A University System Went All In on A.I. Now It’s Tearing Itself Apart (Or maybe not)

Nik was prominently featured in a New York Times Magazine article about the CSU and OpenAI. His strategy of reasonable experimentation comes through really well here, especially in a story that is often full of extreme responses. One of my favorite passages from the story reads.

“Some were ahead of the curve. In the years after the Covid-19 pandemic, Janos noticed that his students, most of whom are remote learners, seemed even more reticent to speak up in class, let alone request office-hours appointments. “What is historical materialism?” he says. “No one is knocking on my door to ask me that.” When ChatGPT was introduced in 2022, he found himself wondering if this could be one way to help them ask questions and engage with philosophy more directly. So he started tinkering with it, eventually using ChatGPT to create chatbots that imitate three major thinkers in his field: Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. If Max Weber, the person, once wrote that universities existed to produce “convivial capitalists,” Janos hoped that Max Weber, the bot, might have something like the opposite effect.”

You can read the whole story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/magazine/ai-university-college-california.html?unlocked_article_code=1.m1A.AZwJ.3nMMh3WtZD2h&smid=url-share