Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system (opens in new tab)

I briefly attended a CSU in the 90's and this was well discussed even back then with predicted population declines. There's just too many CSUs. You'll always need the ones like Stanislaus and Bakersfield to serve their communities and it turns out, they're the ones doing ok. However, there's too many in LA and SF, and the situation is not helped by housing costs in those cities. SFSU itself has had -30% enrollment in the past 10 years.

The CSU system is going to have to to make tough consolidation decisions soon because you can't have declining urban and suburban campuses at the same time.

What exactly does it mean to be "against AI"? Like they don't want students to use AI in coursework? Or they don't want CSU administrators to spend money on commercial AI services? Or the Computer Science faculty don't want to teach about neural networks and linear algebra?

Sonoma-area rent (this college is in Rohnert Park, south of Santa Rosa and east of Sebastopol) spiked by a thousand dollars a month or more after the 2017 fires destroyed several square miles of homes, and the city planners chose to let the single-family home district rebuild as low density rather than rezoning the now-bulldozed land as medium or high density. That campus used to be packed before it became impossible to live in the area, but afaik rents never came back down through when I left a couple years ago, and I think? enrollment dropped off a cliff as the graduating classes discovered they couldn’t afford to get jobs in the area. Presumably losing a state college that specialized in medical professionals in the city next door was worth it to Santa Rosa to preserve those atomic family homes, but locals were livid and it was the beginning of the end for me there (or else I would have been one of those students enrolled these past two years).

> Yeah, I work at a CSU and the Teacher's union is against AI.

Is this a political coalition thing or is there a real teacher-related reason they don't like it?

> the Teacher's union is against AI

Well, of course. Horse buggy manufacturers and drivers were dead set against automobiles.

I heard they do CS exams on air-gapped machines at UC Berkley. Use of AI to do CS homework is strongly discouraged, and if someone cheated, it shows up at the exam...

You could hire people who graduated prior to 2023~.

(not suggesting this is an effective or smart move).

What is your confidence level that potential base level candidates can write a bubble sort function? (and is that at all important to you?)

Completely unenforceable. How is this not immediately apparent?

It’s not like we were building great quality products beforehand. Can we stop with the anti-AI sanctimony ? Some build great stuff, and some terrible, and software has predominantly been garbage for 15 years or more.

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> spent $16.9 million on A.I.

Sooooo... A few days of claude code "thinking", for a few hundred people?

If the NYT is the same as British newspapers, the person who wrote the article doesn't write the headline. It happens here too, and its really annoying because often the article has a much more nuanced picture than the headline would have you believe. In an era when people do read the article after reading the headline it's somewhat forgivable - getting someone's attention then they get the nuance, but in the internet era when people just read the headline it's anachronistic.

There has been quite a few articles in that paper where the headline is really designed to be clickbait.

We've replaced the baity title* with your neutral description of the article. Thanks!

(* in keeping with this site guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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!

Classic NYT

How does this work? Are you embracing AI and also against it? Are you protesting against your own use of AI?

Yes, that describes most of us right now.

The need for physical libraries is fading anyway. I love books, and I spent many happy hours as a student (a long time ago) in the uni library, doing research the only way you could back then.

But now ...? For STEM, at least, everything is digital. You don't need to go to the stacks to get an old journal article.

And yes, it's sad, and it feels like an era is ending. But that's because it is.

I imagine a lot of existing library related applications have had the AI label slapped on them.

That directly contradicts these companies' goals of eliminating all employees.