Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/magazine/ai-university-college-california.html

by jeffwass • 2 months ago

107 113 2 months ago

nytimes.com

https://archive.ph/TNLUr

noosphr3• 2 months ago

California’s public universities spent $16.9 million on A.I. during a financial crisis, and the result has been chaos.

So peanuts.

The public universities budget in California is something like 60 billion.

This isn't even a rounding error.

vermilingua3• 2 months ago

[flagged]

AceJohnny2• 2 months ago

Money is fungible. Budgets are not.

dvt2• 2 months ago

The idea that AI is somehow at fault for the absolute fiscal disaster the UC and the CSU systems find themselves in is laughable at best and damaging at worst. These systems (and I say this as a graduate of UCLA that was on a full academic scholarship) have been taken over by parasitic administrators and bureaucracies-on-top-of-bureaucracies that have milked not only the students, but also the taxpayers, completely dry. Tuition has consistently gone up since the 70s, while housing, facility, classroom quality have all gone down.

It's been literally the biggest grift of the past 50 years[1]. Education should be free.

[1] https://eliterate.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Tuition.png

qsxfthnkp2322• 2 months ago

16.9M would have helped pay for quite a bit of student aid.

noosphr3• 2 months ago

Why not ask about the mismanagement of the other 60 billion?

throwawaytea• 2 months ago

The money spent goes to people, that give it to other people. They didn't just burn it.

dang2• 2 months ago

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mystraline2• 2 months ago

spent $16.9 million on A.I.

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

hparadiz• 2 months ago

I use it in the field and my usage isn't even $1000 yet. I think I might be just now getting there after 6 months.

dkarl• 2 months ago

Some have chosen to link their fate to the technology, dedicating themselves to learning prompt engineering, while others are staging a revolt against it.

I don't understand why these are seen as mutually exclusive choices. I think I would be in both of these camps if I were a student.

warkdarrior2• 2 months ago

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

dwa3592• 2 months ago

a very good question. and yes, it's the protest against using AI while knowing if it doens't work out the way the protestor intended then they will fall behind. so the protestor wants everyone to stop and pay attention and think about what students and teachers are being asked to embrace, while they are also going ahead and using it because they know otherwise they'll hurt their chances at success if the tide doesn't subside.

it's okay to be in multiple camps when things change fast. its a survival instinct.

ordersofmag• 2 months ago

It's like you're making the best you can of the current situation you find yourself in as an individual while also working toward changing the overall situation.

epihelix2• 2 months ago

Can't speak for the OP, but I find LLMs extremely useful in some work contexts, while also being horrified and appalled at how my Uni is trying to apply these tools ad nauseum on everything.

So yes, both attitudes are simultaneously possible.

beej712• 2 months ago

You need to be clear on the usage. It's like how we're all pro-knife and anti-knife at the same time.

jimbokun4• 2 months ago

Society would be better served if AI was eradicated tomorrow.

But since that’s not going to happen it’s in everyone’s self interest to use AI as effectively as possible.

It’s the world’s biggest Prisoner’s Dilemma.

jimbokun4• 2 months ago

Yes, that describes most of us right now.

Reubend• 2 months ago

A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It’s Tearing Itself Apart.

The NYT often has a bias against AI, but the article's contents are actually a pretty reasonable summary of the different attitudes towards AI in academia. Then they went and slapped a terribly sensationalist headline on it, which doesn't seem well supported by the actual article.

Cyclone_• 2 months ago

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

donohoe2• 2 months ago

That was true 29, 40, 80 years ago

frereubu• 2 months ago

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.

kibwen2• 2 months ago

If the NYT is the same as British newspapers, the person who wrote the article doesn't write the headline.

This has been the case for essentially all newspapers since time immemorial. Reporters write the articles, editors write the headlines.

laughingcurve• 2 months ago

Classic NYT

bbor• 2 months ago

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!

dang2• 2 months ago

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)

Avicebron• 2 months ago

I feel like adding more internships with the companies like OpenAI, Oracle, etc would go a long way in improving outcomes and is probably even cheaper than donating licenses and compute.

pesus3• 2 months ago

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

vondur3• 2 months ago

Yeah, I work at a CSU and the Teacher's union is against AI. However, the layoffs happened at some of the CSU's where enrollment numbers are drastically down. I think Sonoma State is having a really bad time getting students and CSU Dominguez Hills has always had issues with attracting students compared to nearby CSU Long Beach. I'd imagine at some point these campuses may end up on the chopping block.

wyager3• 2 months ago

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?

b40d-48b2-979e• 2 months ago

Can one really not imagine a case where the cheating machine being used by students is a bad thing for teachers? Does everything have to be "politically motivated"?

pesus3• 2 months ago

There are tons of reasons AI is actively making the school system worse (amongst many other aspects of society). Immediately jumping to "political coalition thing" seems strange.

ralph84• 2 months ago

Unions are always against whatever management wants. Then it becomes a bargaining chip for what the union wants. That's how collective bargaining works.

ashdksnndck• 2 months ago

I think unions in industries where their workers are at risk of eventually getting replaced by AI are pretty universally against it, because protecting the jobs of members is the whole purpose of a union. It’s like how the teamsters are against self-driving cars.

p1necone• 2 months ago

Dismissing opinions you don't like by arbitrarily classifying them as "political" vs "not political" is lazy and dishonest.

mold_aid2• 2 months ago

Why wouldn't the political coalition of teachers not be a "real" teacher-related reason? It is not illegal, at this point in time, for teachers to oppose AI for political reasons.

As others note, there are a lot of reasons for teachers to refuse or hate AI, though in my experience most don't know shit about it and just want students to stop using it as an expedient. I, for instance, take a look at the tiny Dell cubes that have barely powered our Windows workstations and hilariously bedraggled Prometheus units and anticipate "well, we can't even afford to update these pieces of shit, so I suppose as a 'Microsoft shop' we'll be on a upgrade path to CoPilot-enabled cloud computing or some bullshit like that, then it'll really be all over" so my primary concerns are infrastructural. But god yeah the AI writing I get, jesus. These kids think they're driving around in the AI equivalent of Lambos, but free tier CoPilot is a used 2017 Chevy Cruze.

vondur3• 2 months ago

I guess I should qualify that, many professors are ambivalent regarding AI, but some view it as an existential threat to their profession. Most here are scrambling to figure out ways to work around it if not incorporate some AI into the curriculum, since every student has access to ChapGPT and many also have access to CoPilot.

warkdarrior2• 2 months ago

the Teacher's union is against AI

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

snapetom• 2 months ago

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.

jimbokun4• 2 months ago

Maybe they can open a campus in Texas where all their residents are moving to.

altairprime4• 2 months ago

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).

skybrian3• 2 months ago

I’m usually pretty YIMBY, but I would make an exception for a place that just had a catastrophic wildfire. (That is, unless something’s been done to lower the wildfire risk.)

vondur3• 2 months ago

I don't think you can just appropriate the property that burned down and then build high density housing. I'd imagine the people probably want to rebuild their homes and move back. There's probably other land that can be used for more high density housing.

nradov3• 2 months ago

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?

harshreality• 2 months ago

The university now has an A.I. librarian

Isn't this one of the better uses of AI? Any librarian would have knowledge gaps and bias. Librarian-provided info is best-effort and not considered perfect. They're librarians, not subject matter experts. An AI could give (and cache, since books don't change) summaries of any book, and compare them, far better than a librarian except for niche areas a particular librarian might have read themselves.

epihelix2• 2 months ago

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.

goatlover• 2 months ago

Physical libraries still serve as a place students go to study. It's not about the books, it's having a designated quiet place along with meeting rooms and what not, in addition to computers and printers they can use.

TFNA2• 2 months ago

"For STEM, at least" is doing a lot of work there. In fields like history, archaeology, and linguistics a lot of important research is only on paper. For the last decade, colleagues and I have been scanning publications and uploading them to the shadow libraries, but we have barely scratched the surface.

nitwit005• 2 months ago

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

elicash• 2 months ago

In addition to the welcome message for incoming students, she has used her A.I. avatar to communicate with parents and alumni in languages she does not speak. She said she was working on creating a kind of hologram of herself that could do the same.

This reminded me of back when it was popular on websites to use transparent video to have owners of companies virtually "walk" onto the webpage and talk directly to the user. Stuff like https://newimagemedia.com/videopackages/walk-on-spokesperson... There's a similar awkward period right now as people try to figure out AI.

wr1276• 2 months ago

"This was not, in fact, Teniente-Matson addressing the new class, but her brand-new custom A.I. avatar."

Why is it always the same kind of intellectually challenged people who need custom avatars?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU

“Our professors were pretty anti-A.I., and then C.S.U. signed the contract with OpenAI and things changed,”

Ok, another corrupt university run by bribes.

phyzome• 2 months ago

A lot of this is about admins, but I also find it weird when university lecturers embrace LLMs, which are fundamentally opposed to the principles of academia as I understand it.

dyauspitr3• 2 months ago

What is this chaos? The article doesn’t mention any of it, just some small insignificant amount spent of implementing it.

chadash2• 2 months ago

Find me a university that bans AI usage on campus in CS courses. I don't mind if students have access to AI and use it to help study, but I want some kind of assurance that they are able to build things without using AI.

As a hiring manager, I will immediately prioritize hiring graduates of that school. I can teach someone who knows how to code how to use Claude Code. I find the other way around quite difficult.

justinator2• 2 months ago

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

chadash2• 2 months ago

I don't care if they can write bubble sort off the top of their head. I do care that when they were in class, they had to go through the exercise of implementing bubble sort in their algorithm, realizing that they had an off-by-one error, identifying the problem, and fixing it. School is like working out at the gym, and AI is like bringing a forklift to the squat rack.

tonymet• 2 months ago

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.

HDBaseT• 2 months ago

You could hire people who graduated prior to 2023~.

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

jimbokun4• 2 months ago

Well seems like this is de facto the way companies are hiring right now. Unemployment for new grads is much higher than for people who have been in the industry for a while.

dyauspitr3• 2 months ago

Completely unenforceable. How is this not immediately apparent?

greyface-• 2 months ago

If all assessment is proctored in-person, it's easily enforceable.

yalok2• 2 months ago

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...

hn_go_brrrrr• 2 months ago

I guess if I were in school today, I would be accused of using AI on my homework, as I did very well on all of my projects and bombed my tests. My professors all recognized my hard work and gave me good grades, but I feel like that wouldn't go the same way today.

yalok2• 2 months ago

just saw a relevant HN post about this very matter in Berkley - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392004

beej712• 2 months ago

I asked my students how they felt about having AI teacher avatars and they had a lot of negative things to say. The one thing that stood out the most to me was "it's disrespectful".

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 months ago

Actual title: A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It's Tearing Itself Apart.

BobbyTables2• 2 months ago

Elementary and secondary schools are too content to use AI both for test question generation and grading of student responses…

What are we even doing here?

Different attitudes towards AI in California's university system

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