Straws in the Wind - Part 461

From the Cornell Daily Sun: The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals granted Cornell and four other elite universities permission to appeal a federal judge’s decision to certify a class of approximately 200,000 current and former students in a long-running antitrust lawsuit on Aug. 24. In a class action lawsuit, one or more plaintiffs file the suit on behalf of a larger group, known as the class, whose members may receive compensation based on the harm done to them. Certifying a class means allowing the contended group to proceed with litigation.

...The lawsuit, Henry et al. v. Brown University et al., alleges that 17 highly-selective universities including Cornell created an unlawful price-fixing scheme that reduced competition for financial aid and favored wealthy students under a group known as the 568 Presidents Group, which would violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Act federally prohibits monopolistic competition in interstate trade and commerce. Between 2023 and 2025, 12 of the accused universities settled for nearly $320 million in total, with some payments reaching Cornell students and alumni over the summer. 

Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgetown University and the University of Notre Dame are the five remaining defendants in the suit, which was filed in 2022. The appeals court based its decision to allow the universities to appeal on whether or not the study, a regression analysis done by the plaintiff’s expert, was “adequately analyzed” by Judge Matthew F. Kennelly, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois...

Full story at https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2026/09/7tcslsfcnv3n.

Straws in the Wind - Part 336

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: ...A 20-year-old freshman at the University of Notre Dame emailed the undergraduate population with an enticing pitch. “I built an AI agent that connects to your Canvas and sees everything,” Caden Chuang wrote in the email... “It figures out exactly where you’re falling short and gives you the precise roadmap to get an A with the least amount of work possible.” Within an hour, the university deleted the email from inboxes, Chuang said, and temporarily disabled his account. But more than 1,000 students had signed up.

Then Chuang posted a video on Instagram on Thursday saying he “might have just been expelled.” He said the university disabled his accounts and is investigating him for “creating an AI cheating tool” — a characterization he disputes. The episode marks at least the third time over the past year that an AI tool built by current or recent students has forced colleges into a scramble. Examples include the viral rollout of an “Einstein” agent that could autonomously complete coursework and a Columbia University student’s public clash with administrators over their discrete AI software to help students pass technical interviews. Universities are confronting the fast-moving reality that students are building systems they’re not prepared for.

But unlike Einstein and the interview app, Chuang says his tool, Kerra, is not a cheat code — it’s a productivity tool. The software reads assignments, grades, and uploaded materials from the learning-management system Canvas, then generates study guides, detailed notes, and even assignment drafts. It also tracks deadlines and sends reminder texts designed to keep students on track. Signing up for Kerra is free, but certain tasks and features — such as exporting a study guide or using the tool’s more aggressive iMessage accountability reminders — prompt users to pay a fee ranging from $9 to $20 a month.

Chuang’s broader argument for Kerra is blunt, and, to some instructors, provocative. Spending a lot of time in class is “not as valuable as it used to be in the past,” he told The Chronicle. Instead, the time students spend outside class doing extracurricular activities and networking with potential employers is more important to their future. Kerra lets students “spend more time taking advantage of all the opportunities at their university,” Chuang said...

Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/another-undergrad-is-trying-to-disrupt-college-with-ai-he-says-his-version-isnt-cheating.

Toxic Econ - Part 2

We have in the past posted stories about the website EJMR https://www.econjobrumors.com/ (now XJMR) which caters to academic economists, originally to help job candidates, but has limited moderation. Bloomberg is the latest source of information about the website in a very lengthy article. Some excerpts: 

...Started in 2008 as a website to help Ph.D. students and professors navigate academia’s opaque job market, it soon became a forum for everything from ivory tower gossip to chatter about food or personal technology. (Recent, less inflammatory topics: “Canadian school flyouts,” “Headline CPI increases to 3.2%” and “Pokemon is morally evil.”)

Over the years, the site has also developed a reputation as a swamp of misogyny and racism, with a strict moderation policy but lax enforcement that’s earned it comparisons to 4Chan, the ugly online forum. (Recent, more inflammatory topics on EJMR: “Would you ever hire a hot grad student as a postdoc?,” “Why do feminists, critical theorists, postcolonial writers, etc know so little” and “Does tenure allow me to refuse teaching black people?” Those are just the printable ones.)

By the mid-2010s, the site had hundreds of thousands of visitors a month...

The culture war over EJMR has had implications for the profession, too. For decades, advocates for equality in economics have argued that the lack of women and minorities results in blinkered, narrow-minded policy (for example, not prioritizing research on child care or on the effects of incarceration). Economics as a field can’t address real-world problems, they say, unless it first looks like the real world. Over the years, EJMR had become a symbol of that imbalance as well as a bastion of resistance to change. Its targets have included Melissa Kearney, a University of Maryland economics professor who’s won recognition for her research on families and inequality, and Claudia Sahm, a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve who in a 2020 blogpost titled “Economics Is a Disgrace” denounced the profession as sexist, racist and elitist.

EJMR’s influence has grown despite attempts to shut it down or create sanitized alternatives. In some cases, anonymous attacks that started on the site eventually broke through into mainstream discourse. In December 2023, conservative activists published what they said was evidence that Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized her dissertation, which added to an already-raging firestorm over the school’s response to the war in Gaza and led to her resignation. An anonymous post on EJMR had made a similar claim months before. (Gay has said she’s never misrepresented her findings or took credit for others’ research.)...

[The article then goes on to describe how a subset of supposedly anonymous posts were traced to specific institutions.]

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Posts on Economics Job Market Rumors

Share of all posts from US universities or research institutions on the site

Sources: Ederer, Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jensen; U.S. News & World Report

Share is the percentage of posts accounted for by the school or institution among all posts originating from IP addresses associated with US universities or research institutions. U.S. News economics graduate school rankings are for 2023-24.

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Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-03-15/ejmr-economics-forum-posts-unmask-field-s-racism-and-sexism.

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Our earlier post on EJMR-XMJR:

https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/toxic-econ.html. It features a chart based on the percent of posts from various universities were classified as "toxic." The website has expanded to math, poli sci, and sociology, but seems less comprehensive and active in those fields. A still earlier post from 2017: https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2017/08/bias-in-econ.html.

What could possibly go wrong? More updates

Michigan State, Notre Dame Pivot on Fall Plans Amid Rising COVID-19 Cases

Two more major research universities are walking back plans to resume in-person undergraduate instruction, continuing a rocky rollout for fall reopening plans across higher education. The University of Notre Dame announced Tuesday afternoon it will suspend in-person classes for almost 12,000 students, moving undergraduate classes online for two weeks while keeping students on campus and giving it a chance to reassess its plans and a rising coronavirus infection rate before classes resume. The announcement came at virtually the same time Michigan State asked undergraduates who had planned to live in residence halls to stay home and that it will transition classes planned for in-person instruction to remote formats. 

The moves come the day after the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pulled the plug on in-person classes after just one week. Chapel Hill told students to return home and be ready to complete classes online after a large number of students tested positive for COVID-19 infections last week and the campus’s testing positivity rate spiked to 13.6 percent.

Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/newsletter/breaking/2020/08/18/michigan-state-notre-dame-pivot-fall-plans-amid-rising-covid-19-cases