Cornell recently published a report on the Future of the American University. This is an open letter addressed to Cornell’s Provost and to colleagues across the global academic community.
Dear Provost Bala and Colleagues across the global academic community,
Cornell has done the higher education community a great service through the publication of its report on the Future of the American University. There is much in the report with which, from our very different vantage points as an early career academic (with postdoc experience at Cornell) and a retired British professor, we strongly agree. In particular, we welcomed the five commitments related to integrated learning, judgment and a human-centred approach to AI, strong and sustained two-way bonds with the public, innovation and resiliency in research, renewed attention to academic civics and creating alignment across the learning ecosystem of the university.
The challenge, of course, is how universities can deliver on such commitments. The recommendations at the end of each section of the Cornell report are helpful in this regard.
Our reason for writing is to suggest that the most important way any university can meet the current and future needs of its many stakeholders is by ensuring that it has in place the strongest possible processes for recruitment, appointment, promotion and staff development. This applies equally to academics, professional staff, and the increasingly common hybrid roles that span both domains.
As our experience lies in academic careers, we focus here on some of the processes and pathways academics encounter. Our aim is to expand on, and add to, the report’s observations on tenure and on the experiences of doctoral students. In doing so we focus on the recruitment and promotion of academics, the metrics by which academics are assessed, and the disciplinary structures within which academics work and collaborate. Our central argument is that people, including academics, professionals, students and the wider public, must remain at the heart of Higher Education (HE). Universities will only thrive if they continue to be genuinely human centric. In the current excitement surrounding Artificial Intelligence, there is a risk that we overlook the enduring importance of human intelligence, creativity, relationships and our deep connection to the natural world. The future of HE depends on recognising that AI can support people, but it cannot replace human judgement and the ecological awareness that should shape how universities contribute to society.
It is important that university appointment and promotion panels and processes reflect the new academic landscape being shaped by AI. To ensure a positive future for universities, and for the people who animate them, careful consideration should be given to the following:
Appointment criteria: We believe that the criteria used to recruit and promote academics should increasingly emphasise how candidates exercise their academic judgement, freedom of speech, human reasoning and ethical decision making. Interviews may also need to focus more on how an academic’s work advances knowledge, educates students and benefits the public through methods that build trust in Higher Education and are environmentally sustainable.
Academic leadership in an age of AI: Academic leadership has long been seen as essential to the success of the world’s great universities. Increasingly those promoted to positions of academic leadership will need the skills and courage to manage AI. Academic leaders should be able to demonstrate not only that they are the human in the loop, but also that their presence in that loop has a positive and discernible impact. Two things will be central to this emerging academic leadership role. The first is building trust in the outputs of any academic process (research, teaching or public engagement) that involves an AI. The second is being the ‘accountable officer’ for the use of AIs in their department by taking both legal and moral responsibility for their use and impact.
How we understand contribution: An important part of the work of university appointment and promotion panels is assessing the contribution that a candidate has made. In an age of AI, making such judgments requires a new understanding of contribution. Until recently, contribution was understood only as the value someone added compared with that of other people. It must now also separate what the human contributed from what the AI did. To do this requires academics to be clear in their work about:
Recruitment panels need to explore all these areas at interview to be able to make fair and informed assessments of an academic’s contribution in an AI-enabled HE environment.
In evaluating the contribution of an academic or a department, universities need to recognise a new form of inequality emerging within the sector, one that risks compounding existing disparities. Access to advanced AI models is uneven. Some academics can draw on the newest and most capable systems, while others must rely on less powerful tools, sometimes funded from their own personal resources. This unequal access to digital infrastructure should be taken into account in hiring, promotion and workload assessment, so that evaluations fairly reflect the conditions under which individuals and teams are working.
A debate we would like to contribute to concerns how we should measure the success of an academic in a future increasingly shaped by AI. We offer four suggestions, in the hope they stimulate further discussion.
Recognise equally: It should now be widely accepted across global HE that research, teaching and public impact are equally important. More needs to be done to make that principle a reality, and two related challenges require attention. First, these three activities are interrelated and mutually reinforcing, so any academic community needs a balanced scorecard across all of them. Second, appointments and promotions in each area must be evidence-based, which requires a sector-wide debate about which metrics best demonstrate success in research, teaching and public engagement.
Recognise new metrics: The traditional metric of academic success in research is peer-reviewed publication, but the forms of research output that benefit humanity are evolving. Many of the most valuable contributions enabled by AI now take the form of corpora of knowledge and structured datasets. These outputs rarely fit within conventional promotion and appointment criteria because they fall outside traditional notions of peer-reviewed publication. Greater recognition should be given to these non-conventional outputs, which are becoming foundational to the knowledge revolution.
Recognise new platforms: Academics who wish to share high-quality research quickly and with minimal friction now have many options, including preprint servers and platforms designed for specialist scholarly communities. These outlets often provide faster dissemination, wider reach and more responsive engagement than conventional journals, and their value should be acknowledged in assessment processes.
Recognise portfolio careers: Some academics now have portfolio careers, moving between roles in universities, industry and the non-profit sector. We need metrics that are transferable across these different environments and that support people in moving successfully between them. Such metrics will help ensure that diverse career pathways are recognised and valued.
Interdisciplinarity: Whilst much has been written about the importance of interdisciplinarity in academia, more needs to be done to recruit, develop and reward those who adopt such an approach. Many university structures, built as some of them are around mono-disciplinary departments, embed a silo mentality. We would like to invite university leaders to consider how, in their institutions, academics in different fields but working on related problems would connect. What mechanisms do they have in place to enable academics in different departments to meet, to talk and to co-create new knowledge, taught courses or community-facing projects? And once such interdisciplinary networks are created, how are they sustained, funded and recognised?
New disciplines: As frontier technologies develop at pace alongside major societal changes, how do our universities ensure that they develop the new disciplines required now and in the future? How confident can we be that the existing disciplinary ecosystem is the one needed to ensure universities remain relevant in a fast-changing world? How responsive and encouraging are some of our oldest universities at embracing new and emerging academic areas? Are the existing disciplinary ‘lenses’ through which we seek to understand the world and the human condition sufficient? Or should we be building new academic and scientific disciplines from the ground up, and if so, do we know how to do that?
To conclude, we were very impressed by the following statement made by Professor Dame Sally Mapstone, Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of St Andrews, earlier this month:
No university succeeds alone. In a volatile world, the collective contribution of all our UK universities to the public good has never mattered more.
We trust that this open letter will be read in that same spirit of a collective university effort to improve the human condition and learn from each other.
Best wishes,
Joseph & Andy
Dr Joseph Tooby-Smith, Early Career Academic (josephtoobysmith.com)
Dr Andy Smith MBE CSci FCASES SFHEA, Retired Professor (ORCID)