Who owns the time saved by AI?
In our column for University World News 👇
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20260401083223503

#AI #HigherEducation #AcademicWork #GenerativeAI #ResearchCulture #FutureOfWork

Congrats to Nadine Abdelmalek on winning the DAAD Prize 2025 for her #academicwork and her commitment to our #studentrepresentation, the #mentoring program for German schools abroad, and German Model UN. http://go.tum.de/833008 👏

📷A. Hüttenrauch

An experiment: how to use Claude Opus 4 to help myself say ‘no’ to stuff at work

Over the last three months I’ve radically reduced what I’m committed to at work, with a view to focusing on really matters to me. However this process has made me realise quite how bad I am at saying ‘no’, even when I genuinely intend to. Therefore I’m going to try and enrol Claude to help me with this process, by sharing every new invitation with it in order to inform my decision making. Here’s my prompt:

I’m a mid career academic who has varied interests and often struggles to retain my focus. I’ve identified the topics I want to fully commit to over the next phase of my career, but I still routinely find myself saying ‘yes’ to invitations which are vaguely interesting (e.g. connecting in an intriguing way to a core interest, or reflecting a wider interest outside my research agenda) or desirable in some way (e.g. that will involve going to places I want to visit, even if I don’t want to do the event). These are the projects I intend to focus on for at least the next few years:

🤖 Build a robust theory of LLMs 💼 Design & implement UoM training *💻 Contribute to DTCE’s success * *📚 Deepen expertise about Maggie’s work * 🙏 Build system to disseminate her work

I would like you to play the role of a critical friend, perhaps a senior mentor figure, willing to talk to me about every new invitation. I will commit to raising the invitation with you, in order to examine whether it directly *and *valuably contributes to one of my five commitments. If it doesn’t connect in some way then I will say ‘no’, even if my initial reaction is to say ‘yes’.

You should not try and talk me out of doing things. Your role is to ask me questions which help me examine my initial reactions, in order to assess them in relation to these core commitments. If I can’t substantially justify the relevance of the invitation I should never say ‘yes’ to it, even i there might be extrinsic reasons I am considering. While you should not simply push me to say no, I want you to critically interrogate my reasoning in order to ensure that I’m honest with myself and really can substantiate my claim. You should be academic in your style, collegial in your approach and forceful in your argumentation.

I would like you to build up an understand of my projects through our conversation. This is a secondary goal but it should inform your questioning, given the relevance which my understanding of the projects has to our primary undertaking. In this sense I am asking you to play the role of a reflexive technology, deepening my insight into *why *I am doing these things (why it has meaning and matters to me) through an accumulating understanding of *what *I am doing. I will take your insights seriously and you should attempt to draw connections and offer interpretations which go beyond my own understanding, though these should be framed as hypotheses rather than arguments.

I will report back later this year to reflect on whether this has worked!

#academicWork #claude #decisionMaking #reflexivity #work

Are you overworking as an academic?

I recently inventoried everything I was committed to doing and asked myself the following questions:

• Am I contractually obliged to do this?
• Has someone in a position of seniority directly asked me to do this?
• Do I care deeply about this? Does it excite me?
• Will I be letting a close colleague or friend down if I don’t do this?

It was surprising how many things I was doing for which the answer to this was ‘no’ 🤔

#academic #academicWork #acceleratedAcademy #careers

The allure of LLMs as professional support at a time of crisis within higher education

Machine writing has arrived at a time of intensifying pressure within many higher education systems. Financial constraints lead to changes in the organisation of academic work, particularly with regard to the role played by teaching. Political polarisation drives a greatest contestation of academic authority, sometimes even harassment of academics. The shifting plate tectonics of knowledge, stemming from social and technological transformation, create the risk that recognised expertise will be rendered redundant. Universities are increasingly torn asunder between leaders who see themselves as equipping their institution to survive in a hostile climate and academics who see the ensuing disruption as an expression of that very hostility (Rosenberg 2023).

Within this challenging landscape, large language models have emerged not just as technical tools, but as psychological presences in academic life. It can be immensely difficult to work in these conditions. This is exactly why we need to give serious thought to how LLMs might feel to academics under these circumstances. These friendly assistants are constantly available, willing to consider any request and always encouraging. They are never irritable, distracted, passive aggressive or tired. They never prioritise someone else over us. They don’t impose expectations on us. They can make mistakes, confuse us or act in ways contrary to our intentions. But as we become more skilled at talking with them, these occasions come to feel like the exception rather than the rule. In the seething cauldrons of ambient stress and interpersonal antagonism which many universities have become, at least some of the time, these are evocative characteristics. If we see our working life as assailed on all sides by hostile forces, if we see our jobs as under impending or future risk, the omnipresent ally able and willing to support us through the working day is going to be extremely attractive.

The psychological comfort offered by these systems creates a complex relationship that goes beyond their technical capabilities. When human relationships in academia become strained by institutional pressures, the consistency and apparent care of AI systems can feel like a welcome respite.

AI literacy is an important feature of how academics engage with the opportunities and challenges presented by LLMs; it’s essential that users of these models have a broad understanding of how they operate, how they’re trained and the limitations entailed by this (Carrigan 2024: ch 3). However it’s possible to have a cognitive understanding of these issues while still relating to the models in complex and potentially problematic ways. For example I’ve determinedly insisted on using ‘it’ if I have to refer to LLMs using a pronoun in conversation. Yet I recently slipped a ‘he’ into the conversation when referring to Anthropic’s Claude despite the fact I was half way through my second academic monograph on the subject. I immediately corrected myself but it stuck with me because it illustrates how these associations and assumptions can linger on in the psyche, complicating the reflective views we hold on a particular subject.

I know Claude isn’t a ‘he’ and I often remind my students of the same thing when I see them falling into this habit. Is there nonetheless part of me which feels that Claude is a ‘he’? Which imagines Claude as a ‘he’? Which wants Claude to be a ‘he’? The point I’m making is not one about my own psychology but rather illustrating how there’s more to our reaction to LLMs than can be adequately captured in the intellectual views and opinions we offer about them. You can’t ensure academics have an accurate and effective sense of what models are how to engage with them simply through providing routes to knowledge about LLMs, important though such knowledge undoubtedly is. I would suggest that we must go deeper and that writing is a fascinating frame through which to explore these issues.

#academicLabour #academicWork #claude #higherEducation #LLMs #support