisions." Read this article

From The New York Times
The Ethicist: Should You Be Allowed to Profit From A.I.-Generated Art?
By Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Ethicist’s response offers guidance for students and faculty wondering about the ethical use of AI for coursework. The history of art, Appiah notes, is one of borrowing from earlier work. AI that identifies an artist’s style and produces new work with those features is little different from the artist who studies the old masters and learns how to represent faces. Additionally, we must get used to collaborations between human and machine cognition—using AI in service to human creativity rather than viewing AI as parasitic on it. Read this article