CSU signed a major deal with OpenAI to give ChatGPT Edu access to students, faculty, and staff. Critics say the rollout came during budget pressure, layoffs, and deep confusion over AI rules. The story matters for South African universities too, as campuses from Cape Town to Johannesburg face the same AI trade-off. The real fight isn’t just about ChatGPT. It’s about who controls education when tech platforms move into the classroom.
Saturday, June 13, 2026
Congressional committee examines higher education's role in teaching students to use AI - Bridger Beal-Cvetko, KSL
Utah Rep. Burgess Owens asked several education experts about the impacts artificial technology will have on college students during a committee hearing in Washington on Wednesday. Owens, who chairs the House Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee, spoke of the potential benefits of using AI in education but said academic institutions should ensure students learn the skills necessary to succeed in an increasingly AI-driven workforce, without sacrificing other learning. The challenges presented by the new technology are "significant," he said.
Friday, June 12, 2026
Opinion: Moving Beyond AI Policies in Higher Education - Quimby Kaizer and Saravanan Subbaraya, Gov Tech
Every spring, college and university leaders watch another graduating class walk across the stage. It is a moment worth celebrating. Students worked hard. Faculty did their best to educate them. Families made sacrifices. And yet, for many presidents, provosts and chief academic officers standing at the podium this month, a central question remains: Are we leveraging AI effectively to both empower students and evolve how our institutions operate? This is both the challenge and the opportunity facing higher education, as headlines increasingly reflect parents and students questioning whether college is financially worth it.
https://www.govtech.com/education/higher-ed/opinion-moving-beyond-ai-policies-in-higher-education
University of Maine System to launch shared AI tool to accelerate student, institutional success - Bangor Daily News
The University of Maine System is leading the nation in preparing students for the modern workforce and improving organizational effectiveness with the investment and responsible integration of a shared AI tool. Maine’s largest educational and research enterprise and one of the state’s biggest employers has awarded its first System-wide enterprise artificial intelligence platform contract to ChatGPT Edu from OpenAI. Under the two-year agreement that will begin July 1, every UMS faculty member, staff member and matriculated student will have access to ChatGPT Edu, which was developed specifically for use in higher education settings, though whether and how they use it will be entirely up to them.
Thursday, June 11, 2026
Dreaming: Better memory for a more helpful ChatGPT - OpenAI
Today we’re beginning to roll out a more capable and scalable system for synthesizing memory, developed to tackle the staleness, correctness, and scalability challenges that we observe when memory is applied to the hundreds of millions of users and multi-year time horizons in ChatGPT. Memory is what helps ChatGPT learn your preferences, projects, and constraints, allowing future conversations to start from shared context rather than from scratch. Over the last two years, memory has grown into a critical part of the ChatGPT experience, helping ChatGPT better understand your context so it can help you accomplish meaningful goals over time. This is central to making ChatGPT more useful: knowing you, helping you, and doing more for you.
The board’s role in managing emerging AI risks - McKinsey
During a recent panel discussion, McKinsey and the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) gathered top chief information security officers (CISOs) and board directors, highlighting four priorities for effective oversight: strengthening governance and accountability, balancing innovation with risk, building real-time risk-management capabilities, and improving AI fluency in the boardroom. Together, these shifts signal that AI is no longer just a technology topic; it is now a core enterprise risk and strategic differentiator (see sidebar, “On the street: Sights and sounds from the world’s largest cybersecurity conference”).
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
AI isn’t eliminating gender gaps. It’s reorganizing them - Richard J. Smith, Ed.D., and Madeline Weiler, University Business
In the higher education workforce, women are overrepresented in office and clerical staff positions. They often occupy student-facing roles such as academic advising, which are relationship-focused positions with limited advancement opportunities. Not only are women far more likely to experience job displacement as administrative tasks are automated, but they are also less likely to hold the technical and decision-making roles that influence how AI is designed and deployed. Consequently, women are often positioned downstream of AI systems they did not build and cannot govern. Efficiency alone cannot guide effective AI strategies. Instead, leaders must advance technology and equity simultaneously. University policies should include safeguards to help ensure that employees are not quietly devalued through AI adoption.
AI Raises the Stakes for College Internships - Abby Sourwirne, GovTech
Internship postings on Handshake, a career networking site for college students and graduates, declined by more than 15 percent between January 2023 and January 2025, while the share of graduating students who applied to at least one internship rose from 34 percent to 41 percent. Yet even as internships grow harder to find, they're also becoming more important. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, internship experience with an employer’s organization or industry is among the most influential factors when employers choose between otherwise equally qualified candidates.Some colleges and universities are meeting this problem by providing credits for work experience, revamping on-campus work opportunities or directly partnering with local employers. If they don't, some workforce and higher-education experts warn, students will be left behind.
Tuesday, June 09, 2026
Will AI Help Revive the ‘Stale’ OPM Market? - Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed
Over the past few years, OPMs—including Coursera, iDesign and 2U—have adopted AI-powered features designed to enhance support for instructors and students through coaching, content creation, tutoring and curriculum mapping. According to an April analysis, 70 percent of OPMs are now deploying AI for such purposes. But experts are skeptical that the AI boom will have a big payoff for the beleaguered OPM market, which is attempting to rebound with the help of private equity after years of declining revenues, reputational damage and mounting government scrutiny.
AI Didn’t Break the University. It Revealed What Was Already Broken - Samuel J. Abrams, RealClear Education
I have argued in these pages before that AI itself is not the cause of the crisis; that blaming the chatbot for cheating and the LLM for loneliness is like blaming the calculator for poor math pedagogy. The deeper failure is institutional, and it preceded the technology. As I wrote here in March, the scarce resource in higher education is no longer knowledge but the human encounter itself. The most penetrating response to Hendrick’s essay confirms that and it did not come from another professor; it came from a 49-year-old graduate student named Norma Sancho, writing in the comments. Her reply has since circulated on its own, and it deserves to be read widely.
Monday, June 08, 2026
Are academics making an (em) dash for AI? - Times Higher Education
In the four years since its commercial launch, generative artificial intelligence has had a profound impact on personal and professional life. But are academics enthusiasts or sceptics? Five scholars explain how the technology has affected their own practice – for good and bad. Artificial intelligence writing is instantly recognisable, we are told—soulless, dispassionate, and devoid of the spark that marks genuine thought. Historian Jonathan Rees, in Academe this spring, calls it “bland, unspecific, pedestrian prose”. Journalist and UCL academic Sarfraz Manzoor, in a recent piece for The Independent, concluded that an AI article his students read was “competent but forgettable”. Scroll through r/professors on any given day and you will find dozens, if not hundreds, of colleagues enthusiastically nodding along and complaining bitterly about students submitting work that any fool can see was written by a machine.
Here’s how AI is driving the real revolution in higher education - Onur Bakiner, Seattle Times
What is education supposed to be like in the age of AI? The debate could not be more polarized: According to some, responsible educators should prepare students for artificial intelligence with AI, lest those students find themselves undesirable in the workplace of the future; others believe that the incursion of AI into education is destroying critical thinking skills, and consequently, learning itself. Boosters see in AI the combination of unprecedented opportunity and peril; critics say they have seen hyped-up educational technologies too many times before. The best is yet to come; the worst is yet to come; or maybe, we’ll spend enormous time and money just to stay where we are.
Sunday, June 07, 2026
Dismissing AI is not critical thinking. It’s intellectual closure = Zach Rossmiller, University Business
As a chief information officer, I have the privilege of interacting with students in many different settings, and conversations about artificial intelligence have become increasingly common.Recently, I read several student reflections explaining why they refuse to use generative AI in their coursework. Some described it as environmentally destructive, pointing to water and energy consumption that disproportionately harms vulnerable communities. Others called it a form of cheating, no different than passing off someone else’s work as your own. Several argued that the entire point of education is the struggle itself, and that outsourcing that struggle to a language model defeats the purpose of being in school.
Is AI Killing User Experience? - Scott A. Snyder and Mike Welsh, Knowledge at Wharton
A product manager can describe a workflow and get a working prototype. A strategist can turn a client’s rough concept into a clickable experience before the meeting ends. A founder with no technical background can “vibe code” a beta version of their product for an investor pitch. This is not a small shift. It compresses time, lowers barriers, and gives more people the ability to participate in creation. For organizations trying to move faster, it feels like a gift. Yet the customers on the receiving end are not sold. Despite the perceived gains in speed and personalization, only 17% of consumers believe their experiences are getting better, according to a March 2026 Medallia report. A separate February 2026 Pega study found that more than 60% of consumers lack confidence in how businesses use AI to interact with them.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-ai-killing-user-experience/
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