I caught a news report today and was reflecting on its implications for my work in higher education.

The Register is reporting on a survey of UK primary and secondary school teachers. Those teachers had been encouraged to use generative AI to assist them. As predictable as the rising sun, the teachers report getting more done -- but ending up working the same amount of hours because now they're being asked to do more:

Although some time was saved with AI, that was more than made up for with demand to complete other tasks, resulting in 55 percent of teachers who say they use AI working the same hours as before, and 4 percent saying they work more.

As a university professor, I can't speak as much to primary and secondary education, but I can say for certain that the culture of universities is very much about "productivity" in areas such as research and teaching, and I think the pressure to do more, rather than work less, will be very apparent in the academy (if it isn't already). That's because of longstanding pressures in higher education.

And a lot of this is going to splash onto the students, too.

Research Pressures

In terms of research, when I was hired at the University of Utah back in 2010, I had one peer-reviewed academic article to my name. Within a few years, I was on hiring committees and we wouldn't even really look at applications from folks with 1 article -- they needed to have several before they even started on the tenure track. This was at an "R1" (research one) institution with a medical college and law school. I've seen similar patterns at other institutions, and I've done tenure reviews at still more. Basically, I'm at the age in my career where I believe I could not be hired now by the standards I was hired initially.

This is endemic, and it's been longstanding. While we talk a great deal about quality over quantity, the longstanding observation in the academy is simply more is better. Metrification here includes h-indexes, Google Scholar's i10-index, impact factors, and metrics from Academic Analytics, among others. It also includes the sheer number of publications and grants. And add in corporate social media metrics -- did your article get enough likes and shares? Is your work engaging?

All that prompts an anxious question among those on the tenure track: "If I do this project, will it count?" I asked that question a lot when I was an assistant prof. And that anxiety, of course, comes from the fact that a tenure track job is an endangered species, with the new faculty majority being adjuncts, contractual lecturers, and other shorter-term roles. Even if you get a tenure track job, there's no guarantee you'll keep it.

So, yeah, let's toss in machines that can create synthetic, probabilistic summaries of articles and can generate synthetic articles, lectures, presentations, the whole bit. Toss that into a realm that has for at least a generation been obsessed with more, more, more. As I predicted, Journal editors are already seeing massive increases in submissions. "Publish or perish" is becoming "generate or perish."

I'd predict that, like our colleagues in primary or secondary education, we in the academy won't work less hours. We'll just generate more stuff per hour. Productivity!

I have lost hope that academic researchers will right the ship -- I don't see the culture of productivity waning. And maybe I'm not one to talk, since someone reviewing my tenure file back in 2015 or so said I was "overproductive." I myself am considered to be "highly productive" (but I think of myself as someone who likes writing all the time.)

Teaching Pressures

I could say similar things about the labor of teaching in the university: that I expect admins are going to expect faculty to "do more with less," as the popular saying goes. I think we can imagine how: larger class sizes, maybe increases in teaching load, taking on more grad students. I'm concerned about this but I also have seen it for my whole career -- yes, genAI will ramp this up, but what else is new?

No, my real concern is for the students. The Register article reports a bit about the survey's analysis of primary and secondary students, which found that students are also using generative AI.

Again, I'm not going to speculate about primary/secondary school. In higher education, however, I already suspect that my colleagues are increasing the workload on their students because of the expectation that students are using generative AI. Why not have students do more?

Indeed, over the past year or so, I have observed undergraduate students being asked to read more things (e.g., journal articles, news articles, videos) per week, and produce more things per term (more presentations, more forum posts) than in the past.

To be frank, I can't say systematically that this is happening everywhere, but I am concerned that my colleagues, particularly those in non-Humanities-adjacent fields, will assume that because of generative AI, students can just pump out more products with no extra effort. Professors, particularly those who don't really understanding writing or communication beyond "just produce a thing," will ask students to "read" more texts (using generative AI to summarize it) and do more presentations and "write" more papers simply because it's "easier" now.

After all, there are tools like Grammarly and Scribbr, which exist because their creators appropriated the content of untold numbers of students, that can help students churn stuff out. More stuff surely means more learning!

All that said, it's also the case that professors are reporting asking their students to read less long-form items, such as books. What gives? Are we reading more, or less? I'd say the trend is "reading less, consuming more."

And that's a major tragedy of all this.

As Johnathan Jerry puts it, it's not a crisis of reading less or more: it's a crisis of deep reading:

The real concern is deep reading—not just scanning a short text, getting a hit of dopamine, and gaining a superficial understanding, but instead spending hours inside a writer’s brain by pouring over their book. Professor Maryanne Wolf is perhaps the loudest proponent of this concept, arguing that shallow reading of the sort we do online, buzzing from one post to the next, doesn’t give us the time to analyze, criticize, infer, and deduce. We gobble it up but don’t learn as much from it.

My colleagues who increase the workload on their students are not thinking about deep engagement: it's a higher education version of what marketers used to call "snackable content" coupled with a gesture towards rigor with a dash of "these kids today are digital natives and like to use AI." More educational content sloshing around content management systems will be seen as good in and of itself.

I'm reminded, once again, that "school" comes from the Greek σχολή, meaning "school" as we now understand it but also "free time" and "leisure." The linkage between the two should be obvious if we take the time to think about it: school can be a place where we slow down, explore, think deeply. It may very well appear to be "free time" or "leisure" since thinking doesn't require us to be working some machine somewhere. Thought can happen on a stroll, looking out a window.

But now school of course is a training ground for productive work, and all we know anymore is that more is better than less. Stop looking out the window. You've got thinking to do!

Overall, I'd argue that the emphasis on productivity, whether it's research or teaching, is the contentification of higher education. By that I mean all forms of communication and media get contained within the concept of "content," which itself will not submit to ethical or aesthetic analysis. Content simply must be produced to fulfill the needs of various containers, and we've built one helluva container in the form of the modern academy.

Again, this is not new; I've been documenting this logic dating back to the 1990s. But I can easily imagine all levels of it, from research to teaching, being intensified as generative AI becomes more ubiquitous. (As I said before, just try to write with Microsoft Word these days and not have it try to generate for you.)

Want to resist all this? Go for it: take a walk, look out a window, consider the sky. You might do more thinking even if you're not more productive.