The unhappiness pertains to the insane workloads now normalised across the sector. “I didn’t have a weekend off for five months straight last year,” one worker reported in the NTEU report. But it is also related to what the university has become.
The problems aren’t caused by AI. As historian Nils Gilman says, “the arrival of large language models is acting as a catalytic solvent, titrating out the incoherence that was always there”. We might think of AI as a nucleation site where other issues crystallise and become visible.
Because of that, it may yet prove a focus of resistance, as the concept of “AI populism” implies. In early September, staff at the University of Sydney walked out on strike. One of their demands pertained to AI. Peter Chen, the union branch president, declared:
Higher education is the canary in the coalmine. Where we go on AI […] will travel through the rest of the economy.
That’s obviously true. The state of higher education should serve as a warning about the path we are hurtling down.
A great wholistic description of the way in which higher education in the US was collapsing even before AI came along to supercharge the process.
