Faculty Must Protect Their Labor from AI Replacement

If college faculty are going to survive in a world of artificial intelligence, they’re going to have to start to see themselves as laborers first.

And by survive, I mean survive, as in continue to actually exist.

I feel like I’m well equipped to help here.

I could not give you the exact date I personally urged a tenured faculty member to think of themselves as a laborer, but it was sometime in the early aughts.

We were talking about teaching summer school courses, which our institution compensated according to a percentage of our base salary. The higher the salary, the more you made to teach the seven-week summer session. The tenured faculty person was remarking how great the money was considering the amount of work. I felt similarly, even at my much lower salary, and even as we were teaching the exact same course.

But I remarked to him, given there was sufficient capacity among nontenured instructors to cover the student summer course demand, I thought it was inevitable that one of two things would happen: 1. Either the current policy prioritizing tenured faculty when it came to assigning summer hours would end, or, 2. The summer course compensation would be capped at or around what I was being paid, regardless of rank.

I could tell, because of the length of the pause I’d triggered, that this very smart, thoughtful young professor had never considered the labor structures of his own job, or that it was inevitable administrators would see the potential to save several thousand dollars per course by giving them to lower-paid instructors as a no-brainer.

As it turned out, scenario two became the choice the very next year, delivering this professor a several-thousand-dollar-a-year pay cut in the process.

I’ve been writing about the structures of academic labor pretty much since I moved in here, many times trying to raise a flag of attention for tenured folks by pointing out not pushing back with all their might against the devaluation of teaching through the steady process of adjunctification was going to ultimately erode the job quality for all faculty.

In 2016, I published the classic “If Tenured Want to Survive, Pay Your Adjuncts.”

It included this banger of a paragraph, penned when the entire world was certain Donald Trump was not going to become president.

But in a world where public support of public higher ed continues to decline, where the professoriate is viewed by large swaths of the country as something between a political opponent and a fifth column traitor, where a U.S. senator in all seriousness proposes that a Ken Burns documentary can substitute for college credit in the interests of breaking up the ‘higher education cartel,’ you better believe that they’re coming for everyone and ‘tenure’ is a pretty poor shield.”

Conditions for faculty of all stripes are obviously worse on every single front today.

Less than a month later, I tried a different angle—“Faculty Are Laborers, Not ‘Knowledge Workers’”—in which I pointed out what I thought should be obvious, that for most faculty members, the work of scholarship, which consisted of a significant portion of the rationale for what they were paid, had no value in a capitalist marketplace from which college faculty were no longer insulated.

Most academic research is part of a ‘gift economy’—where something is given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards—rather than a free market capitalist one. While academic publishers make money from faculty research—by selling it back to libraries; what a deal!—they rely on the institutions themselves to make the economics of the gift economy work by bestowing increased compensation and security upon tenurable faculty.

But we should not kid ourselves. In a capitalist system, rather than a gift economy, that vast majority of that knowledge work has almost zero economic value.

For a long time, faculty were insulated from these realities because as a culture we agreed to value knowledge for its own sake, and even subsidize the creation of that knowledge with public funds. People were willing to allow college faculty to exist inside that gift economy.

But the times have changed.”

We should note that the times had changed well before I wrote that blog post in 2016, but even at the time, I recall significant pushback from some folks in the comments who were willing to grant my point over the inequities of in terms of compensation between different classes of faculty but also insisted that by and large tenured faculty were powerless to resist these trends.

That may have been true. It also may be true that faculty of all stripes feel powerless to resist the imposition of generative AI technologies into their labor. The same logic that begat adjunctification will lead to the next step—let’s call it bot-ification—as humans are replaced by generative AI–powered “agents.”

While we may feel powerless, we cannot act like we are if we expect to maintain a world in which faculty exist.

This is why I am continuously surprised and dismayed to see some faculty embrace uses of this technology that inevitably devalues their human labor. Using generative AI for lesson plans, or feedback, or course management is, ultimately, not a route toward making individual faculty more productive and effective but is instead a direct path to obviating the human role in teaching.

A PR release from the UCLA Newsroom about a comparative lit class that is using a “UCLA-developed AI system” to substitute for labor that was previously done by faculty or teaching assistants lays out the whole deal. The course textbook has been generated from the professor’s previous course materials. Students will interact with the AI-driven courseware. A professor and teaching assistants will remain, for now, but for how long?

The professor argues—I would say rationalizes—that this is good for students because “Normally, I would spend lectures contextualizing the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content. But now all of that is in the textbook we generated, and I can actually work with students to read the primary sources and walk them through what it means to analyze and think critically.”

(Note: Whenever I see someone touting the benefit of an AI-driven practice as good pedagogy, I wonder what is stopping them from doing it without the AI component, and the answer is usually nothing.)

An additional apparent benefit is “that the platform can help professors ensure consistent delivery of course material. Now that her teaching materials are organized into a coherent text, another instructor could lead the course during the quarters when Stahuljak isn’t teaching—and offer students a very similar experience.”

The delivery has become efficient and consistent. This is the stuff of markets, not teaching and learning. The professor is now apparently interchangeable. How long will it take before someone decides the professor is unnecessary?

I actually find it shocking that anyone would give over their intellectual property for such an exercise, which makes me wonder if this professor is being compensated beyond their base salary for pursuing such “innovations.” If not, it’s an absolutely foolhardy choice. If so, it’s selling out all future instructional laborers for individual gain.

Either way, it’s the pattern of adjunctification repeating, as relatively well-off tenured faculty protect their individual privileges by permitting the future immiseration of others.

In contrast to the UCLA press release, I was pleased to read an IHE story by Kathryn Palmer on faculty in the Universities of Wisconsin System who are pushing back against a change in copyright policy that “they believe would cheapen the relationship between students and their professors and potentially allow artificial intelligence bots to replace faculty members.”

In essence, the institutions are claiming copyrights, “a non-exclusive license to use syllabi in furtherance of its business needs and mission,” over faculty instructional materials, the very things that are being used in the above example of the comparative lit course at UCLA.

The UW System spokesperson claims there’s nothing to see here, but the faculty are justifiably alarmed and working to push back against any change in copyright and to prevent future misuse of their materials.

The faculty recognize that their labor has value, and to allow the materials generated by their labor to be assumed by another party, or separated from their ongoing work as laborers, augurs a bad future for faculty.

For institutions and students, too, I would argue, though we shouldn’t expect administrators in the thrall of increased efficiency and productivity to recognize this. It is also very much in the plans of the companies developing generative AI (and whatever’s next) to replace human labor with their technology. There is no way to justify the trillions of dollars going into the technology’s development otherwise.

We’ve seen this play before. Let’s not fall for it again.