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A coalition of Columbia Faculty speak on behalf of Columbia students, in support freedom of expression, and against recent police arrests of students on the Columbia University campus, as protests continue inside and outside the university during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in New York City, U.S., April 22, 2024.
College campus watch: The chaos is spreading
Protests over the war in Gaza were spreading to colleges beyond Columbia University on Monday. At Yale University, 50 pro-Palestine protestors were arrested, while Harvard University shut down its lawns for the week over rumors that an encampment similar to the one occupying the Columbia lawns was being organized.
Meanwhile, pro-Palestine protesters at New York University have breached school barricades and taken over the campus plaza, where they have vowed to stay despite orders from school administrators to vacate.
At Columbia – where unrest has continued to grow over the 108 students arrested last week – classes have gone online, and the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” is bigger than ever on its sixth day. Professors held a rally on the library steps calling for university President Nemat Shafik to resign over concerns about institutional freedom after her Congressional hearing last Wednesday, and outrage over her decision to arrest and suspend students.
And it’s not just the professors. Earlier Monday, all of New York’s GOP House members signed a letter, calling on Shafik to resign. The school also lost the support of billionaire Robert Kraft, who said he’s lost confidence in the university’s ability to protect Jewish students.
Graphic Truth: Apprenticeships are on the rise
Whether it’s the price of college, the promise of the gig economy, or simply the desire to get paid while training, apprenticeships are having a moment. In the US, this surge has coincided with an 8% drop in undergraduate college enrollment; in Canada, it comes amid high youth unemployment.
In short, young people want options for brighter futures. As a result, apprenticeships are increasingly becoming an alternative to expensive four-year college degrees, or as a way to forge new careers mid-life. Apprentices get all the benefits of other employees, including wages, while getting valuable on-the-job training.
After dipping during the pandemic, the number of apprenticeship registrations jumped 12% in 2022 to an all-time high in Canada. In the US, they rose 22% between 2020 and 2021 and saw an 82.1% jump between 2008 and 2021.
But this isn’t just a COVID-fueled trend. SAIT, one of Canada's largest post-secondary institutions for apprenticeships, has seen a 20% increase in enrollment over the last two years. So apprenticeships are likely to increase even more in the coming years.
Are identity politics making students less tolerant?
On GZERO World, political scientist Yascha Mounk sits down with Ian Bremmer to discuss his latest book, “The Identity Trap” and what he sees as a counter-productive focus on group identity that's taken hold of mainstream US institutions, particularly in the area of education. Bremmer acknowledges that while he doesn’t always understand the nuances of how young people want to be identified, it feels legitimate that they don’t want society to define what box they’re in.
“We need to have a society in which we respect everybody equally,” Mounk argues, “But that is different from saying that we should create a society where how we treat each other is deeply shaped by the group of which we're from.”
Mounk believes that a novel ideology about race and gender and sexual orientation is holding back young people from embracing diversity of thought and truly engaging with ideas that run contrary to their own. As a university professor, he worries today's college students have been taught to define themselves by the intersection of their identity, that they've become skeptical of free speech principles and reject all forms of cultural appropriation, even if it denies mutual understanding.
Watch the GZERO World with Ian Bremmer episode: The identity politics trap
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
ChatGPT on campus: How are universities handling generative AI?
In this episode of GZERO AI, Taylor Owen, professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University and director of its Centre for Media, Technology & Democracy, discusses how the emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have thrown a new dynamic into his teaching practice, and shares his insights into how colleges have attempted to handle the new phenomenon.
What does education look like in a world with generative AI?
The bottom line here is that we, students, universities, faculty, are simply in unchartered waters. I start teaching my digital policy class for the first time since the emergence of generative AI. I'm really unsure about how I should be handling this, but here are a few observations.
First, universities are all over the place on what to do. Policies range from outright bans, to updated citation requirements, to broad and largely unhelpful directives, to simply no policies at all. It's fair to say that a consensus has yet to emerge.
The second challenge is that AI detection software, like the plagiarism software we've used before it, are massively problematic. While there are some tools out there, they all suffer from several, in my view, disqualifying flaws. These tools have a tendency to generate false-positives, and this really matters when we're talking about academic integrity and ultimately plagiarism. What's more, research shows us that the use of these tools leads to an arms race between faculty trying to catch students and students trying to deceive. The other problem though, ironically, is that these tools may be infringing on students' copyright. When student essays are uploaded into these detection software, their writing is then stored and used for future detection. We've seen this same story with earlier generation plagiarism tools, and I personally want nothing to do with it.
Third, I think banning is not only impossible, but pedagogically irresponsible. The reality is that students, like all of us, have access to these tools and are going to use them. So, we need to move away from this idea that students are the problem and start focusing on how educators can improve their teaching instead.
However, I do worry that a key cognitive skillset that we develop at universities of reading and processing information and new ideas and developing ones on top of them is being lost. We need to ensure that our teaching preserves this.
Ultimately, this is going to be about developing new norms in old institutions, and we know that that is hard. We need new norms around trust in academic work, new methods of evaluating our own work and that of our students, teaching new skill sets and abandoning some old ones, and we need new norms for referencing and for acknowledging work. And yes, this means new norms around plagiarism. Plagiarism has been in the news a lot lately, but the status quo in an age of generative AI is simply untenable.
Perhaps I'm a Luddite on this, but I cannot let go of the idea entrenched in me that regardless of how a tool was used for research and developing ideas, that final scholarly products should ultimately be written by people. So, this term, I'm going to try a bunch of things and I'm going to see what works. I'll let you know what I learned. I'm Taylor Owen and thanks for watching.
- Artificial intelligence and the importance of civics ›
- Education’s digital revolution: why UN Secretary-General António Guterres says it's needed ›
- How will education change in the era of A.I.? ›
- AI's impact on jobs could lead to global unrest, warns AI expert Marietje Schaake ›
- AI agents are here, but is society ready for them? ›
- AI and the future of work: Experts Azeem Azhar and Adam Grant weigh in - GZERO Media ›
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill testifies before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in Washington.
A bad case of “academentia” that needs to be cured
This week Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, and M. Elizabeth Magill, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, were brought before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to speak about the dangerous rise of antisemitism on campus, especially since the Oct. 7 attacks.
The Israel-Hamas war has triggered an alarming rise in antisemitic incidents on and off campus and also a rise in Islamophobic incidents. It was so bad that back on Nov. 14, President Joe Biden released an action plan to combat antisemitic and Islamophobic events on US campuses.
So the university presidents were steeped in this issue and knew tensions had been running high. They came to Washington prepared – well, prepared for something, at least.
Sadly, expectations for these kinds of hearings are low. Politics in Washington today is more like eye surgery done with a pickax, so no one predicted a nuanced, academic discussion with three illustrious leaders. Still, what happened under the big marble-top circus of politics was a genuine surprise.
Amid the usual grandstanding, ax-grinding, partisan preening, camera mugging, sound-bite fishing — and there was a lot of that on culture war issues like “wokeism” – something noteworthy happened.
At five hours and 23 minutes into the hearing — you can watch it here – New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who graduated from Harvard in 2006, asked a basic question of the three presidents.
Here is part of the transcript, with Stefanik questioning the president of Penn, Dr. Magill.
Stefanik: … Does calling for the genocide of Jews constitute bullying or harassment?
Magill: If it is directed or severe and pervasive, it is harassment.
Stefanik: So, the answer is yes?
Magill: It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.
Stefanik explodes in incredulity: This is the easiest question to answer yes, Ms. Magill.
Magill (smiles, oddly): If the speech becomes conduct. It can be harassment, yes.
Stefanik: Conduct meaning … committing the act of genocide? The speech is not harassment?
Stefanik gave Magill one more shot at the answer and got nowhere before asking Dr. Gay, president of Harvard, the same question.
Stefanik: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?
Gay: It can be, depending on the context.
You get the idea.
Apparently, on campuses, calling for genocide is bullying only in certain contexts (when is it not?) and only when it turns into action.
Remember, Stefanik was not asking here if the presidents would shut down such speeches on campus. Or take action. She asked a basic, theoretical question of whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted bullying and harassment. Not a single president answered yes.
This was academentia at its worst. The term, of course, is not medical; it describes hyper-intelligent academics who appear to have lost touch with reality. So caught up in nuance and qualifiers that they can’t answer a simple question.
Imagine for a moment, someone asking, “Is calling for the genocide of all Muslims an act of bullying or harassment? Or the killing of all women? Or the killing of all African Americans, or LGBTQ people?"
Even if US academics uphold the First Amendment, which, in the US, protects hate speech — that was not the question. The question was simply whether calling for the genocide of a specific group hit the threshold of bullying on campus.
How hard is that? Harder than we thought.
Free speech in the US versus Canada is handled very differently. In Canada, there are reasonable limits to speech, and the Criminal Code section 319 is clear that hate speech and antisemitic speech are indictable offenses and are liable for imprisonment.
Context matters as well. Hate crimes against the Jewish, African-American, Muslim, and LGBTQ communities are all up, according to recent stats. The latest FBI hate crimes data shows a 25% rise in antisemitic hate crimes between 2021 and 2022 — which is more than half of all reported hate crimes — against a population that comprises less than 2.4% of the US population. Crimes against the LGBTQ, Black, and Muslim Americans are also overrepresented, but FBI Director Christopher Wray said this week that antisemitism is reaching “historic levels.”
The same is true in Canada, where most hate crimes still target the Jewish population, but the Muslim and Black populations are also targeted.
While the Israel-Hamas war is deeply polarizing, and confusing, there are not two sides to hate. University presidents should not have to duck behind talking points and prepared statements to answer a basic question about human decency. And university students should not have to learn in hate-filled environments. We need to trust our places of education now more than ever, not less.
Higher education should not mean lower common sense.
Students protesting the US Supreme Court's ruling blocking student loan forgiveness
Supreme Court rejects Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan
Today, on the final day of its session, the US Supreme Court announced its decision to block President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness proposal, which would have canceled more than $400 billion in student loan debt for millions of borrowers.
While disappointing to the 40 million student loan borrowers who would have benefitted from the program, the odds of the conservative majority court ruling in favor of Biden’s proposal were slim. The 6-3 vote was split down ideological lines, with the court’s conservative justices arguing that the law does not authorize the Department of Education to cancel student loan debt.
Biden had justified his plan by using the HEROES Act, which allows the Secretary of Education to alleviate the hardship of student loan debt during times of national emergencies. But six states filed lawsuits accusing Biden of overstepping his authority.
Student loan forgiveness was one of Biden’s campaign promises in 2020. While those who supported it will likely blame the court, Friday’s ruling is a setback for the president as he looks ahead to his 2024 run for the White House. His popularity with millennials and Gen Z was already falling – it dropped 31 points since Biden took office to 39%, according to a Gallop polling data – and these groups are particularly passionate about racial justice and student debt.
This was a double whammy decision, coming on the heels of the high court’s ruling on Thursday to prohibit race-based college admissions, overturning decades of precedent for affirmative action. That decision echoed its 2022 Dobbs decision, which also ignored precedent and upended nationwide abortion access.
The Supreme Court’s power derives from it being perceived as an apolitical arbiter of the law, but the perceived conservative bias in the Dobbs decision caused confidence in the Supreme Court to plummet – especially among Democrats, young voters, Black voters, and women.
Those are the same groups who are most likely to support affirmative action and student loan forgiveness. So while the end of this Supreme Court session brought wins for the ideologically conservative, it may have come at the cost of national confidence in the US justice system.
People celebrate the US Supreme Court ruling that universities cannot consider race in admissions.
US Supreme Court ends affirmative action in college admissions
The US Supreme Court ruled today to end affirmative action policies in college admissions, prohibiting race from being used as a factor in deciding who gets acceptance letters. The decision, powered by the court’s conservative flank, will force over 40% of US colleges to overhaul their admissions policies.
The case accused the University of North Carolina and Harvard University admissions policies of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants. UNC and Harvard argued that race is just one of many factors taken into consideration and is done so to ensure diversity and racial equity.
The majority opinion (6-3 against UNC, 6-2 against Harvard) ruled that affirmative action makes race “the touchstone of an individual’s identity” and violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Military service academies were exempt from the ruling.
Mandating that universities use colorblind admissions criteria may decrease racial diversity and limit the pool of students universities draw from. But even before this ruling, US colleges – especially at selective schools – have limited their talent pool by depending on criteria that benefit applicants from wealthy backgrounds.
In the best-case scenario, forcing colleges to overhaul their admissions criteria could lead to a better, perhaps more holistic system that accepts more first-generation college students, racial minorities, and economically disadvantaged students. Worst-case scenario? This ruling decreases diversity on campuses and enables colleges to ignore that racial discrimination still permeates American society. The wider political response has fallen along predictable partisan lines – liberals lamenting and conservatives cheering.
Affirmative action withstood the Supreme Court’s scrutiny for decades, but this court hasn’t shied away from overturning precedent on cases with major societal implications. In a landmark decision last year, the court overturned Roe v. Wade – upending nationwide abortion access.
And the courts aren’t done with college students. Friday, the court is set to announce the fate of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, which, if upheld, would wipe out more than $400 billion in student debt. It will also rule on whether the First Amendment protects a web designer who refused to create websites for same-sex weddings.
Stanford's president on the “new normal” for higher education after COVID
Certain adjustments that universities across the country made because of the pandemic may very well be here to stay. A vast expansion of the use of telehealth, says Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavine, may be one of those things. And even once students can come back to campus, certain remote learning programs may be here to stay. That said, there's no replacing the in-person experience, Tessier-Lavigne stresses.