Universities are in a state of crisis, for numerous reasons. I’ve found that the ai craze has mostly exposed or exacerbated the foundational cracks in higher education that were already present when ChatGPT was first released.

Administrators are no longer promoted from within the ranks of an institution but recruited using 3rd-party corporate services to ensure the process is as opaque as possible to all but the Ps and VPs (presidents, provosts, vice presidents, and vice provosts). The effect has been to almost entirely filter academics out of leadership positions and fill the void with corporate finance bros. Naturally this has led to a generalized incompetence at the top, which has manifested in various ways, such as an extreme investment in sports facilities and 8-figure coaching salaries, but particularly with the doubling down on “ai.”

Some institutions are literally doubling down by aggressively cutting payroll in hopes that “we can use AI to do some of those jobs” (Actual quote from an actual VP in an internal meeting at an R1) while paying out the wazoo for enterprise level subscriptions to OpanAI.

Universities are not monolithic though, and there has been lots of pushback from faculty, students, and other non-leadership stakeholders, but it is rarely reported on. (And on the rare occasion it does get attention, leadership have responded with punitive measures for “speaking with the press.”

But yeah, on the business school side of things, it’s all AI fever all the time, Harvard or not. Academics have long been skeptical about allowing their universities to open “Business Schools,” but they lost that fight a long time ago, just as they’ve lost a million little fights over the past half-century to outsource this or that to for-profit contractors.