Mentorship vs Career Advancement

The academics who climb fastest are not always the ones who lift others.

This is one of the harder trade-offs in higher education.

Career advancement takes time. So does mentorship.

Writing grants. Publishing papers. Building a profile. Saying yes to the right opportunities. All of this competes with the slower, less visible work of developing other people.

I have worked across six universities in three countries. I have seen senior academics so focused on their own trajectory that early career researchers were left to figure things out alone. I have also seen professors who invested deeply in others and watched their own careers slow as a result.

The system does not reward mentorship the way it rewards output.

Promotion panels ask about publications, grants, impact. They rarely ask: who did you develop? Whose career exists because of your guidance?

Mentorship is leadership. But it is the kind that does not show up on a CV.

The academics I admire most found a way to do both. They advanced while making space for others to grow. But they did it despite the system, not because of it.

What would academia look like if mentorship counted as much as metrics?

Source: Professor Dorina Buda

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7476591363371802624/?origin=NETWORK_CONVERSATIONS

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI

  

As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities – and society at large

Lea Pao, a professor of literature at Stanford University, has been experimenting with ways to get her students to learn offline. She has them memorize poems, perform at recitation events, look at art in the real world.

It’s an effort to reconnect them to the bodily experience of learning, she said, and to keep them from turning to artificial intelligence to do the work for them. “There’s no AI-proof anything,” Pao said. “Rather than policing it, I hope that their overall experiences in this class will show them that there’s a way out.”

It doesn’t always work. Recently, she asked students to visit a local museum, look at a painting for 10 minutes, and then write a few paragraphs describing the experience. It was a purposefully personal assignment, yet one student responded with a sophisticated but drab reflection – “too perfect, without saying anything”, Pao said. She later learned the student had tried to visit the museum on a Monday, when it was closed, and then turned to AI.

As artificial intelligence has upended the way in which students read, learn and write, professors like Pao have been left to their own devices to figure out how to teach in a transformed landscape.

Many faculty members in the hard sciences and social sciences have pointed to the “productivity boost” AI can offer, and the research potential unlocked by its ability to process and analyze vast amounts of data. AI’s most enthusiastic proponents have boasted that the technology may help cure cancer and “accelerate” climate action.

But in fields most explicitly associated with the production of critical thought – what is collectively referred to as the “humanities” – most scholars see AI as a unique threat, one that extends far beyond cheating on homework and casts doubt on the future of higher education itself in a fast-approaching machine-dominated future.

American degrees often cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and result in decades of debt, and recent years have seen a freefall in public confidence in US higher education. With the potential for AI to increasingly substitute independent thought, a pressing question becomes even more urgent: what exactly is a university education for?

The Guardian spoke with more than a dozen professors – almost all of them in the humanities or adjacent fields – about how they are adapting at a time of dizzying technological advancement with few standards and little guidance.

By and large, they expressed the view that reliance on artificial intelligence is fundamentally antithetical to the development of human intelligence they are tasked with guiding. They described desperately trying to prevent students from turning to AI as a replacement for thought, at a time when the technology is threatening to upend not only their education, but everything from the stock market to social relations to war.

Most professors described the experience of contending with the technology in despairing terms. “It’s driving so many of us up the wall,” one said. “Generative AI is the bane of my existence,” another wrote in an email. “I wish I could push ChatGPT (and Claude, Microsoft Copilot, etc) off a cliff.”

“I now talk about AI with my students not under the framework of cheating or academic honesty but in terms that are frankly existential,” said Dora Zhang, a literature professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “What is it doing to us as a species?”

A 'soulless' education

AI criticism – or “doomerism”, as the technology’s proponents view it – has been mounting across sectors. But when it comes to its impact on students, early studies point to potentially catastrophic effects on cognitive abilities and critical thinking skills.

Michael Clune, a literature professor and novelist, said that, already, many students have been left “incapable of reading and analyzing, synthesizing data, all kinds of skills”. In a recent essay, he warned that colleges and universities rushing to embrace the technology were preparing to “self-lobotomize”.

Ohio State University, where he teaches, has begun requiring every freshman to take a class in generative AI and pitched itself as the first “AI fluent” university, pledging to embed AI “across every major”.

“No one knows what that means,” Clune said of the plan. “In my case, as a literature professor, these tools actually seem to mitigate against the educational goals I have for my students.”

That’s the crux of what many professors in the humanities fear: that technology that may well be a cutting-edge tool in other fields could spell the end of their own.

Alex Karp, the Palantir co-founder and CEO, stoked those anxieties when he said in a recent interview that AI will “destroy humanities jobs”. On the other hand, Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president and co-founder – who was a literature major – said the opposite: that “studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever”.

A number of tech and finance companies have recently said that they are looking to hire humanities majors for their creativity and critical thinking skills. Indeed, enrollment data at some universities suggests that the long-struggling humanities might have begun to see a resurgence in the age of AI, with early signs pointing to a reversal in decades-long decline in English majors in favor of Stem ones.

Some caution that the humanities will survive – but as a province of the few. When he predicted the end of the humanities, Karp assured that there would be “more than enough jobs” for those with vocational training. Indeed, several professors spoke about concerns that AI will exacerbate a widening divide in US higher education and that small numbers of elite students will have access to a more traditional, largely tech-free liberal arts education, while everyone else has a “degraded, soulless form of vocational training administered by AI instructors”, said Zhang.

“I fully expect that we will start seeing a kind of bifurcation in education,” said Matt Seybold, a professor at Elmira College in New York, who has written critically about “technofeudalism”.

Many professors talked about keeping the technology out of the classroom as a battle already lost. As many as 92% of students have reported resorting to the technology in their school work, recent surveys show, and the numbers are rapidly increasing even as growing numbers express concerns about the technology’s accuracy and the integrity of using it. Reliance on AI among faculty is also on the rise, with observers pointing to the dystopian possibility that the college experience may soon be reduced to AI systems grading AI-generated homework – “a conversation between two robots”.

Some universities have adopted AI detection software to catch artificially generated work; others prohibit faculty from directly accusing students of having used AI – as they can often be wrong.

Professors said they resorted to oral interrogations, handwritten notebooks and class participation for grading purposes. Some require students to submit transparency statements describing their work process. Others have reportedly injected random words like “broccoli” and “Dua Lipa” into assignments to confuse learning models – exposing students who did not even read the prompts before pasting them into AI.

Many professors spoke of their frustration at having to sift through students’ artificially generated homework. “It creates hours of additional labor,” echoed Danica Savonick, an English professor at the State University of New York Cortland. “And makes me feel like a cop.”

Some allow students to use AI for research – to a point. Karl Steel, an English professor at Brooklyn College, said that AI has helped make students’ presentations richer and more interesting – but that while they may use it to prepare, he has them speak from minimal notes and stand in front of a photo of a text they annotated by hand. He also assigns written responses to texts only after the class has discussed them. “I suppose they could use their phones to record the conversation, feed a transcript into a chatbot and produce a paper that way,” he said. “But that is more trouble, I think, than most students would take.”

Left to their own devices

Many universities’ administrations are embracing AI for instruction, research and evaluation. In some cases, AI has guided decisions about which programs to cut at times of austerity in the education sector.

More than a dozen universities have partnered with OpenAI on a $50m initiative that the company has said will “accelerate research progress and catalyze a new generation of institutions equipped to harness the transformative power of AI”. California State University has joined several of the world’s largest tech companies to “create an AI-powered higher education system”, as the university put it. Multiple universities have introduced AI majors and masters.

The plans are lofty but offer little guidance on what professors are supposed to do with students who can’t read more than a couple paragraphs at a time or turn in essays generated in seconds by a machine. Left largely to themselves, some are trying to articulate clearer lines around AI use, and organize a more coordinated effort against its encroaching dominance.

Last year, the American Association of University Professors, which represents 55,000 faculty members nationwide, published a report warning that universities were adopting the technology “uncritically” and with little transparency. Some university unions have begun incorporating protections against AI in their contracts to establish oversight mechanisms and give faculty greater input – and to protect their intellectual property from feeding machines that may soon take their jobs.

But much organizing against AI remains informal and via word of mouth, with faculty-led initiatives like the website Against AI, which offers resources to those trying to shield students from the intellectual ravages of outsourcing elements of their education to a machine.

“Materials here are intended as solidarity solace for educators who might find themselves inventing wheels alone while their administrators, trustees and bosses unrelentingly hype AI,” reads the website, which offers a list of assignment ideas to mitigate AI use – from oral exams, to requirements students submit photographic evidence of their notes, to analog journals.

Many of the professors interviewed by the Guardian said they ban AI in their classrooms altogether – but recognize their hardline approach is discipline-specific.

Megan McNamara, who teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and created a guide for faculty across disciplines to deal with AI-related academic misconduct, noted that “cultural” differences in the humanities versus Stem disciplines, or in qualitative social sciences versus quantitative ones, tend to shape faculty members’ responses to students’ use of AI.

“I think that’s just a function of one’s individual relationship with writing/reading/critical analysis,” she wrote in an email.

Several professors spoke of using the issue as an opportunity to get students to think critically about technology.

When she suspects someone has used AI, McNamara talks to them about it, treating the incident as an “opportunity for growth, restorative justice and enhanced authenticity in student-instructor relationships”, she said.

Eric Hayot, a comparative literature professor at Penn State University, said he tries to convince his students that tech companies are trying to make them “helpless” without their product.

“These companies are giving these technological tools away partly because they’re hoping to addict a generation of students,” Hayot told the Guardian. “This is part of every single class I teach now, talking to students about why I’m not using AI, why they shouldn’t use AI.”

‘We can decide that we want to be human’

Several professors noted that they have also begun to see mounting discomfort from students against the technology – and technology’s dominance in their lives overall.

Clune, the Ohio State professor, said students have become more curious about his flip phone, which he started using after realizing his smartphone was “destroying” his attention.

“I think the current crop of gen Z students are seeing that they are the guinea pigs in this giant social experiment,” said Zhang, the Berkeley professor.

“There’s a broader and increasing sense from students that something is being stolen from them,” echoed Seybold, the Elmira College professor.

Seybold pointed to students’ mounting disillusion with tech more broadly. Those who are rejecting AI, he added, are often driven by environmental concerns, and suspicion of companies they view as partly responsible for shrinking democracies and a more violent world.

In Michigan, for instance, that has spurred activism. The University of Michigan recently announced plans to contribute $850m toward a datacenter to provide AI infrastructure in collaboration with the Los Alamos National Laboratory – at a time when it is cutting funds for arts and humanities research and on the heels of anti-war protests on campus. A spokesperson for the university said that the planned facility would be smaller and consume less energy than a “typical datacenter”.

As pushback grows, so does an emphasis on those intrinsically human qualities that differentiate people from machines – the very qualities a humanistic education seeks to nurture.

“There’s kind of defeatism, this idea that there’s no stopping technology and resistance is futile, everything will be crushed in its path,” said Clune, the Ohio State professor. “That needs to change … We can decide that we want to be human.”

That idea has also been key to Pao’s approach to teaching in the age of AI.

“You plant seeds and you hope,” Pao said, of efforts that at times feel like tilting at windmills. “You hope that in the long term you’re helping them become happy human beings, who are able to take a walk, and experience things, and describe things for themselves.”

Source: Alice Speri

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/10/ai-impact-professors-students-learning

How to Become a Better Learner

Everybody hates that feeling when you spend three weeks reading a book, and a month later somebody asks you about it and you can’t remember a damn thing you read. Not only does it make you feel stupid, but it also makes you wonder why the hell you wasted a couple dozen hours of your life on a bunch of words that didn’t stick.

There are better and worse ways to learn. And interestingly, despite all of the babbling that goes on in school when you’re a kid about what you need to learn, not much is said about how to learn effectively.

And when I say “to learn effectively” what I mean is A) to not just accumulate knowledge but B) to be able to apply that knowledge effectively at some point in the future.

By this definition, much of what you did in school was not learning. It was temporary exercises in memorization. By this definition, most of the seminars and courses and books and conferences people spend money on is not learning either.

Something is not truly learned until it changes you in some way, no matter how subtle or simple.

1. Memory Is Based on Relevance

Since my book came out last year, I’ve done probably 500 different promotional things for it. But one of my favorites was participating in this online book club called Mentor Box.

Like most book clubs, Mentor Box sends you a couple books each month and you’re supposed to read them. But what’s cool about Mentor Box is not only do they send you the books, they send you study material related to the books, as well as video interviews with the authors. But their study materials, instead of being like school, where it asks you to repeat information in the book to help memorize it, are designed to force you to apply the lessons to various areas of your life.

That’s because memory works based on relevance. We’re selfish creatures by nature and we only remember what our brain has deemed important to our own lives. You can learn the coolest thing in the world, but if you don’t find a way to make it relevant to you and your well-being in some way, your brain will conveniently forget it.

If you want to remember information, then you need to stop and take a second to ask yourself, “How is this relevant to me?” or “How can I apply this in my life?” You basically have to get personal with it. And if you’re not willing to get personal or think about your own life critically in that way, then most of the information you consume will just wash away.

Mentor Box is a great tool, but you can do this on your own when you’re reading at home. You can go out and buy a notebook (or keep a folder on your computer) and every time you come across something interesting in a book, write down its application or relevance to something in your life — how you can use the concept, how it explains something in your past, how it can help with your problems, etc.

Basically, you need to approach whatever material you’re studying with a clear purpose in your mind. You can’t just read a book to say you read it. That’s like dating someone just to say you dated them. It’s empty and pointless and soon you’ll forget it ever happened. Go into everything you read with a clear purpose of what you want to get out of it, then do the extra mental steps to make sure that happens.

2. Memory Functions by Association, Not by Blind Recall

We’ve all had that experience of watching a documentary or something, and then when we try to think back a couple days later, not remembering what was in it.

That’s because blindly recalling information out of the blue rarely works, and is not an efficient way for our brain to work.

Our memory works via associations. For instance, I saw a documentary a few years ago about the Soviet Union hockey team. It was one of those things that I not only forgot what was in it, but forgot that I had even watched it.

Then, a couple months ago, I was talking to a guy who was writing a book about teamwork. He mentioned something about hockey and the documentary immediately shot back into my head. I started describing it to him, and suddenly flashes of various scenes and interviews started returning to my conscious memory.

The information had always been in my head, it just hadn’t been accessible because it wasn’t associated or relevant to anything I was discussing.

Understanding that memory works in this way is useful though because it means you can become more economical in what you choose to remember and what you don’t.

In this day and age, where we can Google and Wiki everything, sometimes just remembering the core idea or general principle behind a book or article is useful enough in and of itself. I couldn’t tell you the studies or statistics about men’s job prospects and college graduation rates, but I do know they’re declining and I do remember there’s a famous article from The Atlantic (and book) that I could easily look up if I wanted to know all of that stuff (I just did, it’s here). I remember the principle point is that new technologies are creating an economy where the skills that men excel at are no longer as useful as those that women excel at. I couldn’t tell you anything else about the article, but I know enough to find it, pull it up and grab whatever facts I may need and then move on.

3. Reading Does Not Have to Be Linear

Another mistake a lot of people make is assuming that they have to read everything, line by line, one after another. This is not only not true, but it’s often a waste of time and energy.

If you’re reading a nonfiction book and you already understand the main idea of a paragraph, skip to the next one. If you’re reading a study or story that you’ve heard before, skip it (unless you want to reinforce it, of course). If a book is kind of bad and there’s really only one chapter that sounds appealing, just read that chapter and put the rest away.

When you buy a book, you’re not buying the words, you’re buying the useful ideas. The job of the writer is simply to convey those ideas as efficiently as possible. If the writer is doing a poor job of that, then take it upon yourself and act accordingly.

The point of a book (or article, or video, or podcast) is to glean the information that is relevant and important to you. Not to finish it or to understand every word. What matters is the principle or key idea. Everything else is merely a vehicle designed to get that principle or idea to as many people as possible. Once you’ve received that principle/idea, there’s no reason to feel obligated to sit there and read/watch/listen to the rest (unless you want to).

4. Thinking Critically and Asking the Right Questions

Everything you read should be questioned. You should question the author’s biases, whether they’re interpreting information correctly, whether they’re overlooking something.

One thing I try to force myself to do, especially when I’m reading something I agree with, is ask, “How could this potentially be wrong?”

You’ll be surprised how often you come up with stuff.

Other useful questions to ask after everything you read include:

• “How does the author benefit from writing this?”
• “Is this something relevant to my own life and happiness? Is it worth remembering?”
• “What’s the underlying principle here? How could it be applied to other areas of life?”

The truth is, there’s little that we know with absolute certainty. Most models and theories have little empirical support for them (looking at you personality tests), and outside of the hard sciences, much of the academic research out there is flimsy at best, and outright misleading and wrong at worst.

Everything should be taken with a grain of salt (including what I’m writing right here), for the simple reason that almost everything is largely uncertain. And it’s the ability to navigate those uncertainties effectively that will determine the depth of your knowledge and understanding, NOT the simple ability to memorize a bunch of facts and numbers.

Source: Mark Manson

https://markmanson.medium.com/how-to-become-a-better-learner-c1def7f9d5da

English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings

Amid the rise of artificial intelligence and concerns about distraction, more English professors are turning to no-technology policies that prioritize physical books and reading packets.

This academic year, some English professors have increased their preference for physical copies of readings, citing concerns related to artificial intelligence.

Many English professors have identified the use of chatbots as harmful to critical thinking and writing. Now, professors who had previously allowed screens in class are tightening technology restrictions.

Professor Kim Shirkhani, who teaches “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” explained that for about a decade prior to this semester, she did not require printed readings. This semester, she is requiring all students to have printed options.

“Over the years I’ve found that when students read on paper they're more likely to read carefully, and less likely in a pinch to read on their phones or rely on chatbot summaries,” Shirkhani wrote to the News. “This improves the quality of class time by orders of magnitude.”

As the course director for “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” Shirkhani leaves the decision of allowing technology in the classroom up to each individual instructor. Yet others have followed her practice.

Last semester, professor Pamela Newton, who also teaches the course, allowed students to bring readings either on tablets or in printed form. While laptops felt like a “wall” in class, Newton said, students could use iPads to annotate readings and lie them flat on the table during discussions. However, Newton said she felt “paranoid” that students could be texting during class.

This semester, Newton has removed the option to bring iPads to class, except for accessibility needs, as a part of the general movement in the “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay” seminars to “swim against the tide of AI use,” reduce “the infiltration of tech,” and “go back to pen and paper,” she said.

Regarding the printing cost, Newton and Shirkhani both emphasized that Yale has programs to help students who need financial assistance paying for printing.

“I totally get that cost and the burden of that cost,” Newton said in an interview. “I kind of feel like there's going to be a book in most classes that you have to buy, and the course package just sort of replaces a physics textbook.”

Spring semester courses offered a total of 34 TYCO packets this year, up from 20 at the same point last spring, according to archived versions of the TYCO Student Course Packet website. Fall semester courses increased from 30 packets in 2024 to 35 last semester.

TYCO Print is a printing service where professors can upload course files for TYCO to print out for students as they order. Shorter packets can cost around $20, while longer packets can cost upwards of $150 when ordered with the cheapest binding option.

Other English professors are maintaining preexisting no-technology policies.

Professor Nancy Yousef, continuing from her approach at previous schools, has kept a requirement for printed readings.

“The English classroom is increasingly a kind of special place where it’s still possible to converse without the screen,” Yousef said in a phone interview. “AI only seems to make it more imperative to make sure that students are having a direct experience with the text.”

Yousef explained that literature courses are a “practice of attention and a practice of learning how to ask a good question.” Yousef said she hopes students come away from class with greater questions and increased engagement with the texts rather than “a set of bullet points that can go on a PowerPoint.”

Writing professor Anne Fadiman wrote to the News that she asks students to buy the course packet and, when possible, to use physical copies of the books.

“When you read a book or a printed course packet, you turn real pages instead of scrolling, so you have a different, more direct, and (I think) more focused relationship with the words,” Fadiman wrote.

Professors who continue to allow technology in their classroom cite printing costs and concerns about paper usage.

Professor Stephanie Kelley does not require students to bring printed readings and allows technology “for accessibility, cost-related and environmental reasons.” While she has noticed students being distracted during class, such as by online shopping, she wrote to the News that “it can be a lot of paper, most of it going straight in the bin once class is done.”

Kelley wrote that she wonders why the discussion of course material costs “more often falls on humanities classes rather than those with required textbooks that are often prohibitively expensive to rent or purchase.”

In the fall, Yale College Council Senators Siena Valdivia ’28, Alex Chen ’28 and Alexander Medel ’27 — who is a staff writer for the News — sponsored a $3,500 stipend prioritizing first-generation, low-income students to receive financial aid for printing costs. Medel and Senator Aaron Lin ’28 also sponsored a $6,000 stipend to “alleviate the cost of course materials and textbooks for Yale College students.” These stipends come from the YCC budget.

“In an ideal world, printing would be subsumed into the fiscal responsibilities of the university. But under further priority reconfiguring in light of the endowment tax, any such changes face an uphill climb,” Chen wrote to the News, referring to the upcoming increase in the federal tax on Yale’s investment returns, which was enacted as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year.

For Yale students, printing one double-sided black-and-white page on a University printer costs 12 cents.

Source: Jolynda Wang

https://yaledailynews.com/articles/english-professors-double-down-on-requiring-printed-copies-of-readings

New Study Reveals The Single Most Important Factor for Learning Rate

Recently, I wrote a defense of psychologist John Carroll's claim that what separated stronger and weaker students wasn't a fundamental difference in learning potential, but a difference in learning rate. Some people learn faster and others more slowly, but provided the right environment, essentially anyone can learn anything.

In arguing that, I primarily wanted to dispute the common belief that talent sets hard limits on the skill and knowledge you can eventually develop. Not everyone could become a doctor, physicist or artist, the reasoning goes, because some people will hit a limit on how much they can learn.

However, in arguing that the primary difference between students was learning rate, I may have also been committing an error!

A recent paper I encountered suggests that the rate of learning among students doesn't actually differ all that much. Instead, what differs mostly between students is their prior knowledge.

"An Astonishing Regularity"

The paper, "An astonishing regularity in student learning rate," was authored by Kenneth Koedinger and colleagues. They observed over 6000 students engaged in online courses in math, science, and language learning, ranging from elementary school to college.

Source: Scott H. Young

https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/new-study-reveals-the-single-most-important-factor-for-learning-rate-acc9042c00c6