Ever-expanding AI continues to invade higher education

Just months into the Trump administration, in a systematic process facilitated by the six Republican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court justices, democracy and the rule of law—as we have long understood these concepts—are eroding by the day. Yet capitalism is booming, less restrained than at any other time in recent memory, and tech firms are dominating portfolios. Such conditions have facilitated corporate America’s push—streamlined by President Trump—to insert AI into every square inch of the education system. 

Shortly after Trump’s executive order on AI in education in April, which focused on K-12 schooling, a report was published, The Blueprint For Action: Comprehensive AI Literacy For All. It took aim at the entire education system with “support” by EDSAFE AI Alliance, aiEDU, and Data Science 4 Everyone. The constellation of corporate interests affiliated with these three coalitions alone is stunning.

But this is politics, of course. Like so many other corporate-and foundation-funded education-related initiatives, The Blueprint For Action was also supported by two university-based entities, the Global Science of Learning Education Network at the University of California, San Diego, and the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation at Arizona State University (ASU)—the latter of which educates roughly 75 percent of its students online and is home of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. The Blueprint For Action also lists over 30 separate entities as “contributors,” a list which includes corporate- and foundation-funded education groups, consulting and lobbying organizations, investors, and opaque education nonprofits. 

Speaking at the ed tech Woodstock known as the ASU+GSV Summit in April, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon seemed to confuse AI with the steak sauce of my childhood, but it all makes sense to me now. The ’80s talking points are all back; The Big Bad Department of Education, a permanently failing education system, the wonders of private school choice and more tech in the schools, and couching corporate greed in terms of concern for students and our national competitiveness. I just hope we can use AI to, once and for all, win the international war for condiments. 

Written primarily for educational administrators and reporters, The Blueprint For Action mentions the concept of “human flourishing” several times, a phrase that can also be found in the playbook for our current democratic dissolution, Project 2025 itself (the full title of which is Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise). A brilliant stroke. Who doesn’t want our students—and all humans for that matter—to flourish? Those of us hung up on, for example, masked federal agents arresting immigrants on our streets, using alligators as prison guards, fictionalizing history, federal investigations of the President’s perceived enemies, and millions of Americans losing healthcare coverage and food assistance need to reconsider our views. Because the report affirms that the key rhetorical concept of human flourishing—”understood as a state of complete well-being, encompassing purpose, positive relationships, personal growth, and health”—is a “focus of the Trump administration.” Whew. 

Given the University of Wisconsin (UW) System’s prioritization of all things tech, what I’ve named the AI-is-everything-in-education policy couldn’t have come at a better time. Recent media revelations about the UW’s profligate technology and consultant-related spending have called the System’s leaders’ priorities into question. 

But the UW’s prioritizing of extravagant tech products and services over employees is hardly news. In the fall of 2023, when The Daily Cardinal published UW System President Jay Rothman’s smoking-gun email to Chancellors outlining 16 “observations and takeaways” of a Chronicle Of Education report, the press—beginning with the Daily Cardinal itself—focused on takeaway #13 on the list regarding campuses “shifting away from liberal arts programs to programs that are more career specific, particularly if the institution serves a large number of low income students.” 

Yet the 16-point list should be read in its entirety. And in addition to suggestions that campus leaders make “painful” (#2) and “difficult” (#3) (both terms in scare-quotes) budget cuts and decisions, Rothman also stressed the “need to invest in technology to ensure efficient operations (e.g. that the institution’s enrollment and tuition payment functions are effective”) (#7). 

The corporate AI-is-everything-in-education policy comes to the rescue, providing cover for the UW to refocus the larger conversation where it wants—on the uncritical embrace of any and all technology over all else as it slowly and systematically dismantles our campuses. 

A long-standing corporate tech priority for education—online schooling—has had numerous monikers in a decades-long attempt to expand in the K-12 and higher-education markets. The AI-is-everything-in-education policy—because it’s all about tech—would also be the next logical step in the permanent marketing plan for the UW’s online programs. When speaking to the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee in April, Rothman said that the UW System “was focused on making college more accessible and looking for ways to serve nontraditional students around emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.”    

Given the recent closure of six two-year schools in the UW System, the Board of Regents’ authorization of tuition increases, and the official secrecy surrounding pending budget cuts at UW Madison, it’s clear that “accessible” does not mean affordable or geographically convenient. Rather, “accessibility” is yet more corporate-speak for marketing online education. 

Indeed, with no expensive training or additional software, even I could read the AI-generated results of a Google search for the “benefits of online education,” a list on which “accessibility” is prominently featured.

Moreover, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard educational administrators and policymakers link their corporate-created priority-of-the-moment to the elusive “nontraditional” student, I could have already retired. Higher-education leaders, accepting the institution’s privatization as God-given and not an ongoing political choice, have told us that the “nontraditional student” is going to infuse our coffers with cash since about forever. 

Ultimately, however, it’s not clear what Rothman was saying about AI and the education of nontraditional students. One interpretation is that the UW System is seeking to increasingly use AI to educate—at the very least—nontraditional students online. Another possibility is that the UW’s online programs should be increasingly used to educate students about AI. Or Rothman could have meant both: fewer actual humans teaching our students in an increasing number of online programs, the content of which disproportionately consists of AI-related information (whatever that would look like). Absent any clarification and given the UW’s embarrassing and increasingly expensive tech worship, I suspect President Rothman meant both. 

In addition to the multitude of corporate interests aligned with the Trump administration, many other powerful actors are pushing the UW System in a tech-worshipping direction, including Wisconsin’s own Technology Council, created by state statute in 2001 as a non-profit corporation to “promote the development of high-technology businesses” in the state. Just weeks after technology interests helped deliver the White House to Trump, the Technology Council hosted an event about the future of higher education in the state at which Rothman, alongside president of the Wisconsin Technical College System, Layla Merrifield, and president of the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, Eric Fulcomer, were featured on a panel. 

The Technology Council describes itself as the “science and technology advisor to the Governor and the Legislature” and as an “independent, non-profit and non-partisan board.” “Independent” is a curious descriptor for the Council, however, which boasts numerous corporate sponsors, including several investment and law firms. 

In 2002, the Technology Council published Vision 2020: A Model Wisconsin Economy, with “major funding” from Mason Wells Private Equity. The report, like the seemingly endless string of similar reports published by business interests ever since, falsely assumed that we can create more high-tech, high-wage jobs by educating more people and producing more sleek reports. As if more bachelor’s and advanced degrees, or certificates (another current corporate education fad) held by the population will mean fewer jobs in the occupations that dominate the labor market, such as home healthcare, warehouses, retail, food services, and the like. 

But that’s not how things work. That’s not how things can work. Nearly 70 percent of gross domestic product consists of personal consumption, and the vast majority of this consumption involves physical objects, not information, data, or knowledge. And decades ago, corporations decided to move the manufacturing of nearly everything outside of the U.S., to locations that pay workers pennies on the dollar. Technology, then, is largely a tool used to create and deliver stuff to eager consumers. Hence, the percentage of technology-focused jobs as a share of all employment has long been in the low single digits. 

Maybe neither the Technology Council nor UW policymakers have high-speed internet access, so they’re unaware of the poor job prospects in the oversaturated tech sector. To give just a few recent examples, Microsoft is laying off three percent of its entire workforce just two years after it eliminated 10,000 “roles.” And it’s taking these steps despite “better-than-expected results, with $25.8 billion in quarterly net income, and an upbeat forecast in late April.” Amazon is also laying off employees in communications and sustainability, while the cyber-security firm Crowd Strike also recently announced layoffs of five percent of its workforce.  

It seems like all those high-paying, high-tech manufacturing jobs that never materialized in another Trump-backed Wisconsin fantasy, Foxconn, have also been deleted from policymakers’ memories. Foxconn was promoted as a boon for UW–Madison, and the Technology Council affirmed that the project “will help drive Wisconsin’s economy.” Yet in June of this year, the Foxconn fiasco was labelled by NBC Chicago a “mostly-abandoned stretch of four lane roads and barren fields.” I guess the “technologies that will place Wisconsin on the leading edge of an American revolution in manufacturing and health care” should be considered alongside highways jammed with self-driving cars, the 3-D printer takeover, and employee-less retail stores in the Futurist Bible, a faith-based volume consisting of perpetual predictions that can never be disproven. They just keep getting postponed.  

Any discussion of the education sector’s tech fixation is not complete without mention of the seemingly endless and ever-increasing number of ed-tech firms, many of which are connected to The Blueprint For Action report. An honest discussion of the real economy—specifically, the disproportionately low education, low wage, non-technology-focused jobs that actually exist—runs afoul of the multitude of powerful interests that literally marinate our education information ecosystem. 

Why, then, do we still take seriously corporate claims of an economy, or world for that matter, that can ever be dominated by technology-related activity and employment? 

The AI-is-everything-in-education policy will also further the UW’s current emphasis on the T in STEM at the expense of most of S, E, and M. The Materials Science engineering program at UW-Milwaukee (UWM) recently learned this the hard way. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, UWM Chancellor Mark Mone defended eliminating the materials science program, and suggested that the university can “redeploy resources from the shuttered program to ‘growth areas,’ such as computer science and software development,” programs which have between 450 and 500 students.

Here, Chancellor Mone must be talking about programs with increasing numbers of students as opposed to fields with growing numbers of jobs in the real economy. Because there is absolutely zero evidence that technology jobs are increasing as a share of all jobs in the real economy. Zero. 

But in the UW System, we don’t serve students. Like the Trump administration, we serve corporations. And today, tech corporations—and their conduit in the White House—run the show. 

Many faculty in the UW System, with AFT-Wisconsin leading the way, have forcefully pointed out that education is about human relationships, a rather pedestrian observation if one talks to any student, parent, or teacher. But educational administrators, despite mostly being parents, former faculty, and—of course—students themselves, now exist in an environment completely dominated by technology interests. The current AI-obsessed education sector is yet another chapter in a decades-old tech supremacy narrative vis-à-vis education, one which continually replaces rational thought and empirical reality with corporate talking points repeated endlessly, as if to make them true through sheer repetition. 

Because tech is always the priority in our corporate-dominated, consultant-driven UW System, it seems clear where its tumultuous path is headed. The UW will spend obscene sums of money on various platforms and AI consultants. AI training for faculty and staff will become omnipresent on our campuses, dictated by UW System leaders and policy. 

Following Trump’s lead, there will be no public debate on prioritizing all things AI. Only administrators and UW System leaders will be involved in these far-reaching decisions, an increasing number of whom are now selected by Rothman without mandatory search committees because of a recent, extraordinarily significant yet under-appreciated Regents-backed policy. This campaign will be presented as necessary to, as Trump affirms, “demystif[y] this powerful technology,” or, in the language of The Blueprint for Action, provide “comprehensive AI literacy” for all the simple-minded, knuckle-dragging faculty who struggle to point and click. 

While millions of dollars (as well as untold time, intellectual energy, and oxygen) are dumped into the AI-is-everything-in-education policy, UW campus administrators no longer have any meaningful discretion. They merely act as regional managers following austerity dictates from System headquarters in Madison, and will tell our campuses that newly vacant faculty and staff lines cannot be filled—except those in the corporate-preferred programs involving technology and, increasingly, healthcare (another major focus of the Technology Council). 

The further narrowing of the UW’s educational offerings, built on the fake version of the economy promulgated largely by tech interests themselves, will continue unabated. Wisconsin students’ access to a broad range of fields at our 11 comprehensive universities—intentionally located in every corner of the state so as to provide the widest access possible consistent with the Wisconsin Idea—further eroded. And let’s not forget our students’ access to in-person, human education is increasingly at risk as well. 

But who needs well-informed, critical-thinking citizens prepared to work in the real economy and educated by human professors in subjects like history, politics, literature, foreign languages, the arts, and so forth, in an increasingly non-democratic country? Certainly not the Trump administration and its corporate backers in tech.