Texas Universities Use AI To Rewrite How Classes Talk About Race

Texas has been ground zero for the GOP’s assault on higher education over concerns about DEI initiatives, as well as gender and race “ideology.” Texas A&M made headlines earlier this year when it announced that a professor was fired for teaching “improper gender ideology.” In addition to firing the professor, the school has also begun implementing AI to rewrite course descriptions and syllabuses with mixed results. 

According to AP, Texas A&M System’s chief strategy officer, Korry Castillo, told school officials that each time she asked the AI tool to find courses on feminism, she would get a different set of results. “Either the tool is learning from my previous queries, or we need to fine-tune our requests to get the best results,” Castillo wrote in her email. The effort comes after Texas A&M announced a new rule requiring professors to obtain permission from the school president to teach about race and gender. 

Officials at Texas State University have similarly used AI tools to rewrite their syllabuses. Intro to Diversity, Social Inequality, Freedom in America, Southwest in Film, and Chinese-English Translation were among the classes the tool flagged as needing a name change to appear more neutral. 

I just…how do you make “Chinese-English Translation” any more neutral? It sounds like a literal description of what the class is about. Republicans have spent a decade talking about how liberals are so easily offended, but we weren’t telling colleges that simply acknowledging the existence of Chinese people is an ideological act. 

“I’m not convinced this is about serving students or cleaning up syllabuses,” Chris Gilliard, co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute, told AP. “This looks like a project to control education and remove it from professors and put it into the hands of administrators and legislatures.”

While obviously these are deeply incurious people by virtue of the racism, homophobia, and sexism inherent in these policies, the laziness is what’s striking to me. Instead of building a task force of people to implement these admittedly lame changes, they’re relying on a technology whose flaws are widely known. 

AI in its current state isn’t an actual, synthetic intelligence; it’s simply a large language model. Everything AI “knows” is through scraping data from preexisting sources. They’re using a program that can’t even deliver accurate food recipes to dictate their syllabuses and course descriptions. 

“These systems are fundamentally systems for repeatedly answering the question ‘what is the likely next word’ and that’s it,” Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington, told AP “The sequence of words that comes out looks like the kind of thing you would expect in that context, but it is not based on reason or understanding or looking at information.”

Another point of concern is the shadowy nature of the terms used for the AI tool. School officials didn’t provide AP a list of the terms being searched, and Castillo said she would only share the terms with staff in person or over the phone. If you’re actually doing a good thing, you wouldn’t need to be shady about what terms you’re using. 

Both the audits themselves and the usage of AI have left faculty members at the schools upset about what they believe is a loss of autonomy in how they teach. “I love what I do, and it’s very sad to see the core of what I do being undermined in this way,” Aimee Villarreal, an assistant professor of anthropology and president of Texas State’s American Association of University Professors chapter, told AP. Villarreal added that faculty have been pressured to comply with the changes or risk having their classes delisted ahead of the Spring semester. 

T. Philip Nichols, a Baylor University professor, told AP that Texas’ use of AI in this way represents a larger threat to higher education. “This is a kind of de-professionalizing of what we do in classrooms, where we’re narrowing the horizon of what’s possible,” he said. “And I think once we give that up, that’s like giving up the whole game. That’s the whole purpose of why universities exist.”

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