Yeah that title is absurd, tho it did make me read the whole thing out of pure incredulity. The “tearing itself apart” apparently refers to the fact that the CSU system spent $16M on AI tools during a $2B+ budget deficit, which… yeah. Doesn’t take an economics professor to see the problem with that thesis!
The author does seem interested in supporting the headline, but I think they're too good of a journalist to pull off the outrage. It mainly comes through in passages like this:
After I pointed out to Janos that Marx himself would have had a field day with MarxGPT, he laughed… by interacting with ChatGPT, he and his students solidified its role in the public education ecosystem; and their ability to do so was the result of the transfer of almost $17 million of worker-generated public funds to a private, for-profit company.
If this wasn’t the NYT, I’d assume this was a joke. Sadly, I think it is indeed intended as something of a slam dunk…
They do get to AI critics eventually, though obviously ‘activists dislike X’ isn’t really proof for ‘X is tearing us apart[, Lisa!]’. Namely,
“We feel like a guinea pig for what A.I. is going to do to higher education,” Kenney said. The embrace of generative A.I., she went on, is “a step down the path of creating a really different kind of future citizen and worker.” This kind of student would be intellectually passive, less likely to see themselves as agents of their own lives.
I think everyone would agree they’re “guinea pigs”, as are we all in a way — such is the curse of living in interesting times. The rest seems pretty plainly speculative, though.
This winter, the [critics at SFSU] circulated a petition asking the chancellor’s office to invest in protecting faculty jobs and academic programs rather than renew the OpenAI contract.
…hopefully an economics professor chimes in!