Tag: Familiar

  • New Government, familiar problems – By Chris Husbands

    New Government, familiar problems – By Chris Husbands

    The higher education sector had high hopes of a new government last July. Early messaging from ministers suggested that they were justified.  The Guardian quoted Peter Kyle, the Science Secretary, declaring an ‘end to the war on universities’. Speaking to the Commons in September 2024, the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said that ‘the last Government ..use[d] our world-leading sector as a political football, talking down institutions and watching on as the situation became…desperate. I [want to]…return universities to being the engines of growth and opportunity‘.  In November, she announced a rise – albeit for just one year in the first instance – in the undergraduate tuition fee, with the prospect of alleviating pressure on higher education budgets.

    Ten months on, the hopes look tarnished as financial, political and policy challenges mount. The scale of the higher education funding challenge is deepening, it seems, by the week. The OfS has reported that four in ten universities will report a deficit this year.  Restructuring programmes are underway in scores of universities, with some institutions on their second, third or even fourth round of savings.  The post-study graduate visa, an important lifeline for international student recruitment, appears to be under threat.

    There are eerie echoes of headlines and comments under the last government.  The Daily Telegraph declared that a ‘record number of universities [are] in deficit’. The Times claimed that universities that appeared to report relatively poor progression to graduate-level jobs were to be ‘named and shamed’. Following the success of Reform UK in local elections, some backbench Labour MPs have been sharply critical of universities: ‘I would close half our universities and turn them into vocational colleges’, wrote the Liverpool MP Dan Carden (BA, London School of Economics, since you ask), whilst Jonathan Hinder, MP for Pendle (MA Oxford) declared himself ‘happy to be bold and say I don’t think we should have anywhere near as many universities and university places‘. Philip Augar, who reviewed skills funding for Theresa May’s Government, wrote in the Financial Times that the ‘English higher education market is broken‘ as a result of a ‘failed free market experiment’. It seems terribly familiar: a sector in financial crisis, losing political traction and friends.

    Policy direction appears to be unclear. The English higher education sector is still largely shaped by the coalition government’s policy decisions between 2010 and 2015. Its key design principles include uncapped student demand since number controls were abolished in 2013, assumed cross-subsidies across and between activity streams allowing for institutional flexibility, access to private capital markets since HEFCE capital funding was removed in 2011, diverse missions but largely homogenous delivery models based around traditional terms and full-time, three-year undergraduate provision, and jealously protected institutional autonomy. Familiar though these principles are in higher education policy, some are in truth relatively recent, and are creating tensions between what the nation wants from its university system, what universities can offer and what the government and others are willing to pay for.   

    Moreover, the sector we have in 2025 is not the sector which the 2017 Higher Education and Reform Act (HERA) envisaged: HERA was expected to significantly re-shape the sector. The government’s impact assessment of HERA suggested that there would be in the order of 800 HE providers by the mid-2020s.  This did not happen, though the impact of private capital, often channelled through established institutions and now rapidly growing for-profit providers, should not be underestimated as a longer-term transformative force in the sector.

    We are expecting both a three-year comprehensive spending review and a post-16 White Paper in a couple of months’ time. In my 2024 HEPI paper, ’Four Futures’, I sketched out possible scenarios for a sector facing intense challenges. The near-frozen undergraduate fee was reducing the unit of resource for undergraduate teaching as costs rose. Undergraduate demand seemed to be softening amongst (especially) disadvantaged eighteen-year-olds. International student demand remains volatile and subject to political change in visa regulations.  The structural deficit on research funding deepened.  ‘Four Futures’ outlined four scenarios, summarised in Table 1.

    Of course, we all want a mixture of cost control, thriving universities, regional growth and research excellence, but it is difficult to have all of them. Governments and universities set priorities based on limited resources, so there are choices to be made and trade-offs to be confronted for both policymakers and institutional leaders. 

    Government needs to make decisions about universities in the context of competing and changing policy imperatives. It needs to balance restoring government finances, allocating resources to other needy sectors, securing economic growth, and, more obviously important than a year ago, protecting sovereign intellectual property assets and growing defence-related R&D. The Secretary of State’s letter to Vice-Chancellors in the Autumn identified growth, engagement with place, teaching excellence, widening participation and securing efficiencies, but did not unpick the tensions between them.  That depends on articulating a stronger vision for higher education given the Government’s priorities and resources and the economic challenges facing institutions, and it is a task for the forthcoming White Paper.  

    But there are urgent choices too for institutions, and those need to be made quickly in many universities.  Institutional and sector efficiencies are vital, and a key theme of the UUK Carrington Review, but they need to be considered in the light of sustainable operating models for both academic delivery and professional services. Institutions need a clearly articulated value proposition, communicated strongly and effectively and capable of driving the operating model. In the past, too many universities have tried to do too many things – and with resources scarce, the choices cannot be ducked. That means there is a consideration which links the choices facing government and those facing individual institutions.  If a core strength of the English system lies in its diversity and its distributed excellence, individual institutions need to think about their place in, and responsibilities to, the wider HE system. For a sector characterised by intense competition, that is a profound cultural shift, notwithstanding the economic and legal challenges of collaboration.

    The higher education sector now is not the sector we have always had, and therefore it won’t be the sector we always have. How the sector collectively, and institutions individually, confront choices is a test for policymakers and institutional leaders.

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  • Sam Altman’s AI Hype Is Familiar

    Sam Altman’s AI Hype Is Familiar

    I think Sam Altman is too young to have been influenced by Rolling Stone magazine, but I feel like he’s learned something about retconning previously expressed hype in order to make room for fresh amazement from how Rolling Stone treated the new albums of the 1980s and 1990s by the Rolling Stones.

    By that time, the Stones had established themselves as permanent rock royalty, but their music was undeniably less vital than their late-’60s, early-’70s heyday that produced all-time great work. Music tastes had changed, Mick and Keith were less interested in and less capable of breaking new ground, and so the work understandably suffered next to albums like Exile on Main Street or Sticky Fingers.

    Not according to Rolling Stone, which could be relied on to wax rhapsodically about whatever the boys had produced upon the album’s release, declaring it a return to greatness after a previous fallow period. Unfortunately, you can only return to greatness once, so when the next album would arrive, they had to retroactively downgrade the previous album that had been dubbed a near masterpiece.

    In 1983, Kurt Loder declared that Undercover “reassembles, in the manner of mature masters of every art, familiar elements into exciting new forms,” giving the album four and a half stars.

    Undercover had one minor hit, “Undercover of the Night,” which sounds like second-rate Duran Duran, and has Charlie Watts playing electronic drums, an absolute offense against all that is good and holy. The idea that it is a near-perfect album is, literally, insane.

    We move forward to 1989 and the Steel Wheels album, also given four and a half stars, this time by Anthony DeCurtis. The review opens with “Nothing reinvigorates Sixties icons like having something to prove. In the past few years the reverence typically shown both the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan has worn perilously thin. The Stones’ last two albums, Undercover and Dirty Work—not to mention Mick Jagger’s solo recordings—ranged from bad to ordinary” (emphasis mine).

    It gets better. In 1994, Barbara O’Dair declared in her review of Voodoo Lounge, “Gone are the smooth moves, trend nods and lackluster songcraft of Dirty Work and Steel Wheels, the Rolling Stones’ last two studio discs. The band’s new album, Voodoo Lounge, is ragged and glorious, reveling in the quintessential rock & roll the Stones marked as their own some 30 years ago.”

    But this time it’s true, the Rolling Stones really are back!

    The popular explanation for all these rave reviews upon a new album’s release is that Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and Stones lead singer Mick Jagger were close friends. But even that friendship could not stand up against the fact that over time, it became clear that these albums were duds, and so each review had to retroactively throw the previous effort under the bus.

    Recently, on the platform I will only ever call Twitter, Sam Altman declared, “We trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). This is the first time I have been really struck by something written by AI.”

    This is a strange statement, given that Altman has been relentlessly hyping this technology since its first public appearance in 2022, expressing personal marvel at its smarts, its empathy and now its creativity. One would think he’s been struck repeatedly by what his models produce, but apparently not—this is the first time.

    Note that this model is not yet available for public consumption, so we cannot judge for ourselves if it is “good” at creative writing, except I am totally going to judge whether or not it is good at creative writing and say it isn’t.

    Despite being well established in the skeptic camp about this technology, I think anyone who reads More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI would come away seeing that I am quite open to experimentation and exploration of this technology where it has the potential to enhance, as opposed to substitute for, human capacities.

    But “creative writing” is clearly not an area in which large language models will excel, because I will go to my grave believing that the whole point of writing creatively is to attempt to capture the artistic intention of a single unique intelligence and then to share that intention with other unique intelligences. This challenge, which I have wrestled with over many, many hours of my life, is difficult, fascinating and very much worth doing even if the product of that wrestling never sees the light of day beyond the audience of the original author, which is something I’ve experienced rather often in my career.

    Large language models are not unique intelligences. They are highly sophisticated, technologically amazing pattern-matching machines that generate syntax as their outputs. There is no intention behind this generation, therefore there is no creativity at work. It is not writing, not as I understand it, and not as I value it.

    I know lots of people who are willing to argue about these things who will say that we’re in the midst of a “new” intelligence, blah blah blah. I’m happy for other people to wrestle with these thought experiments, but I know for a fact that the human experiences of reading and writing the creative work of other unique human intelligences is worth doing no matter what this technology—that cannot and never will work from an intentional place—is capable of.

    Look, I imagine some of my frustration is starting to leak through, and I do not wish to outright dismiss those with other perspectives, though I wonder about folks who are not capable of seeing past Altman’s relentless hucksterism by now.

    The thing is, thanks to More Than Words being in the world and having the opportunity to talk to lots of different people in lots of different contexts about what I have to say about writing in a world where large language models exist, it’s increasingly clear to me that in many cases, no one is asking for this stuff.

    If no one is asking for it, we certainly have no responsibility to give it the time of day when it does arrive just because it’s shiny, new or amazing at the surface level.

    The future is ours, not AI’s.

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