My new book, The AI Crisis in Higher Education: A Strategic Proposal, is now available open access from the University of Manchester. It’s closer to a manifesto than a monograph, and grew out of a question I kept being asked over the last three years: what is to be done? I wrote the first draft in a very odd week I spent stranded in a hotel in Geneva after losing my passport, following a deeply thought-provoking series of workshops at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
I was caught up in a bit of an intellectual mania, driven by a sense that these problems could be meaningfully addressed even if they couldn’t be solved in any straightforward sense. The difficulty wasn’t a lack of possible responses. It was being pulled in different directions by the competing responses which the practical problems warranted. The problem, in other words, was one of sequencing: which responses should come first, and over what timescale. I came away from those workshops preoccupied by what I saw as the likely bursting of the AI bubble, and by the failure of university strategy to address it. The book is my attempt to work through that problem: why adapting to AI and integrating AI keep undercutting each other, and what a university might do in the meantime, which I call strategic under-integration.
There will be a book launch at the University of Manchester library on October 13th at 1pm where I’m delighted that Helen Beetham and Jennie Blake will be joining me. You can get tickets through Eventbrite here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-ai-crisis-in-he-a-strategic-proposal-tickets-2001872054203
There are lots of people to thank here. Susan Robertson, João C. Magalhães, Noel Castree, Milan Sturmer and Richard Sandford were all kind enough to read early drafts of the text. Colleagues at the Geneva Graduate Institute, particularly Lenka Kepkova and Dominic Eggel, were incredibly welcoming hosts. A range of Manchester colleagues contributed to this book through the discussions we’ve had in recent years across different forums, including Drew Whitworth, Peter Kahn, Taslima Ivy, Jaco Renken, Jennie Blake, Sarah Dyer, Rebecca Hodgson, James Brooks, David Spendlove and Rory Stanton. Particular thanks to Helen Beetham and Milan Sturmer, who are the most intellectually generous and principled scholars I know, as well as being endlessly rewarding to talk to about these issues.
Thanks most of all to Jennie Blake, who spotted a ponderous LinkedIn post about what to do with this manuscript and put me in touch with Helen Foster. I’m so glad this could be the first Pressbooks open monograph published by the University of Manchester. Thanks to Helen Foster and her team for all their work in getting it online.
