Greetings from a rainy, chilly northeastern Virginia day. I’m buried on work, especially on climate change and AI, but wanted to note this story as I keep modeling post-peak higher education. In Minnesota is a pair of campuses, the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, which, while separately…

The generative AI world continues to develop at a very fast pace. I’m buried in project work right now, but wanted to quickly note some developments. The big announcement today was OpenAI’s launch of GPT-4, the next version of its large learning model. …

How can higher education reimagine itself in response to the climate crisis? I’ve been exploring this question for years, and was very happy to encounter a new paper offering an intriguing call for academic design. It’s about donut economics. To explain too briefly: professor Kate Raworth introduced the donut economics…

How do we think about large fossil fuel companies donating funds to universities? How might our attitudes change as the climate crisis worsens? These questions came to mind as I read a new report from Data for Progress. …

How might we use generative AI tools in higher education? Many address this issue by focusing on chatbots as writing apps, trying to think through what the technology means for teaching writing. While this is obviously a major part of the topic, I think we need to explore other, emerging…

How can a non-profit respond to financial stresses? In non-profit higher education one response is to cut back on services and staff. When a college or university does this, I call it a “queen sacrifice.” That’s a term from chess, when a player gives up their most powerful piece —…

As people grapple with ChatGPT 3 and other instances of generative artificial intelligence, we sometimes turn to imagination in order to describe and understand the technology. I’ve seen folks raise the Terminator movies, HAL-9000, and generic scary robots to express their fears, for example. Others use history, bring up comparisons…

For the past two months I’ve been scrambling to work on generative AI. That’s the phrase I prefer to corral together ChatGPT, art generators like DALL-E, and any AI-driven software which helps us make content. Besides hosting Forum sessions (some of our best attended and viewed: 1, 2, 3) I’ve…

One way colleges and universities can respond to rising financial pressure is to cut personnel. Sometimes they fire tenure-track faculty, either by removing their academic programs or by declaring financial emergency. This is a policy I’ve dubbed “the queen sacrifice,” based on the chess gambit of giving up one’s most…