How Golden Gate’s big AI bet will energize fundamental changes - Alcino Donadel, University Business

At the height of California’s gold rush, a YMCA night school was founded to train students in gold assaying and assist Chinese immigrants with learning English. It marks the humble beginnings of Golden Gate University—and an enduring tale that inspires President Brent White to capitalize on a new national phenomenon.Golden Gate made three major announcements in April that emphasize the university’s radical embrace of artificial intelligence as a tool and societal force. It founded the School of Psychology to research how AI will transform human behavior. GGU Digital upgrades the university’s distance education platform with personalized, AI-assisted instruction. Lastly, nine new board members were introduced to help expand the university’s global footprint in emerging fields.

https://universitybusiness.com/how-golden-gates-big-ai-bet-will-energize-fundamental-changes/

College students are booing commencement speakers celebrating AI, but the wave of hate hasn’t stopped them from using it to cheat on their exams - Sasha Rogelberg, Fortune

On one hand, they’ve made their ire toward the technology clear: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with hisses during his commencement remarks at the University of Arizona’s graduation ceremony on Sunday when he invoked the inevitability of a future with artificial intelligence. “The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Schmidt said, pausing for a moment as students booed. “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.” But the outward disgust toward the AI boom doesn’t tell the full story of the 2026 graduating class’s relationship to AI. The same cohort is also adopting the technology at a rapid clip, with 57% of U.S. college students reporting using the AI tools in their coursework weekly, and 20% using it daily, according to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study published last month. But where some see a contradiction, experts see a peek into the minds of young graduates—the first generation of college students to experience their four-year undergraduate experience with tools like ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, at their fingertips.

https://fortune.com/2026/05/19/college-students-booing-commencement-speakers-ai-cheating-cognitive-dissonance/

Should AI Nudge You or Tell You What to Do? - Stefanos Poulidis, Haosen Ge, Hamsa Bastani, and Osbert Bastani, Knowledge at Wharton

In general, AI guidance can fall into one of two categories: attention signals and action signals. Attention signals flag decisions that are important without offering a recommendation: “This is a critical decision: pay close attention.” Action signals go further and prescribe a specific action: “Here’s what you should do.” But which type of signal actually helps us make better decisions, especially when the AI is reliable and provides highly accurate advice? This question is increasingly relevant, as AI tools become better calibrated and consistently dependable. As this trend continues, we must ask: Are there costs to relying on AI too much, even when its advice is correct? We explored these questions in a study using chess — a setting where AI recommendations are trusted, accuracy is exceptionally high, and decision quality is easy to measure.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/should-ai-nudge-you-or-tell-you-what-to-do/

Higher education, stop policing AI. Know your students - Robert Mason, Rikard Jalkebro and Ziad Hani, University World News

The solution to AI in higher education is not more software. It is ‘knowing your student’ (KYS). The idea borrows from the banking sector’s ‘Know Your Customer’ regulatory and compliance process used to combat fraud. Banks do not solely rely on a single automated alert to determine suspicious behaviour. They build contextual understanding over time: patterns, histories, habits, inconsistencies and relationships. Universities should do the same. However, Know Your Students should not mean turning universities into compliance departments. It means using sustained teaching, feedback, mentoring and dialogue to understand how students actually learn.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20260522093324632

Here are states’ 3 highest priorities in developing AI policy - Alcino Donadel, University Business

States are defining what AI will look like in practice across K12 and higher education, building policy infrastructure that reflects both the technology’s reach and its risks. A new national overview from the Education Commission of the States spells out how public officials are issuing guidance, installing guardrails and coordinating across sectors to align AI use with school strategy and workforce demand. Arkansas, Illinois, Ohio and Tennessee now require public school districts and postsecondary institutions to adopt formal policies governing acceptable AI use. At the same time, at least 35 states have issued some form of guidance ranging from short advisories to full frameworks. Taken together, these efforts converge on a shared set of priorities that promote human decision-making, student AI literacy, safety and data protection.

https://universitybusiness.com/here-are-states-3-highest-priorities-in-developing-ai-policy

If Canvas Goes Down Again, What’s the Contingency Plan? - Lisa Anderson and Mairéad Martin, Inside Higher Ed

Faculty and administrators across the country, shaped by their experience adapting instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, knew what to do last week. Shifting the modality of instruction is not new for us. Instructors quickly improvised alternative assignments, delayed quizzes and exams, populated offline course materials, and adjusted timelines in order to keep learning moving forward. When it came time to notify students of these adjustments, however, a more fundamental issue became apparent. Many instructors came to discover they had no reliable way to contact their students outside the learning management system itself. Some did not know how to access their course rosters outside Canvas. Others teaching large online lectures encountered institutional email delivery limits. Many had no established communication pathways beyond LMS announcements.

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/05/22/when-canvas-goes-down-whats-contingency-plan-opinion

Why Higher Education Needs Humanics - Michael J. Avaltroni, US News

In a world where artificial intelligence now permeates daily life and higher education, it has become essential to weave the human element throughout the delivery of instruction – particularly healthcare education.Enter humanics.The integration of humanics – often described as the study, understanding and development of key human qualities – represents a novel way to foster interdisciplinary collaboration in education, technology and the human component in an AI-driven world. It speaks to the urgent need to build healthcare teams that optimize all the advances in artificial intelligence with the humans in the middle – our students, clinicians and patients. It also speaks to the urgency to redefine higher education itself.

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2026-05-19/why-higher-education-needs-humanics

Grade inflation much higher in ‘AI-exposed’ degrees - Jack Groves, Times Higher Education

Drawing on publicly available data from a large research university in Texas, Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, examined the marks awarded to more than 500,000 students between 2018 and 2025. When these grade patterns were compared against syllabus data on the types of writing tasks used for assessment, it revealed the share of A grades in “AI exposed” courses rose by 13 percentage points, or 30 per cent, compared with the 2022 baseline. Overall grade point average rose by 0.12 points for “high-homework” courses in which AI could potentially complete the assessment, says the study, which was published as a working paper by Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education. Grade inflation occurred only in homework-based writing and coding tasks and was not found to the same extent in in-person examination, explains the study, which suggests the computing power of “AI [is] substituting for student effort specifically on the unsupervised assessments where instructors cannot observe the production of submitted work”.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/grade-inflation-much-higher-ai-exposed-degrees-says-us-study

Maine's Public University System on verge of Closing Deal for First System Wide AI Tool - Kristian Moravec, Central Maine

Maine’s public university system plans to award its first contract for an artificial intelligence platform to ChatGPT Edu, an OpenAI chatbot tool for higher education, the system told employees and students in an email Friday. The two-year contract will cost about $1.39 million and serve the system’s estimated 25,200 students and 5,600 employees, likely starting in July, according to Ryan Low, the system’s vice chancellor for finance and strategic AI integration. OpenAI’s winning bid, which was submitted by a vendor, Carasoft, is not yet set in stone.

https://www.centralmaine.com/2026/05/19/maine-public-universities-on-verge-of-closing-1-39m-deal-for-first-systemwide-ai-tool/

Can colleges still deliver in the age of AI? One Ivy League school is investing $30 million to improve career outcomes - Jessica Dickler, CNBC

College students are increasingly worried about what an AI-driven jobs apocalypse could mean for their employment prospects. To that end, many colleges and universities are racing to recalibrate.

Even at nation’s most elite schools, the focus is shifting to career readiness. Fears that artificial intelligence will upend students’ future career plans are reverberating across college campuses. “Higher education needs to do better,” said Joseph Catrino, the inaugural director of Dartmouth’s Center for Career Design. “We need to do better for our students — we need to step up and help students be prepared.” The Ivy League college recently raised $30 million in endowed funds to support internship opportunities. Now students can access up to $6,500 during any term to help finance unpaid or underpaid internships. “This allows the student to explore and engage in a field that they normally wouldn’t be able to,” Catrino said.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/what-this-ivy-league-is-doing-to-get-students-hired-in-the-age-of-ai.html

Why Indiana University’s AI skills course is free - Pamela Whitten, University Businiess

Indiana University just gave away our most popular AI skills course by making it completely free and open to all, with no application or tuition required. Anyone who completes the course that we’ve come to know as GenAI 101 will earn an AI skills badge from our world-renowned Kelley School of Business at no cost.Our decision to make such a highly sought-after course available for free is rather unconventional for a major university. Tuition is one of the ways we pay the bills, yet we know that the ability to wisely work alongside artificial intelligence is too important of a skill to lock behind a paywall. When our faculty developed and launched GenAI 101 eight months ago, we could not fully predict the continuing and accelerating appetite for AI literacy among corporations, small businesses, state agencies, and universities across the country. They asked us to share it, and we have now done so by making the class freely available to anyone.

https://universitybusiness.com/why-indiana-universitys-ai-skills-course-is-free-pamela-whitten/

MIT president blames federal policy shifts for big drop in research on campus - Washington Post

MIT is doing less research and enrolling fewer graduate students as a result of federal actions, the university president warned Thursday. Federally funded research on campus is down more than 20 percent compared to this time last year, MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, told the campus community in a video message, and the number of new federal research awards is also down more than 20 percent.“That is a striking loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,“ Kornbluth said.

https://universitybusiness.com/mit-president-blames-federal-policy-shifts-for-big-drop-in-research-on-campus/

AI research papers are getting better, and it’s a big problem for scientists - Joshua Dzieza, the Verge

“It’s a huge burden on the peer-review system, which is already at the limit,” Degen said. “There’s just too many papers being published and there’s not enough peer reviewers, and if the LLMs make it so much easier to mass produce papers, then this will reach a breaking point.” Optimists about generative AI have high hopes for its ability to produce future scientific breakthroughs — accelerating discovery, eliminating most types of cancer — but the technology is currently undermining one of the pillars of scientific research, inundating editors and reviewers with an endless stream of papers. Paradoxically, the better the technology gets at producing competent papers, the worse the crisis becomes.

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/930522/ai-research-papers-slop-peer-review-problem

The AI assembly line: Strategic imperatives for CEOs - Gianmarco Cilento, Steffen Fuchs , and Varun Marya; McKinsey

Just as Ford’s production line transformed physical labor, agentic AI—systems that can act autonomously rather than just responding to prompts—is now reshaping cognitive work, including engineering design, supply chain planning, and risk assessment. (We will refer to agentic AI simply as “AI” throughout this article.) With AI, companies no longer need to depend solely on the judgment and availability of a small number of experts to make complex decisions or create sophisticated products. Instead, knowledge becomes broadly accessible to anyone with the right AI capabilities, accelerating decision-making, product customization, and other tasks once limited to experts.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/industrials/our-insights/the-ai-assembly-line-strategic-imperatives-for-ceos