AI is an Academic Freedom Issue

Faculty must be given voice and choice on these matters

At times, the arrival of generative AI on school campuses feels like a tsunami, a force of nature that cannot be resisted by mere human agency.

The sudden ubiquity of this technology and the seemingly steep curve of increasing capabilities of the AI models make it difficult to wrap one’s head around the way this technology implicates faculty (and student) freedoms. We have been led to believe that AI is “inevitable,” so it is our job to adapt to some new reality imposed upon us.

But it’s clear that using the frame of inevitability runs the risk of sidelining the kinds of deliberative work rooted in instructional values that are at the center of this aspect of the practice of academic freedom.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) just released a “Statement on Educational Technologies and AI” that illustrates some of the growing tensions around institutional embrace of technology - often without any faculty input, let alone authority - and academic freedom.

The statement is predicated on the relatively recent release of “agentic AI,” browsers capable of operating inside of campus courseware, completing modules entirely unaided by humans.

Anna Mills

shared a video demonstration showing how easy this truly is.

This is a step beyond even students plugging questions into an AI model and sharing those answers as their own. The MLA statement acknowledges a couple of aspects of technology inside our institutions which we must grapple with, including the fact that software should be viewed as at least as important to the learning equation as classrooms and other physical facilities, and is perhaps more important given how this software mediates the relationships between instructors and students.

This software, which has direct impacts on an instructor’s ability to do their work with students, has been appearing, unbidden and mostly without faculty conversation, for more than two decades, and this has been a mistake. I have a strong memory of the arrival of Blackboard in my classroom when I was teaching at Virginia Tech in the early 2000s. At first, I thought it was a godsend. No more having to print everything for students or complaints that they’d lost a reading or assignment.

What’s your grade? Look at Blackboard. Attendance policy? Check the syllabus, which is on Blackboard. What’s due when? The entire semester is right there, on the learning management system, a marvel of organization and efficiency.

Unfortunately, over time, I experienced the ways that the Learning Management System (Blackboard in my case, but the same applies to Moodle, Canvas, et al.) undermined some of the very abilities I was hoping to help students develop in their writing: planning, agency, and self-direction. The omnipresence of the grade book emphasized an aspect of the course that I was trying to de-emphasize in my instruction. The LMS was, on the whole, disempowering in terms of student development.

By the end of my full-time teaching career, I’d almost stopped using it entirely, primarily relying on it for announcements. (It’s possible that I was violating institutional policy, but, as a contingent instructor, I had my own academic freedom of the “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” variety.)

The eroding effect of the LMS on student development was only revealed over time, while the danger of agentic browsers engaging with courseware is an immediately obvious problem. The MLA:

1. “Advocates for full faculty and instructional involvement, including faculty of languages, literatures, and the humanities, at all levels of decision-making in the selection, procurement, and responsible implementation of instructional technology systems and software, including those incorporating AI.
   
   The instructional mission cannot be fulfilled in the absence of faculty expertise, and this expertise extends not only to the “content” of the curriculum but also to the infrastructures and environments—virtual and otherwise—in which learning happens.
   

2. Calls upon law- and policymakers, LMS vendors, and companies offering agent-based AI browsers to cooperate in order to prevent misuse and to ensure that academic institutions have the ability and option to block agentic AI when needed.
   
   Without dedicated outside cooperation from lawmakers and technology providers, academic institutions may not have the technical capacity to do so on their own.”

If we believe that academic work should have any integrity, these should be a no-brainer. At the same time, we should step back and examine how various AI “partnerships” between tech companies and institutions have been signed without faculty consultation.

An AAUP survey released this past summer found that three-quarters of faculty reported that administrators “‘overwhelmingly’ lead conversations about introducing AI into research, teaching, policy, and professional development, but gather ‘little meaningful input’ from faculty members, staff or students.”

Fifteen percent of faculty said that AI use is mandated by their institution. While that number may seem relatively small, in the interests of academic freedom, shouldn’t that number be, I don’t know…zero?

While mandatory Four in five faculty report that they are required to use their campus learning management system, systems which are now vulnerable to the technology that is being aggressively marketed to students.

Given what we now know about the influence of technology on how we engage students, there must be room for rejecting this technology at both the institutional and individual level, at least if we believe in academic freedom.

Writing recently at The Chronicle of Higher Education Ted Underwood argues that higher education must take the lead developing and exploring AI-powered applications in education. I am, personally, more open to the potential of resistance - particularly resistance rooted in student agency - than Underwood, but I agree that this technology is much better suited in the hands of institutions themselves than in the tech companies which are busy swallowing up centuries of knowledge production and selling it back to us through their models.

But for this productive exploration to happen, faculty (along with students) not only need to be at the table, but at the center of the discussion.

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The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.