Good morning, and welcome to Friday, July 12. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Nick Perez compiled Comings and Goings. Andrew Mytelka contributed the Footnote. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

The uncanny AI classroom

You may have heard of the uncanny valley, which explains the unsettled feeling we get when encountering an anthropomorphic apparition that falls short of humanity. The artificial-intelligence revolution has brought the uncanny valley to the classroom, as our Alex Walters reports.

Artificial intelligence will power digital replicas of a handful of professors this fall. Morehouse College, a historically Black men’s institution in Atlanta, is rolling them out using technology from VictoryXR, an Iowa company. Morehouse already offers “metaversity” classes, where students don virtual-reality headsets to take courses in digital classrooms.

The new virtual doppelgangers will serve as digital teaching assistants. They can answer students’ questions or help them catch up if they miss class.

The execution is newer than the idea. A computer scientist at Georgia Tech has been using a virtual teaching assistant since 2016. Outside of the classroom, institutions have introduced AI-powered chatbots to answer students’ questions on topics like financial aid and registering for classes. Here’s what sets the new TAs apart:

• Morehouse’s digital TAs try to mimic the in-person classroom experience. They’re shown standing in a classroom, and their words play over a device’s speakers. They can display different media like slideshows, images, and videos to explain concepts.
• The AI models are trained on class content. Professors share information with the AI assistants through a process that’s like uploading course materials to learning-management systems.
• The virtual replicas can respond to questions that aren’t class related. They do so by turning to a model from the company behind ChatGPT. Then they try to steer students back to the course.

Still, the interactions are far from human. The system can take a while to interpret questions before it responds. It loses the thread of conversation quickly.

• “Want to see a demonstration with magnesium?” a TA asked in one demonstration. After receiving an affirmative reply, it started explaining what can be learned from mixing vinegar with baking soda.

The bigger question: Is this a fancy toy that’s more hype than help? Only time will tell whether tools like this help students learn or are, in fact, a solution searching for a problem.

For more:

• Read the full story on Morehouse’s AI assistants: ‘A Professor’s Digital Mini-Me’
• Try a demonstration for yourself: One is available here.
• Read up on related ethical questions in The Chronicle archive: AI Chatbots Pose Ethical Risks. Here’s How One University Is Handling Those.

Quote of the day

“Predictive models yield less accurate results for Black and Hispanic students, systemically making more errors.”

—Denisa Gándara, an assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin, described the findings of new research she co-authored.

Algorithms incorrectly predict that Black and Hispanic students will not succeed in college about a fifth of the time, according to the research, published Thursday in the journal AERA Open. They incorrectly project failure for white students 12 percent of the time, and for Asian students 6 percent of the time.

The bigger picture: The findings are a flashing red light for colleges that use data to inform admissions and allocate extra support for students. Researchers have long warned that algorithms based on historic data can be racially biased.

For more from The Chronicle: Are Colleges’ Predictive Analytics Biased Against Black and Hispanic Students?

Quick hits

• Chancellor pushed to the exit after 36 years: The board that oversees College of the Canyons, a community college in California, placed Dianne Van Hook on administrative leave and said it will search for her replacement. It’s not clear why Van Hook, who has led the institution since 1988, is being shown the door, but a board member said that it was not in response to union pressure or a campus climate survey that has raised concerns. The board has held closed sessions related to chancellor evaluation at four straight meetings. (The Santa Clarita Valley Signal)
• Nursing faculty flee Dickinson State: All full-time nursing-program faculty members resigned on Wednesday, saying they can’t realistically meet the public university’s new credit-hour production requirements. The university’s president said he refuses to set up “a special set of rules” to allow the faculty members to “work less hard” than other professors. The institution is seeking replacements and turning to other institutions in the North Dakota State University system for help. (The Dickinson Press)
• Embattled Cal Poly Humboldt president will leave: Tom Jackson Jr. plans to step down in August, less than four months after a faculty vote of no confidence rebuked him for calling police on protesters who were occupying a campus building where his office is located. (California State University, The Chronicle)
• Bluefield State must rebuild faculty governance: The Higher Learning Commission is requiring the historically Black institution in West Virginia to reinstate faculty committees and a faculty assembly. The university’s board dissolved its Faculty Senate after its former president, Robin C. Capehart, clashed with professors. Capehart retired last year. (WVVA, The Chronicle)
• Closing for-profit didn’t set up transfer destinations: Northwestern College, a Chicago-area for-profit institution, told students in an email announcing its sudden closure that it had set up transfer pathways to several other institutions. But all of those institutions told a local television station that Northwestern hadn’t contacted them. (WGN)
• Controversial statue decapitated on campus: Amid the tumult of Hurricane Beryl, an 18-foot statue of a woman on the University of Houston’s campus was purposefully decapitated this week. Anti-abortion groups have protested the statue, which wears a collar similar to that of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Houston Chronicle)

Weekend reads

• From the ’60s Till Now, TV News Coverage of Large-Scale University Protests Doesn’t Look So Different (The Conversation)
• China Reopened to Foreign Students. Americans Are Staying Away. (The Wall Street Journal)
• Masks Are Key Tools Against Covid-19. Should They Be Banned for War Protesters? (USA Today)
• College Credit for Working Your Job? Walmart and McDonald’s Are Trying It. (NPR)
• How Public Universities Hooked America on Meat (Vox)
• The College Board’s FAFSA Takeover (Inside Higher Ed)
• What is AI? (MIT Technology Review)

Comings and goings

• Jennifer O’Connor, vice president of technology and information law and policy at Northrop Grumman, has been named vice president and general counsel at Harvard University.
• Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, chancellor of the City University of New York, has been named chair of the American Council on Education’s Board of Directors, in Washington, D.C.
• Lewis P. Graham, interim academic dean at Morris College, in South Carolina, has been named chief academic affairs officer of the college.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.

Footnote

Your regular writer put off today’s Footnote long enough that The Chronicle’s Andrew Mytelka had to bail him out with the following contribution.

Summers offer ripe crops of academic illusion, as professors dream of wrapping up books and recasting syllabi at the same time administrators imagine completing strategic plans, budgets, and board presentations. This happens, of course, all while recharging their batteries from a relentless academic year, and preparing for whatever the fall portends.

The remedy to such illusions, I’ve learned after a lifetime of practice, is procrastination. Not your garden-variety procrastination involving TV reruns, online shopping, and rereading the Harry Potter series. I’m talking about what a Chronicle columnist described in 2005 as “productive procrastination” and what a 2012 columnist called “the good kind of procrastination.” But perhaps the epitome of all lessons in the art of “structured procrastination” appeared in a 1996 piece titled “How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done.” Its author, John R. Perry, then a philosophy professor at Stanford, won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2011 for having explained how “the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely, and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.”

I recognize, of course, that if you have read this far in the Footnote, you are unlikely to need any guidance at all in procrastination. For what are you doing, except delaying the start of your workday, by reading this?

Still, I’m grateful for your attention. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I’d like to point out that I’d planned to write about Perry’s essay in 2021, to mark its 25th anniversary. But then the pandemic happened, and personal and professional commitments intruded, and before I knew it, it was 2024.

The experience was a full realization of the principles outlined by my colleague Eric Hoover in a 2005 article about research on chronic dawdlers, especially on campuses, those “hothouses of procrastination.” Its title: “Tomorrow, I Love Ya!”