AKA Review - 11.01.2024

From The Chronicle of Higher Education
Americans Have Not Turned Against Higher Ed

By Kevin Carey and Sophie Nguyen

The narrative that Americans are losing faith in the value of college has become a journalistic given. This critique looks closely at the data behind that narrative, and offers five clearheaded lessons about what higher ed public opinion polls really tell us. Based on this, the authors conclude: “There is a difference between expecting more from an institution and abandoning it.” Despite their various dissatisfactions, Americans overwhelmingly still believe in college as a bedrock institution and want their children to be college-educated. Read this article

From The Atlantic
ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College
By Tyler Austin Harper

Talking informally with students at Haverford and Bryn Mawr, the author found near-unanimous rejection of using AI tools to cheat. Students valued these schools’ venerable honor codes and saw cheating as antithetical to the education they desire. Reassuring? Perhaps. But creating an ethos that stems AI cheating is challenging both culturally and economically. The structures that make honor codes function—small classes, writing centers, accessible faculty—aren’t cheap. In a higher-ed landscape of yawning resource inequalities, they’re not scalable. Read this article

From The Washington Post
Racism was called a health threat. Then came the DEI backlash
By Akilah Johnson

The backlash against DEI in college hiring, admissions, and curricula is well documented. Less so is the pushback against research and teaching about how racism affects health. Despite what most people think, only limited progress has been made on eliminating racial health disparities that stem from differences in medical treatment, small numbers of doctors of color, and environmental and economic factors. As this article highlights, continued advocacy and research are needed to address centuries of inequities that have life-or-death consequences. Read this article

From The New York Times
A Shift in the World of Science

By Alan Burdick and Katrina Miller

“It was computer science, not physics or chemistry,” some groused when the Nobel Prizes in those disciplines were awarded for achievements based on new AI models. This reflects the Nobels’ inherent anachronism: they reward discipline-bound research at a time when the world’s problems don’t respect boundaries. AI’s contribution will be to mine, distill and forge collaborations among what humans have learned across disciplines: a grand sampling of humanity and a better sum of parts than we’ve managed to assemble on our own. Read this article

From The Atlantic
We’re Entering Uncharted Territory for Math
By Matteo Wong

Rather than rehashing well-worn concerns that AI will replace human workers, Terrance Tao, widely considered the world’s greatest mathematician, describes instead his vision of hybrid human-AI interaction. Large language models were not built to handle mathematical reasoning. Now, however, Open AI claims that its new “reasoning models” will handle complex mathematical tasks “much like a person.” Tao argues that rather than using AI as a creative collaborator this way, we should use it instead as an “industrial-scale” lubricant for mathematicians’ hypotheses. Read this article