Recording a Faculty Senate meeting back in November. Sure, it’s overkill.
That’s what I do…
Category: Higher Ed
Most of us are familiar with Edmond Rostand’s play, Cyrano de Bergerac, a poetic play in which one man’s true identity is kept hidden behind another’s. I’m paraphrasing quite a bit, but the 19th century play has been performed and adapted almost continuously since its debut, finding great success on the silver screen in Steve Martin’s classic modernization in Roxanne and the gender-flipped version in The Truth About Cats & Dogs, and the small screen, showing up in venues as diverse as The Brady Bunch and Bob’s Burgers.
The story follows this general line (with apologies, to folks who want a better synopsis – and to my high school French teachers): A person who can’t express themselves well is aided by one who can, all to woo another, and hilarity ensues when the person providing the wooing words to the wooer has to come to terms with their own feelings for the woo-ee.
I bring this up because recent advances in technology have me concerned that we’re coming into an age of a cybernetic Cyranos, and it has implications we’re not going to fully understand until long after these new tools have been used for some time and become embedded in our culture and lives. The tools I speak of (as you may guess from my title) are the chatbots powered by generative “artificial intelligence” (AI) algorithms, such as ChatGPT and Bing.
My career has been in higher education, and over the years I have witnessed technological attempts to improve the response to plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct. Back in the day, it was easier than it is today to, say, get a term paper from someone geographically distant and present it as one’s own work locally. Cheaters could cheat, and could do so more easily, because, let’s face it: nothing was connected. Eventually, though, the internet came along and ruined everything. For starters, it supersized the market for, shall we say, papers on demand. But, at the same time, we started to see more and more work being submitted digitally, which allowed software tools to make some of the verification process an easier, more automagic one.
Today, plagiarism software is a big business, with enterprise-level tools deployed as a normal part of course management software. It’s not just for academia – businesses deploy these tools, and individuals using tools like Grammarly can even do a self-check before submitting their work or school projects. Even lawmakers are turning to these tools.
In less than half a year, though, the new generation of AI tools has been making headlines for the “human-like” responses created when given a prompt, to, say, write a poem or do a report on a specific subject. These new chatbots have been harvesting data from the internet, and using heuristic algorithms to catalog word-use patterns to which they then compare their own outputs, creating a feedback loop of generative critique to then reshape the response to resemble human output.
Now, I’m not a computer scientist, but that’s how I understand it. Point is, we now have machines that are capable of developing iterative understandings of patterns at a blazing speed, and just as quickly parrot those patterns. The results, I will admit, are impressive.
Sometimes scary. Not always in a good way, either…
A few months ago, the trustees of a public university were listening to a presentation from an administrator about the ongoing process of developing a new strategic plan for the campus, and he began by saying that someone in the office thought it would be fun to ask a chatbot to write a strategic plan for the university. “Actually,” he said, “it turned out pretty good.”
There is a great deal of faith that such documents will be written and vetted by the humans hired for those jobs…and yet, across the field of journalism, we have, in fact, seen some human reportage jobs trickling away while these systems are beginning to be engaged.
Which brings me back to my career. I’m what is referred to as “a creative” – that is, I create content in audio and video media…and I work in higher education. For that first distinction, think about the implications if a machine could just do what I do… In fact, this reminds me of a joke told by Woody Allen in his days as a standup comedian:
My father worked for the same firm for 12 years. They fired him and replaced him with a tiny gadget that does everything my father does, only much better. The depressing thing is my mother ran out and bought one.
For that matter, what about the folks who write strategic plans? I’ve heard from a pretty good source that a chatbot already does a good job with that task…
Joking aside, my side of these ivy-covered walls is the least of it: the implications on the teaching and learning mission of any college is being challenged by these technologies. Task forces and committees are springing up on campuses around the world to explore a very basic question: what in hell is being unleashed upon us? The implications for educators and for students are all immediately transformative. We are, today, now in a world where a person can create a term paper by robotic proxy.
Fortunately, many of these term papers are going to have flaws. My own experience dabbling with one product, ChatGPT, has shown that the machine has an easy relationship with lying, often creating, let’s call them “alternative facts,” and presenting them as if they belong in our universe of truth. You can even get them with citations…to non-publications written by non people.
Like I said earlier: the results are impressive. Sometimes scary.
If I were to write an essay and submit it to my job or for a class with fabricated “facts” and imagined sources, I would be called a lying liar. The eggheads who built these systems prefer not to say that these bots are lying in their responses, and I get it – lying is a harsh, very negative term. One could try to fancy it up by using a longer word that most folks probably don’t know means the same thing, like “prevarication” but even that’s too harsh. Because it’s true. Instead, they insist their systems are “hallucinating.”
Great…the bots are tripping and these works are just their fever dreams…
Now, even with the caveat that I know it is not right and proper to paint all students with the same big brush, it is not unthinkable that a student on a deadline could use a tool like this to create a quick draft of an essay using a real-language prompt…and not go much beyond the draft, since, hey, it is pretty good…and it’s already 2am and the essay is due at 8. It’s going to take some time for the anti-plagiarism systems to develop heuristics to learn to detect algorithmic output over human expression.
Quite frankly, it’s got a good chunk of the ivory tower types with their undies bunched up to their necks.
Let us be fair, here, and remind ourselves we can’t just point at students as a cause to worry about potential technology abuse – it can happen on the other side of the equation, too. It is eerily possible to imagine this scenario: an instructor uses a chatbot to write a lecture. You can even imagine using other AI tools to create a deep fake video for his online class to view.
I say this with such certainty because a faculty member at the Wharton School of Business who teaches innovation and entrepreneurship did just that. Not to cheat the system, but to demonstrate the breadth of opportunities these generative AI tools allow.
Which brings me back around to Rostand’s creation, you know, the guy with the big nose and great way with words, Cyrano de Bergerac. He was the unknown source for the voice of another. With the penetration of (anti)social media into almost every aspect of our daily lives, who is to say we’re dealing with the people we think we are?
Should this matter? Well, we are still struggling as a nation to cope with the impact of social media on a wide range of cultural and political issues, up to and including elections for the highest offices in the land. Who – or what – is generating the words (and images and sounds) that go viral, influencing others with propaganda? Who – or what – is generating the body of knowledge used to teach, and adding to it in academic response?
It is very likely that not only is the proverbial horse long out of the barn, and we are well beyond any hope of closing the barn doors, but that horse has met with others and is actively breeding.
Pay attention to this story, as it’s only just beginning.
[This post has been updated. Details at end.]
For more than three decades I have worked for Land-Grant universities. For them what don’t know what that means, a land-grant institution originates in the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, which was a method by which states were granted tracts of federally controlled land they could then sell or manage to raise funds that would then be used for for the creation of endowments for state colleges.
Thus, the “land-grant” colleges were born, a string of state schools across the nation designed to meet the pressing needs of education at the time, primarily in the fields of agriculture, science and engineering, in response the growing industrial revolution. Also military science – as we were in the middle of a bloody civil war.
In my old granite state stomping grounds, New Hampshire’s land grant of 150,000 acres raised enough capital to create the NH College of of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Hanover, which grew and eventually moved to Durham thanks to a generous bequest from Ben Thompson, and thence continued to grow into today’s University of New Hampshire.
The A&M focus was common across the nation, and many schools today still use A&M in their names, in places such as Tallahassee FL, Miami OK, and College Station TX. Chances are, a school that calls themselves “Aggies” started with a land grant.
Once such school is Oregon State University. Its College of Agricultural Sciences bills itself as the oldest, founding college at OSU, which was once, in fact, called Oregon Agricultural College.
All of the land-grant colleges started with a donation of land from the federal government to the states. Younger western states like Oregon in the mid-1860 had a lot of federal land within their new borders, land that was given to settlers in in large chunks thanks to laws like the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Law and later under the 1862 Homestead Act. It’s curious to me, raised in seacoast NH, to walk around here in Corvallis and see plots of land that were doled out under those programs when the town, later city, was first settled by folks who came out the Oregon Trail.
So where did NH’s land-grant land exist? Turns out that NH and other northeast land-grants were made with western federal land – the states were given “scrip” that described their grant.
As it turns out, my career in higher education has Oregon roots – on both coasts, as UNH’s land grant included 22 parcels of land in Coos, Josephine, and Douglas counties totaling 1,816 acres. Oregon State University began with 91,629 acres spread across 601 parcels in Oregon.
I chose to live in a problematic state; my time here has opened my eyes to a history that I never learned much about on the other side of the nation. For example, Oregon’s first constitution prohibited black people from the state. (Maybe “problematic” is an understatement…)
Oregon, like much of the west, was created in the nation’s era of Manifest Destiny – we expanded from the collections of colonies on the Atlantic coast to cover the continent all the way to the west coast in a remarkably short period of time. Some of the expansion was made possible through land grabs, some by land sales. Along the way, it’s worth noting, this new nation and all its new settlers were moving into a place that was not empty.
My old home of Dover, NH, is going to celebrate its quadricentennial next year. But for thousands of years before the past four hundred it was home to many tribes of indigenous peoples. Across the nation, as settlers carved a new nation out of the coastline and western wilderness, white people displaced and decimated native nations. Along the way, many, many treaties were made between the new nation and the older ones, which the new, expanding nation broke with impunity, many times, over and over.
Sidebar: I had long known of the rotten history that is the treatment of native peoples here in the U.S. Perhaps the strangest way I learned of the impact of this history was through satire, in the form of an audio sketch by the Firesign Theatre, Temporarily Humboldt County. Without trying to break down satire, as overthinking it makes it fail, what makes this piece work is the fact it is so horribly rooted in truth. A formula has been posited that explains humor: Comedy=Tragedy+Time. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, but it seems to work in this sketch.
More seriously, a greater reawakening of this knowledge and concern in me began back in 2011 when I recorded an interview program with Paul VanDevelder, who had received the 2011 Oregon Book Award for Savages and Scoundrels (Yale University Press), telling the history of the violations of treaties made between the United States and the native populations of its lands. Bottom line: the actions against the tribes of this nation by the federal government are, simply, crimes. If treaties are, as our Constitution states, the “supreme Law of the Land,” than our government has a long, sordid history of breaking the law.
In recent years, we white folks have been forced to come to face this horrible truth. A few years ago, our university began the practice of including a land acknowledgement at university events. Here’s a sample of an early version suggested by a resolution from student government:
Let it be acknowledged that Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR is located within the traditional homelands of the Mary’s River or Ampinefu Band of Kalapuya. Following the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855 (Kalapuya etc. Treaty), Kalapuya people were forcibly removed to reservations in Western Oregon. Today, living descendants of these people are a part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon (https://www.grandronde.org) and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians (https://ctsi.nsn.us).
https://asosu.oregonstate.edu/land-rec
One of the things that struck me when I first came to this campus was the presence of numerous cultural centers, and the one I’ve been most interested in over these years is Kaku-Ixt Mana Ina Haws, known as the Longhouse. I’ve attended a number of events over the years, many as part of my job to record or stream events, but many more just out of my own curiosity. In 2020, we began to see signs around campus declaring “This is Kalapuyan Land,” an outgrowth of an exhibition by the same name. As these signs began appearing on a campus mostly deserted due to pandemic, their impact was not as broadly felt for another year, but folks who were on campus saw them, and heard the land acknowledgments in Zoom meetings and online events with a different awareness.
The land acknowledgements began to evolve. A Faculty Senate President introduced a new bit of verbiage in her statement before meetings, explaining that some parts of the suggested one felt a bit like boilerplate (my description). The College of Agricultural Sciences has been discussing with numerous stakeholders the status of native lands near here on which a an experimental farm is operated by the college.
We also saw other campuses around the west and the rest of the nation begin to grapple with their own relationships with native people and lands, from similar land acknowledgement statements to curated exhibits, campus place names and markings, and more. I was intrigued to see UNH, too, was making gestures towards…what, exactly? When we began saying the words, I wondered: is this a beginning to restorative justice, or will it just be a restorative interpretation?
In making presentations, I have at times been one chosen to read the words. At one point during the COVID interregnum, my producer’s brain got me to thinking about making a short video version with words and images, to make it easier for people across campus to include a uniform acknowledgement in campus presentations…but it didn’t take me long to connect the dots and realize that it wasn’t about making the statement easy to do. Having read the words out loud, I understood, somewhat, why the form has evolved, depending on who is reading it, since we introduced it as a necessarily element in public events.
Still, it felt like…well, just words.
Then something exciting happened last spring: the University of California system announced their Native American Opportunity Plan. In short, California students who are also enrolled in federally recognized Native American, American Indian, and Alaska Native tribes get free tuition.
WOW! That’s a lot more than words, for damn sure. When I heard that news, I was kind of sad – someone else did it before us, but I was eager to see what OSU would do. Finally, in August, we learned what OSU would do: any person enrolled in a federally-recognized tribe would be eligible for in-state tuition. So if you’re, say, an Abenaki from the east, you can go to OSU and not pay out-of-state tuition. And if you’re enrolled in one of the Nine Tribes of Oregon:
students who are enrolled members of the Nine Tribes of Oregon may be eligible to enroll in the state of Oregon’s newly announced Oregon Tribal Student Grant Program, which provides assistance up to the cost of attendance at Oregon public and private non-profit colleges and universities.
https://leadership.oregonstate.edu/speeches-and-statements/osu-allow-state-tuition-enrolled-members-all-federally-recognized-tribal
Emphasis added. Worth noting: this particular grant program is only funded for the 2022-23 academic year, but, if eligible, it means that a tribal member here in Oregon can attend tuition-free.
Some work is begin done in Oregon, and in recent weeks the rivalry school south of OSU stepped up with a similar announcement that the University of Oregon (not a Land-Grant, but located on stolen land, too) will cover full tuition and fee costs for American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) residents. UO is doing this in a manner similar to OSU’s plan:
…incorporating wrap-around services that support student retention and graduation through complementary financial assistance, improved counseling and academic services, and professional development. Once state and federal options have been exhausted, the UO will waive remaining tuition and fees for Oregon residents who are enrolled citizens of the 574 federally recognized tribes.
https://homeflight.uoregon.edu/
These are good steps, but are they enough?
Meanwhile, I hadn’t realized how much our land acknowledgment statement had evolved at OSU, until I heard a college dean reading one in a public meeting. The new one has come quite a long way since the students crafted one one in 2019. It reads:
Oregon State University recognizes the impact that its land grant history had on Indigenous communities in Oregon. Through the Morrill Act of 1862, which established land grant universities in the United States, the federal government seized nearly 11 million acres of land from 250 sovereign tribal nations, with little or no compensation.
In 1868, the state legislature designated Corvallis College as Oregon’s land grant institution. Soon after, Oregon received 90,000 acres of federal lands — taken from the Klamath, Coos, Lower Umpqua, Siuslaw and Coquille people — to be sold to create an endowment supporting the growth of the new college, which would become Oregon State University.
Oregon State University in Corvallis is located within the traditional homelands of the Marys River or Ampinefu Band of Kalapuya. Following the Willamette Valley Treaty of 1855, Kalapuya people were forcibly removed to reservations in Western Oregon. Today, living descendants of these people are part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians. Indigenous people are valued, contributing members of the Oregon State community and represent multiple sovereign tribes among students, faculty, staff and alumni.
Oregon State University accepts its responsibility for understanding the continuing impact of that history on these communities. Oregon State is committed — in the spirit of self-reflection, learning, reconciliation and partnership — to ensure that this institution of higher learning will be of enduring benefit, not only to the state of Oregon, but also to the people on whose ancestral lands it is now located.
https://oregonstate.edu/land-acknowledgement
Words.
Isn’t it past time to go beyond talking about concepts such as restorative justice, and time to start acting it out? Yes, OSU, the problematic State of Oregon’s flagship research university, its Land-Grant institution, is trying to do something, but I would argue it is not enough.
Why does any Land-Grant university charge a fee for indigenous people to attend? Seriously – why can’t the descendants of the native people who were robbed to create these lucrative endowment start getting something back? An opportunity for direct restorative justice is sitting right there: simply don’t charge anyone enrolled in a federally recognized tribe any tuition.
It’s way past time to start making up for the original theft.
[Updated 24 October. In my original post, I did not get the details of OSU’s plan quite right, so I fixed that, and while in there I rewrote the end a bit. Tangentially, I had a nice chat with the interim Chief Diversity Officer at OSU today, and he mentioned a few other interesting things I had not noticed before, such as the impact some research involving indigenous knowledge can have from an intellectual property perspective. I need to wrap my head further around that notion. The bottom line to me is that the legacy of the land-grants is something rather awful, and making land acknowledgments is far too little to get us back into any semblance of karmic balance. That non land-grant schools like UO are grappling with the history of the land upon which they sit is useful to see, too. But we all still have a lot of work to do, and a long way to go…]
Northeast Passage is a group of dedicated individuals at the University of New Hampshire “empowering individuals with disabilities to define, pursue, and achieve their Therapeutic Recreation and Adaptive Sports goals.” In late summer 2000, a group with NE Passage trekked to the newly renovated Galehead Hut in NH’s White Mountains.
Here’s a short story we made from that weekend:
If the embedded video is not displaying for you, try watching on Vimeo
The inspiration for the trek was the uproar over upgrades that were done to the rustic cabin located on Forest Service land, which required meeting current ADA spec. Many in the AMC community thought the ADA requirements were balderdash and poppycock (although they used less colorful language) and railed that the next step would be paving the pathway itself.
For Jill and the team at NE Passage: challenge accepted. Three wheelchair users and two crutchers completed the climb, and I was charged with documenting the event. In addition to recording much of the video you see (while hiking the trail myself), I also coordinated a 2nd unit and sound recordist – couldn’t have done this without Tom & Mark – plus a “sherpa” who brought fresh production supplies. Also embedded on the trek was a reporter and photographer for the New York Times, as well as another video crew. Almost a bit of a circus swirling around the actual hikers…
Heading down the mountain after two nights in the hut, the team was met by hikers coming up the trail with a copy of the day’s NYT – we were the first story from the University of NH to make the front page of the Old Gray Lady. (Below the fold – but still!)
This video is one of the stories we made from the footage – it ran during an intermission in NHPTV’s coverage of a UNH Hockey game…and that’s how I got an Emmy on my shelf. We also completed a half-hour feature on the trek commissioned by the UNH Foundation. (I sure wish I’d saved a copy of that one, as there is a ton more footage and fun.)
To my great surprise, I was less tired or sore after getting home than I expected I would be. Something in the work and the people I was with was keeping me going with ease. Working with Northeast Passage on this project and many others informed my thinking about life and how inclusive actions make us all better people with fuller experiences. I am grateful I got to know Jill and the others, and feel lucky to have tagged along.
Meanwhile… I recently discovered a 20-year retrospective video on the trek put together by my friends at Northeast Passage. Watching it, you can see what a difference the trek made to so many people – our teams, yes, but even folks who weren’t part of the challenge.
I can’t embed the video, but you can watch it on YouTube. That’s Jill Gravink, Founder and Director of Northeast Passage at the beginning.
To this day, I have yet to experience anything like this project. It was hard work, sure – even the day before the trek we climbed some supplies to the hut and did some test footage. During the hike up, I bounced between the lead and middle teams, and probably climbed the trail twice. On the way down, again I bounced, from the middle team to the last team, at one point, I ditched the camera to lend an extra set of hands and getting chair down Jacob’s Ladder.
Then I hiked back up to retrieve it, and hustle back to leapfrog those folks and find the group further down.
I have never worked so hard for a story before, let alone a story that meant so much to so many. Thanks, Jill (and everyone!) for having me along.
An interesting read this morning over the tea and toast from the Chronicle of Higher Education that looks at the astronomical figures that make up the salary line of Div. 1 colleges and universities. Well, not the entire salary picture – my own personal experience has been that most public employees aren’t getting even proportionally outsized salaries. No, those astronomical numbers occur consistently in one department across our nation’s campuses: the athletic department.
Joy Blanchard, an associate professor of higher education at Louisiana State University, calculated the difference between her salary and that of her university’s head football coach at the time, Edward Orgeron … Blanchard wanted to know how long it would take him, at his salary, to earn her salary. The answer? Just 2.6 days.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/colleges-are-paying-big-bucks-for-coaches-heres-what-else-they-couldve-spent-the-money-on
Yes, the story does explain the different pools of money that fund athletics versus the rest of the academic enterprise; it discusses the role of donors to lessen the demand of general funds or tuition revenues to make our sports coaches the highest paid public employees in every state. I get all that.
But I’ve been in higher ed for more than three decades and the reality is that the number of athletics programs that are truly fiscally independent, that don’t exert a downward drag on campus finances is a mere handful.
More often than not, athletics budgets magically show up as “balanced” only because the rest of their host campus foots the bill for additional costs, be they infrastructure (building maintenance, parking structures, silly things like internet, phones, and employer costs for employee health care, workers comp, etc.) or just direct subsidies for academic assistance (often in gated facilities available only to athletic elites, not the general student population who may need them, too…). all the way up to direct repayment of debts incurred because, in many – most – cases the athletics enterprise operates in the red and ultimately the institution is the co-signer on the loan and must make good.
I don’t hate athletics, and have been known to root, root, root for the home teams from time to time, but I find it terribly unsettling where the coach salary arms race has taken us – all of use – in recent years. The numbers we spend in one place versus another say a lot more about our priorities than any W/L columns or championship banners can ever replace.
Arms race, Eric?
Sure. Why not? Kinda reminds me of a bumper sticker…
