UK universities draw up guiding principles on generative AI

All 24 Russell Group universities have reviewed their academic conduct policies and guidance

UK universities have drawn up a set of guiding principles to ensure that students and staff are AI literate, as the sector struggles to adapt teaching and assessment methods to deal with the growing use of generative artificial intelligence.

Vice-chancellors at the 24 Russell Group research-intensive universities have signed up to the code. They say this will help universities to capitalise on the opportunities of AI while simultaneously protecting academic rigour and integrity in higher education.

Harvard’s Admissions Is Challenged for Favoring Children of Alumni

Harvard’s Admissions Is Challenged for Favoring Children of Alumni

Harvard students and supporters marched through Harvard Square during a rally on Saturday to oppose the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmation action.

Lecturers don’t want a marking boycott, either. But we must fight those wrecking UK universities | Lorna Finlayson

Pay cuts are just one factor: working conditions are also getting worse and that’s bad for both staff and students

Since late April, staff at 145 UK universities have been refusing to mark students’ work. The marking and assessment boycott is the most recent action by the University and College Union (UCU), which represents academics and other university staff. With graduation ceremonies now upon us, the boycott is causing significant havoc. Just how significant is a matter of some dispute. But what is indisputable is that many students have had their marks delayed, and some will be unable to graduate as normal this summer.

Industrial action by (mainly) academic staff is always a hard sell. Lecturers are seen as relatively privileged people. The students being hit by their latest action have already had their studies disrupted by a pandemic and a series of strikes. Seen this way, the current marking boycott can look like a selfish step too far.

Lorna Finlayson is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Essex

She’s Going Into 6th Grade and Already Saving for College

Red wall Tory MPs put pressure on Sunak over net migration

Group issues 12-point plan calling for stricter immigration rules for care workers, students and refugees

Rishi Sunak is facing demands from “red wall” Conservative MPs to slash the number of overseas care workers, foreign students and refugees allowed into the UK in time for the next election.

The MPs from the 2017 and 2019 intake, who call themselves the New Conservatives, have issued a 12-point plan to cut net migration to Britain from 606,000 to 226,000 before the end of 2024.

A cap of 20,000 on the number of refugees accepted for resettlement in the UK.

Caps on future humanitarian schemes such as the Ukraine, Afghanistan and Hong Kong schemes should the predicted 168,000 reductions not be realised.

Implementation of the provisions of the illegal migration bill, which it is claimed would lead to a reduction of at least 35,000 from LTIM.

A raise in the minimum combined income threshold to £26,200 for sponsoring a spouse and raising the minimum language requirement to B1 (intermediate level). This should lead to an estimated 20,000 reduction in LTIM, the MPs claim.

Making the migration advisory committee report on the effect of migration on housing and public services, not just the jobs market, by putting future demand on a par with labour requirements in all studies.

A 5% cap on the amount of social housing that councils can give to non-UK nationals.

Raising the immigration health surcharge to £2,700 per person a year.

AI as Answer Machine? Or Wordsmith? Or Something Else?

Last month on the blog, I floated the idea of thinking about generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard as technologies for learning. I drew an analogy to the digital camera I used as I learned photography. As I was developing a conceptual understanding of photography, I was also learning how to use the tool in my hands, with all its knobs and buttons, and these two kinds of learning informed and supported each other. Could we use generative AI tools in a similar fashion, teaching students to use the tools well as part of learning other skills, like writing and researching? If so, it might help to know what kind of tools we’re dealing with when we talk about ChatGPT and other AI text generation tools.

For instance, I saw this post by Simon Harris go around Mastodon a couple of weeks ago:

15yo: I use ChatGPT quite a bit.
Me: Oh?
15yo: Today, I asked it to give me the last digit of Pi.
Me: but there is no…
15yo: …exactly
Me:
15yo: Apparently, it’s 4

This is funny because ChatGPT is so, so wrong about pi. As an irrational number, pi has a nonterminating decimal representation; there’s no last digit of pi. The joke, however, relies on an assumption that ChatGPT is supposed to be some kind of answer machine, a tool for answering questions correctly. However, ChatGPT is famously not that. It’s well known for “hallucinating” facts and inventing citations. There are, in fact, a lot of educators who are worried that students will rely too much on ChatGPT and similar tools because these tools produce text that is factually incorrect. For example, check out this YouTube video of a chemistry instructor evaluating the accuracy of ChatGPT’s answers to various organic chemistry questions. Spoiler: It didn’t do that great.

So if these tools aren’t answer machines, what are they? I would argue that ChatGPT and similar tools are actually wordsmiths. They are powered by large language models that mix words together to create fluent prose. Ask it to draft an essay for you on a given topic, and it will put words together to do just that. Ask it to revise that draft based on your feedback, and it will do that, too. See, for instance, how Ethan Mollick used Bing to help him craft the final paragraph of his April 26th newsletter. Ask it to summarize a long text, and, because it’s good with words, you’ll get a pretty decent summary. It’s a wordsmith that actually doesn’t know what it’s writing but still produces intelligible texts.

This is, in fact, the other reason that educators are worried about AI text generators, because they can quickly produce acceptable responses to pretty standard essay question prompts, and educators are worried that students will use these tools to cheat, whether the essay question is of the “writing as assessment,” “writing to learn,” or “learn to write” variety. Because ChatGPT and its peers are good with words.

I’m struck by how the initial reporting and framing of these tools affect the ways we think about them. While AI text generators were seen as answer machines (albeit flawed ones), AI image generators have been seen as “smiths” of a different kind, working with pixels to create images. While a tool like ChatGPT making stuff up is seen as a problem, if I ask Midjourney or DALL-E (a couple of popular image generators) to give me a scene of robots playing basketball, no one worries about the result not being real-world realistic.

If AI text generators are tools for learning, as I argued on the blog last month, then I think it’s helpful to think of them as wordsmithing tools. Does a student struggle to come up with counter arguments for their thesis? Ask an AI tool to generate a few. Does a student freeze up when confronted with a blank page? Ask an AI tool to write a first draft. Does a student find it hard to adopt the right voice for their writing? Ask an AI tool to rewrite a draft essay in different voices. These are all wordsmithing tasks that ChatGPT and its ilk can handle pretty well.

Please note that I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t help students learn to develop counter arguments or to get past writer’s block or to figure out their writing voice. I am suggesting, however, that AI tools might be used to help students learn these skills, just as my digital camera helped me learn photography. Cynthia Alby uses the metaphor of learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels to talk about how AI tools might provide a kind of scaffolding for students learning writing skills. When I heard that metaphor, I was reminded of a 2012 blog post by Mark Sample, in which he talks about balance bikes as a different way to teach kids to ride bicycles. Learning with training wheels means getting help with balancing while learning to pedal, while learning with a balance bike means not worrying about pedaling while learning to balance, which is apparently easier for most kids. We might need to think carefully about where our students need the kind of support that AI tools can provide, and the answer might vary by student.

I’ve been using the training wheels and balance bike metaphors in my recent talks on teaching with AI, and I was all ready to bust out the “AI as wordsmith” argument above at a talk I gave earlier this week. But then I signed up for ChatGPT Pro to see what ChatGPT’s plugins are all about. Back in March, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced that the tool would have plugins that allowed it to communicate (in a fashion) with other web tools and websites. It’s taken me three months, but I finally started playing around with these plugins. I quickly realized that some of the advice I had given faculty earlier in the year about designing “ChatGPT-proof” assignments hadn’t been accurate for a while!

For instance, if I ask the free version of ChatGPT, which uses GPT-3.5, to tell me about the May 2023 Supreme Court decision that dealt with Andy Warhol’s art, here’s the response I get:

I apologize for the confusion, but as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, I’m not aware of any specific Supreme Court decision in May 2023 related to Andy Warhol’s art. It’s possible that such a decision may have occurred after my knowledge cutoff or it may be a hypothetical scenario that hasn’t actually taken place. I recommend checking reliable news sources or legal references to get the most accurate and up-to-date information on any recent Supreme Court decisions regarding Andy Warhol’s art.

If I think about ChatGPT as an answer machine, I’m not getting the answer I want, but at least the tool is telling me what it doesn’t know. That’s an improvement over how the chatbot presented information at the start of 2023. But watch what happens when I use the same prompt in ChatGPT Pro with the VoxScript plugin enabled:

In May 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Andy Warhol Foundation in a copyright infringement case. The case was centered around a series of silk screen images that Warhol created based on a photograph of the late musician Prince, taken by photographer Lynn Goldsmith in 1981.

The court ruled in a 7-2 vote that Warhol infringed on Goldsmith’s copyright. The case hinged on whether Warhol’s images of Prince transformed Goldsmith’s photograph to a great enough degree to stave off claims of copyright infringement and therefore be considered as fair use under copyright law.

Goldsmith had sued the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (AWF) for copyright infringement after the foundation licensed an image of Warhol’s titled “Orange Prince” based on Goldsmith’s image of the pop artist to Condé Nast in 2016 for use in its publication Vanity Fair…

It goes on for another couple of paragraphs, and it gives me the news source it used to generate this summary of the case, a May 18th NPR report. This version of ChatGPT is indeed acting like an answering machine!

Quick sidebar: It is also now possible to share one’s ChatGPT correspondences with others. A few months ago, you needed some third-party tool to do so, but now ChatGPT has a share button for every chat. Thus the argument that there’s no “paper trail” for how one uses ChatGPT is no longer true.

I used ChatGPT for the above examples, but please remember that ChatGPT isn’t the only game in town. I asked Bing about the Andy Warhol case, and I got a similar summary, this time with three different news sources cited. Google Bard gave me a similar summary and added some text about how fair use works in the United States. Its sources, however, were meeting notes from a 2004 Congressional subcommittee hearing and a Quizlet created for maybe a law course? Your mileage may vary with these tools.

So are these tools now, in fact, answer machines? I’m going to argue that while they can be used in that way, a better way to think of them is as interfaces to other systems. Just as Siri or Alexa act as a voice-based interface to the apps on your digital devices, ChatGPT and Bing and such are text-based interfaces to, for instance, all the transcripts attached to all the YouTube videos. These tools are still wordsmiths, but wordsmiths used as interfaces.

To use a left field example, the fast food chain Wendy’s recently announced that it was working on an AI chatbot to take drive-thru orders. That’s AI-as-interface, with the chatbot, which is good with words, taking spoken orders for a cheeseburger and a Frosty and turning that into an order in the restaurant’s food production system. For a more academic example, consider Elicit, an AI research assistant that can help you find research in its corpus of 115 million academic papers that might address your research question. Ask it a question like “How should I form groups of students when using group work in the college classroom?” and (because it’s good with words) it will return a table of potentially relevant papers, summarized and tagged by intervention, sample size, and outcomes.

AI as answer machine, AI as wordsmith, AI as interface… I’m not sure where we’ll land with how we think about these tools, but I believe these framings are helpful in assessing what the tools can and cannot do and what roles they might play as learning technologies.

One more caveat: Most of what I’ve presented here is focused squarely on AI text generation tools powered by large language models. There are lots of other kinds of AI tools, like Cornell University’s Merlin app, which can identify birds by their songs, or that AI-powered agent that excelled at the strategic negotiation game Diplomacy, that don’t fall into any of the categories I’ve described here.

The best thing you are likely to read about the Supreme Court affirmative action decision — or rather the response to it — is Freddie’s take. Two points strike me as especially important: first, that the whole kerfuffle is a distraction from any actually meaningful racial politics in this country, since a candidate who has to go to Columbia or Amherst rather than Harvard is not exactly a victim; and second, that there’s a massive media freakout about this because so many people in our media are the products of elite universities. Several decades ago, when most journalists attended mediocre universities or, often enough, were not even college educated, we would have had a chance to have this story like this presented with some fresh, clear, well-seasoned perspective. But our journalists haven’t had any of that commodity on hand for a long, long time.

Wednesday briefing: Inside the marking boycott that has thrown university students’ futures into the air

In today’s newsletter: A stalemate between lecturers and universities has left thousands of exams and dissertations ungraded – what’s the dispute about, and how might it end?

• Sign up here for our daily newsletter, First Edition

Good morning. Finishing the last exam of your degree course should be one of the happiest moments of a student’s career. The stress of finals is over, the hard work has paid off. Graduation beckons and, beyond that, the next exciting stage of life.

But for tens of thousands this summer, the reality is proving very different. A marking boycott by the union representing many UK university lecturers means that tests are being left ungraded and dissertations unassessed.

Net zero | The government’s plans to hit net zero have been criticised in a report by its own advisers that warns targets are being missed on nearly every front. Lord Deben, outgoing chair of the CCC, said the UK had “lost the leadership” on climate action shown at Cop26 in 2021 and done “a number of things” that were “utterly unacceptable”.

Julian Sands | A body that was discovered in the wilderness near Mount Baldy in California on Saturday has been confirmed to be that of the missing British actor Julian Sands. San Bernardino county sheriff’s department had been coordinating a search for the actor who was reported missing on 13 January.

Health | Senior doctors in England have voted to go on strike over pay for the first time in nearly 50 years. Hospital consultants will strike for two days on 20 July, which will bring major disruption to services that have already had to reschedule 651,000 appointments since a wave of NHS strikes began last December.

Covid | Matt Hancock has said he is “profoundly sorry” for his part in mistakes that meant the UK was not properly prepared for Covid. He told the Covid public inquiry that he had not properly challenged assurances that sufficient planning was in place.

UK economy | The UK’s largest mobile and broadband companies have been accused of fuelling “greedflation” after pushing through the biggest round of price hikes for more than 30 years. Six companies controlling most of the telecoms market all charged a 3.9% supplement on top of their annual inflation-linked increases this year, meaning millions of customers have faced mid-contract price increases of up to 17.3%.

Marking boycott may delay degrees of more than 1,000 Durham students

University says about 20% of final-year students will face delays if industrial action continues

More than 1,000 final year students at Durham University could be left without a degree this summer because of the marking boycott disrupting universities across the UK.

Durham, one of 145 universities affected by the industrial action over pay and working conditions called by the University and College Union (UCU), said about 20% of its 5,300 final year students would “at the moment, face delays in receiving all their marks and final classifications”.

The Virtues of Mary Wollstonecraft

In 1978, the University of Chicago Press journal Signs published a short essay introducing Mary Wollstonecraft’s lost anthology of prose and poetry she had published “for the improvement of young women.” Wollstonecraft’s anthology reproduced edifying fables and poetry; excerpted from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton; and included four Christian prayers Wollstonecraft had authored herself. Among the last is a lengthy “Private Morning Prayer” which reads, in part:

Though knowest whereof I am made, and rememberest that I am but dust: self-convicted I prostrate myself before thy throne of grace, and seek not to hide or palliate my faults; be not extreme to mark what I have done amiss—still allow me to call thee Father, and rejoice in my existence, since I can trace thy goodness and truth on earth, and feel myself allied to that glorious Being who breathed into me the breath of life, and gave me a capacity to know and to serve him.

Though Wollstonecraft is now regarded a canonical thinker in the fields of history, political science, and gender studies, secular feminist scholars still struggle to make sense of her religiosity. Many suggest, as Moira Ferguson did in her 1978 Signs essay, that Wollstonecraft’s own skepticism grew as she crafted her more influential political work. Meanwhile, religious thinkers tend to ignore her religiosity, subscribing to the selfsame interpretation of her as a duly secular proto-feminist.

Enter Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent (Oxford) by Emily Dumler-Winckler, the first adequately theological treatment of Wollstonecraft’s pedagogical, social, and political thought. In a beautifully written, deeply learned, and insightful book, the St. Louis University theologian maintains that there is far greater continuity throughout Wollstonecraft’s work than scholars realize. The imitatio Christi commended in her early publications, including the Female Reader, is the key that unlocks her entire corpus. Deftly employing knowledge of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, but also Burke, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Paine, Dumler-Winckler situates Wollstonecraft in the Western canon as the seminal philosophical and theological thinker she rightly is.

Dumler-Winckler is at her best in revealing the kinship between Wollstonecraft and the pre-moderns, and distinguishing her from contemporaries like Kant. Such scholarly care helps Dumler-Winckler show how Wollstoncecraft’s thinking about virtue, justice, and friendship can inform those who resist various racial and economic injustices today.

However, Dumler-Winckler is less convincing in her efforts to distinguish Wollstonecraft’s pre-modern insights from those she dubs (and derides) “virtues’ defenders,” namely, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and Brad Gregory. Certainly, their thought—like the “virtue despisers” she more charitably challenges—would be well served by the rich encounter with Wollstonecraft that her book offers. But given Dumler-Winckler’s own judicious critiques of our modern ills, these “defenders” (especially Gregory) may be more friends than the foes she imagines.

Cultivating the Virtues through the Moral Imagination

Given Wollstonecraft’s sharp critique of Edmund Burke’s (prescient) condemnation of the French Revolution—as well as her Enlightenment-era claim of “natural rights” for women—Wollstonecraft has long been regarded a paradigmatically liberal thinker: akin to a female Thomas Paine, a feminist John Locke, a proto-Kantian. However, some scholars in recent decades have rejected these inapt comparisons, with most now placing her, rightly in my view, in the civic republican tradition that dates to Cicero. This reexamination of Wollstonecraft’s thought has also allowed for greater scrutiny of her argument with Burke over the French Revolution, with some now seeing far more affinity between the two English thinkers than was previously thought.

Dumler-Winckler’s 2023 book deepens these insights by foregrounding Wollstonecraft’s early pedagogical texts as the key that unlocks her account of the virtues, which itself is the prism through which to view her entire corpus. Throughout Modern Virtue, Dumler-Winckler strongly contests the view that Wollstonecraft’s account of virtue resembles that of the rationalist Kant, or the “naked” rationalism of the French revolutionaries Burke rightly scolds. Early on, Wollstonecraft writes: “Reason is indeed the heaven-lighted lamp in man, and may safely be trusted when not entirely depended on; but when it pretends to discover what is beyond its ken, it . . . runs into absurdity.” As Dumler-Winckler shows, respect for the ennobling human capacity for reason and its limits can be found throughout her work.

But Dumler-Winckler also ably distinguishes the proto-feminist from the “sentimentalism” of Hume, the “voluntarism” of some Protestant contemporaries, and the “traditionalism” of Burke. Dumler-Winckler finds the golden mean by looking beyond the moderns with whom Wollstonecraft is too hastily classified to show her kinship with ancient and medieval thinkers, especially Aristotle and Aquinas. It’s in the rich Christian tradition especially that Wollstonecraft finds dynamic resources to bring to bear on her “modern” subjects (abolition and women’s education, in particular)—even as the late-eighteenth-century thinker refines the tradition for the “revolution in female manners” she seeks to inspire. Thus, the seemingly incongruous subtitle: “a Tradition of Dissent.”

“The main business of our lives is to learn to be virtuous,” the pedagogue wrote in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). For Wollstonecraft as for Aristotle and especially Aquinas, argues Dumler-Winckler, one learns to be virtuous through the gradual refinement of all the faculties in a dynamic engagement of the imagination, understanding, judgment, and affections—especially through imitating the patterns of Christ-like moral exemplars. “Teach us with humble awe to imitate the divine patterns and lure us to the paths of virtue,” Wollstonecraft writes. One “puts on righteousness,” then, not ultimately as a rule obeyed, a ritual practiced, or a philosophical tenet held, even as obedience, rituals, and understanding are, for Wollstonecraft, all essential components.

Rather, one “puts on righteousness” as a kind of “second nature,” which is the refinement and cultivation of raw, unformed appetites (i.e, “first nature”). Wollstonecraft artfully employs Burke’s metaphor of the “wardrobe of the moral imagination” to depict the way in which cultivation of the virtues refines one’s “taste” in particular matters. “For Wollstonecraft, nature serves as a standard for taste, only insofar as the passions, appetites, and faculties of reason, judgment, and imagination are refined by second natural virtues. . . . [I]t is never the gratification of depraved appetites, but rather exalted appetites and minds . . . which are to govern our relations.”

In imitating Christ-like exemplars from an early age, we develop the the moral virtues that perfect our relation with God and others—being crafted and crafting oneself, in turn. “Whatever tends to impress habits of order on the expanding mind may be reckoned the most beneficial part of education,” Wollstonecraft writes in the introduction to the Female Reader, “for by this means the surest foundation of virtue is settled without struggle, and strong restraints knit together before vice has introduced confusion.” Pointing to this dialectical design, Dumler-Winckler shows how Wollstonecraft wished for Scripture and Shakespeare to “gradually form” girls’ taste so that they might “learn not ‘what to say’ but rather how to read, think, and even pray well, and how to exercise their reason, cultivate virtue, and refine devotional taste.” Schooling the moral imagination through imitation was the key to acquiring virtue for both Aristotle and Wollstonecraft—but so was making virtue one’s own: “[W]e collectively inherit, tailor, and design [the virtues] as a garb in the wardrobe of a moral imagination.”

Wollstonecraft’s argument with Burke, then, concerns not the evident horrors and evils of the Revolution itself (in which she agrees with him) but the causes of such evils. For Wollstonecraft, the monarchical French regime Burke extols had become deeply corrupt, with rich and poor loving not true liberty but honors and property. The French peasants (and the revolutionaries that emboldened them) thus lacked the virtues that would allow them to respond to injustice in a virtuous way: “The slave unwittingly becomes the master, the tyrannized a tyrant, the oppressed an oppressor.” “Absent virtue,” Dumler-Winckler insightfully writes, “protest unwittingly replicates the injustice it protests. For Wollstonecraft, true virtue is revolutionary because it enables one to justly protest injustice, and so not only to criticize but to embody an alternative.” Throughout the text, Dumler-Winckler exhorts those who would critique various injustices today to showcase, in their particular circumstances and unique oppressions, virtuous alternatives.

Women’s Rights for the Cause of Virtue

Just as Augustine distinguished true Christian virtue from its pagan semblances, Dumler-Winckler tells us, Wollstonecraft distinguishes true virtue from its “sexed semblances,” especially in the thought of Burke and Rousseau. For the latter two, human excellence was a deeply gendered affair. For Wollstonecraft, however, virtue is not “sexed”—even as men and women, with distinctive procreative capacities and physical strength, clearly are. Dumler-Winckler yet again turns to Aristotle and Aquinas as those who “supply the material” for Wollstonecraft to call upon women to imitate Christ and live according to their rightful dignity as imago Dei. Dumler-Winckler’s own words could summarize her important book: “The affirmation of women’s ability to recognize, identify with, and even emulate the divine attributes has been so crucial for the affirmation of their humanity and equality, it may be considered a founding impetus for traditions of modern feminism.”

Wollstonecraft knew that women’s education and role in society needed to be reimagined. Dumler-Winckler writes that “unlike most of her predecessors, premodern and modern alike, . . . Wollstonecraft could see that growing in likeness of God would require a ‘revolution in female manners’ and a rejection of ‘sexed virtues.’” Mrs. Mason, the Christ-like protagonist in Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, taught her female pupils to think for themselves “and rely only on God.” Mason’s advice did not commend the Kantian autonomy so often extolled today, but rather “virtuous independence.” Mason taught: “[W]e are all dependent on each other; and this dependence is wisely ordered by our Heavenly Father, to call forth many virtues, to exercise the best affections of the human heart, and fix them into habits.”

And thus we come to the rationale behind Wollstonecraft’s late-eighteenth-century appeal for women’s rights. It was an appeal “for the cause of virtue,” as Dumler-Winckler quotes the proto-feminist again and again. Wollstonecraft grounded rights in the imago Dei, viewing them as both important protections against arbitrary and unjust domination, and specifications of justice’s demands: “what is due, owed, or required to set a particular relationship right,” as Dumler-Winckler nicely puts it. Unlike the Hobbesian Jacobins, Wollstonecraft recognized that “liberty comes with attendant duties, constraints, and social obligations at every step.”

Recognizing how Wollstonecraft advocated rights on the basis of Christian theological anthropology, not secular Enlightenment ideals, it is odd then that Dumler-Winckler picks a fight with the likes of Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and especially Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory. It is true that in his 2012 Unintended Reformation, Gregory laments, in Dumler-Winckler’s words, “the eclipse of an ethics of virtue with a culture of rights,” but unlike MacIntyre and Hauerwas, who reject rights as a quintessentially liberal phenomenon, Gregory endorses an older grounding for rights. But this is precisely what Dumler-Winckler has shown Wollstonecraft offers: the good and right held together, just as, both happily acknowledge, Catholic social teaching does today.

Unfortunately, however, modern rights theories have followed not Wollstonecraft or CST but the “conceptions of autonomy and self-legislation” that both reject. Though Wollstonecraft’s view of “liberty is not, as Burke fears, a license to do whatever one pleases or as Gregory fears ‘a kingdom of whatever,’” that surely is a prevailing view of liberty today. Indeed, it manifests itself (in Gregory’s view) in acquisitive consumerism, “an environmental nightmare,” “exploitative (and often brutally gendered)” impact on workers, the decline in the “culture of care” and much, much more, about which Dumler-Winckler and Gregory (and I) agree! But more crucial, perhaps, is a common solution: if “disordered loves are at root, Wollstonecraft suggests, a matter of idolatry,” the remedy depends, according to Dumler-Winckler, on “their reordering, on the cultivation of what Wollstonecraft considers ‘the fairest virtues,’ namely benevolence, friendship, and generosity. . . . Not to banish love and friendship from politics, . . . but to refine earthly loves.”

Dumler-Winckler and I disagree about some of the practical implications of Wollstonecraft’s vision today. She sees unjust essentializing in the TERF movement; I, in the gender ideology against which TERFS rally. She hails Kamala Harris as an exemplar, I, Justice Barrett. But that we share a common understanding—and indeed an intellectual framework—that each person “learning to be virtuous” can transform a society for the common good is itself a great advance from the MacIntyrian lament. It is one for which she and I can both happily thank an inspiring and insightful eighteenth-century autodidact, one who should be more widely read—and carefully studied—today.

The Guardian view on universities: arts cuts are the tip of an iceberg | Editorial

Ministers are ultimately responsible for weakening the arts and humanities. They are taking the country backwards

The announcement that the University of East Anglia is to cut 31 arts and humanities posts – out of a total of 36 academic job cuts – has rightly prompted anger as well as dismay. UEA became a literary flagship among the new universities that opened in the 1960s. This year is its 60th birthday, and since 1970 it has been home to one of the most famous creative writing courses in the world: founded by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, its students have included Anne Enright, Ian McEwan and the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro.

There is shock, among alumni and observers, that the financial problems of the UK’s higher education sector now threaten such prestigious institutions. Once celebrated for their innovative approaches, 1960s campus universities were where different kinds of courses were developed. Creative writing is one example; media, development and women’s studies are others. In cutting the arts and humanities in these universities, managers and policymakers are turning back the clock – at a time when, arguably, there has never been a greater need for courageous innovation. Any idea that the risks are limited to the post-1992 universities should be junked.

‘I haven’t had a single normal year at university’: the UK students graduating without a graded degree

An unlucky cohort of undergraduates has been plagued by Covid restrictions, education strikes and finally a marking boycott

Emily Smith, a final-year geography student at Durham University, never imagined her already heavily disrupted university experience could end like this. She won’t be graduating this summer because half her work remains unmarked owing to a national marking boycott by lecturers.

She refuses to attend the “completion ceremony” Durham has offered her instead. Without an actual degree classification it seems like a “farce”. Like so many in this deeply unlucky cohort of students, she feels this is the last straw.

Third of UK final-year students face grades delay due to marking boycott

Small number could attend graduation but later be told they have failed as pay dispute affects assessments at 145 universities

Tens of thousands of university students are being left in limbo without their final degree results this summer, including some who could attend graduation ceremonies only to be told later that they have failed.

About a third of the UK’s 500,000 final-year undergraduates are thought to have been affected by the marking and assessment boycott at 145 universities, part of the pay dispute between the University and College Union (UCU) and employers that has strained relations between staff, students and management.

Don’t Save Yourself, Save the World: A Dialogue with Vincent Lloyd

“I’m very skeptical about the ability of people in positions of power and privilege—including intellectuals—to name truths about the world.”

The post Don’t Save Yourself, Save the World: A Dialogue with Vincent Lloyd appeared first on Public Books.

The Size of Things: Time in Context

What does the timeline of human existence look like when physically laid out to scale? How does that compare to the timeline of the universe?

The post The Size of Things: Time in Context appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

Cost of living crisis forcing students to take on more hours of paid work

Most university students supporting themselves say it is negatively affecting their studies, survey finds

The cost of living crisis is forcing more university students to take on more hours in their part-time jobs, with most saying that supporting themselves is affecting their studies, according to a new study.

More than half of the 10,000 students surveyed by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) said they did paid work during term time, with most saying they were using their wages to support their studies.

Test Scores for U.S. 13-Year-Olds Show Lowest Math and Reading Levels In Decades

The last time math performance was this low for 13-year-olds was in 1990.

Authors of ‘And Tango Makes Three’ Sue Over Florida Law Driving Book Bans

A lawsuit targeted a school district and the State of Florida over restricting access to a book about a penguin family with two fathers.

A Step Forward in the Debate about Masculinity

Early in 2019, the men’s razor company Gillette raised eyebrows with a new commercial. The ad depicted stereotypically disordered male behavior—aggression, catcalling, and a “boys will be boys” indifference to both—and contrasted it with a new generation of men taking a stand against that patriarchal past: a father breaks up a fight between two boys, a young man cuts off another’s unwanted advances toward a female stranger.

Many on the right complained that Gillette drew a glib equivalence between masculinity and toxicity, and the commercial was admittedly both myopic and preachy. But the conservative dismissiveness of the ad largely settled into a defensive, abrasive machismo. The ad was simplistic, but its critics missed an opportunity to think through the meaning of masculinity, and about the importance of male—and especially paternal—role models.

Conversations about sex and gender are surely just as difficult now as in 2019. Any talk about masculinity can easily veer into the same sclerotic patterns of the Gillette hubbub: a left that paints with uncritically broad brushes, and a right that gets defensive and dumbs down its beliefs. Richard Reeves’s latest book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, manages to avoid predictability, blending statistical insight and easygoing wit to craft a fruitful exploration of the male malaise.

Reeves, a liberal economist at the Brookings Institution, bookends Of Boys and Men by presenting the educational, economic, and cultural challenges men face, and he proposes policy and social solutions for each. They’re all insightful and (unsurprisingly) subject to debate, especially, in my view, his discussion of fatherhood and marriage. But one of the most important lessons of the book—which Reeves introduces to reassure readers that they can care about both women’s equality and men’s struggles—is that “we can hold two thoughts in our head at once.” In that vein, we can disagree, even deeply, about some of Reeves’s premises or proposals, while also recognizing that Of Boys and Men models the sort of intellectual dexterity needed to tackle complicated matters in our polarized times.

Men Falling Behind

Reeves begins his book by pointing out how boys are falling behind in the classroom. He surveys data showing they are 14 percentage points less likely than girls to be ready to start school at age 5, as well as 6 percentage points less likely to graduate high school on time. Look ahead at college, and young men are 15 percentage points less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s. Women are narrowing gaps between themselves and their male classmates in typically male-dominant subjects (such as STEM), while stereotypically female subjects like nursing and teaching remain so.

Men are also being outdone in the job market. Worries about the wage gap—which Reeves handles with careful nuance—or about a C-suite glass ceiling have some legitimacy, but overemphasizing them paints an incomplete picture. The lack of female representation among Fortune 500 CEOs tells us that a small—albeit influential—proportion of men are doing very well. But by the same token, the people struggling the most economically are more likely to be men. An astounding one-third of men with only a high school diploma (approximately 5 million men) are out of the labor force.

To address these labor market problems, Reeves draws from the women-in-STEM push and calls for similar efforts for men in health care, education, administration, and literacy—or as he calls it, HEAL. In the same way that Melinda Gates pledged $1 billion to promote women in STEM, Reeves proposes an equal “men can HEAL” push. He envisions a combination of government and philanthropic funds for training and scholarships, and for marketing these often well-paying careers. Child care administrators and occupational therapists, two examples Reeves cites, respectively earned on average $70,000 and $72,000 in 2019.

One of the most discussed policy proposals in the book deals with educational gaps, which Reeves wants to address largely by “redshirting boys,” or delaying their start in kindergarten by a year. It’s not that young boys are less able than their female counterparts, but rather that they cognitively develop at a different pace, about two years slower than girls. For Reeves, giving boys the “gift” of an extra year before starting school “recognizes natural sex differences, especially the fact that boys are at a developmental disadvantage to girls at critical points in their schooling.”

Reeves’s reasoning reflects an important aspect of his approach: he acknowledges the importance of biology, and thinks that understanding biological factors should moderate a tendency, frequently seen on today’s left, to confuse equality with sameness. After examining data on men’s and women’s different career interests and outcomes, for example, Reeves concludes that we should at the very least consider that biology and “informed personal agency” play some role in occupational choices. He rejects attributing all gender gaps to sexism, or expecting perfect 50–50 representation in all fields.

People of different political stripes can debate the scope and specifics of both the HEAL movement and redshirting boys, among other proposals in Of Boys and Men, but Reeves leaves the possibility of fruitful deliberation very much open. He helpfully frames his discussion of education and jobs so that potential disagreements will be about means, rather than  fundamental ends.

But the same can’t be said about the third aspect of the male malaise Reeves identifies: the cultural status of fatherhood.

Fatherhood without Marriage?

Reeves recognizes a sense of aimlessness has taken hold of many men’s most personal relationships: between men and women, and between fathers and children. But he primarily wants to address the latter problem, and to do so by envisioning fatherhood as an independent institution, considered separately from marriage. We should address and improve relationships between fathers and children first, irrespective of whether fathers are married to their kids’ mothers. Our safety net should expect more than mere economic support from fathers—particularly among noncustodial parents—and reward them for involvement in their kids’ lives. In a nutshell, our culture and policy should reconcile themselves with the reality that we live in “a world where mothers don’t need men, but children still need their dads.”

Why doesn’t Reeves concurrently advance a marital renewal? For one thing, he regards the traditional model of marriage as too rigidly predicated on the expectation of a male breadwinner, and by extension on the economic dependence of women. From it flows a notion of fatherhood that may have encouraged family formation in the past, but that is now “unfit for a world of gender equality.” The decline of marriage poses problems, but it’s largely indicative of positive gains in autonomy for women, in his view.

Reeves emphasizes that many unmarried, nonresidential fathers are very involved in their kids’ lives. Black fathers, for example—44 percent of whom are nonresidential—are more likely than white nonresidential fathers to help around the house, take kids to activities, and be generally present, according to one study he cites. Reeves argues that our cultural expectations of fatherhood “urgently need an update, to become more focused on direct relationships with children” (emphasis added). Since about 40 percent of births in the United States take place outside of marriage, he concludes that insisting on a model that assumes an indissoluble link between fatherhood and marriage is just anachronistic.

But Reeves doesn’t fully reckon with the gravity of divorcing fatherhood from marriage. Chapter 12 of Of Boys and Men, which Reeves dedicates to his independent fatherhood proposal, advances particular policies to support “direct” fatherhood unmediated by marriage, from paid parental leave to child support reforms, to encouraging father-friendly jobs. But he spends surprisingly little time directly arguing against the empirical and philosophical case for fatherhood within marriage as distinctly positive.

For example, Reeves writes that “there is no residency requirement for good fatherhood. The relationship is what matters.” Fair enough. But which model—fatherhood within marriage or nonresidential fatherhood—tends to facilitate more of the positive interactions needed to build healthy relationships between fathers and children? In general, the one where more of those interactions can potentially take place. A study by Penn State sociologist Paul Amato suggested this, reporting that from 1976 to 2002, 29 percent of nonresident fathers had no contact with their kids in the previous year, while only 31 percent had weekly contact.

In fact, contact with their biological father plays a positive role in advancing the two other major concerns Reeves has for boys: work and education. A 2022 report from the Institute for Family Studies found that “[y]oung men who grew up with their biological father are more than twice as likely to graduate college by their late 20s, compared to those raised in families without their biological father (35% vs. 14%).” According to the Census Bureau, approximately 62 percent of children lived with their biological parents in 2019, and 59 percent lived with married biological parents. In other words, growing up with a biological father is deeply intertwined with growing up with a married father—there are very few cohabitating biological or single biological fathers.

Beyond social science, there’s also a conceptual issue at the heart of Reeves’s proposal. It’s undeniable that many working mothers don’t need men in the same way past generations did—if what we mean by “need” is economic support. But it’s also very clear that mothers do need men. Without men, well, they wouldn’t be mothers (and vice versa) for the very simple yet profound fact that the sexes need each other in order to fulfill their biological end. This is more than a semantic trick—it’s a recognition that mutual dependence is at the heart of our biology. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, men and women could not exist without each other—and that realization should caution us against overemphasizing independence.

Moreover, shouldn’t fatherhood also entail modeling what lasting commitment to a spouse looks like? Reeves is right to stress that fatherhood should mean more than just economic support, but he misses the fact that prospects for decoupling marriage from fatherhood are similarly discouraging in this regard. In a study by the late Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan, 80 percent of unmarried parents were in a romantic relationship (with each other) at time of the birth of their child. But here’s how McLanahan summarized her five-year follow-up with them:

Despite their “high hopes,” most unmarried parents were unable to maintain stable unions. Only 15 percent of all our unmarried couples were married at the time of the five-year interview, and only a third were still romantically involved (Recall that over 80 percent of parents were romantically involved at birth.) Among couples who were cohabitating at birth, the picture was somewhat better: after five years, 26 percent were married to each other and another 26 percent were living together.

In divorcing fatherhood from marriage so hastily, Reeves misses an opportunity to consider why reimagining marriage is a key aspect of reinvigorating fatherhood as well. It’s the biggest drawback of Of Boys and Men.

Nevertheless, Reeves’s proposal has clearly opened a door to fruitful further debate. His case for direct fatherhood should temper a traditionalist reflex to assume that nonresidence is equivalent to abandonment—there are clearly many nontraditional, not-married, or separated fathers who embody dedication to their children. But if engaged fatherhood is so empirically and conceptually intertwined with marriage, then we would lose key aspects of both by separating them. We shouldn’t idealize marriage or how it affects fatherhood, but we shouldn’t hastily decouple marriage and fatherhood either.

Successfully reimagining marriage and fatherhood will probably even entail letting go of some of the overly rigid gender roles that Reeves criticizes in Of Boys and Men: more female breadwinners and paternal homemakers, as well as various policies and workplace arrangements to support the parent–child bond are all likely to be a part of the future of the family. But so should giving boys and men not just the tools to excel at school and work, but the habits and vocabulary to strive toward commitment, dedication, and love in the most personal dimensions of their lives.

Improving the Debate

Of Boys and Men is a book about men, written by a man, claiming that our culture doesn’t take men’s problems seriously. In the wrong hands, it would have been the latest entry in a seemingly incessant culture war, a callback to the silliness of the Gillette controversy. Yet it has been a resounding mainstream success. In matters of gender and sex, some might believe it’s impossible for there to be any interest in men’s issues across the ideological spectrum. The success of Of Boys and Men suggests that’s not the case.

Of Boys and Men has a point of view, but Reeves doesn’t close off the possibility of exchange or criticism by making a caricature of his opponents. This is the sort of book that not only exposes an often ignored issue, but elevates the quality of our conversations about it, even amid disagreement. That is perhaps its most impressive feat.