“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
A year into this newsletter, I am trying something a little different. Thus the nod above to a film premised on the lead character’s starting again. Also, Polly Holiday, RIP. “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” was adapted into “Alice,” the TV series that made her a national star.
Read on.
New for me
Here at the University of Pittsburgh, a little initiative that I helped to get off the ground a couple of years ago just “celebrated” its second anniversary. We call it “PASTA,” a memorable acronym for a mostly uninteresting name: the “Pitt Artificial Intelligence [read that phrase as a single entry] Scholar Teacher Alliance.” The somewhat stilted name, which almost no one remembers, owes its origin to my instinct that we needed a catchy acronym to help “it” get off the ground and stay aloft. Here is the (brief, and mostly uninformative] website.
To borrow a phrase that I use when I am asked “what is PASTA?”: PASTA is lunch. Lunch is drawn from a mailing list of people who are interested in exploring what Generative AI does and is not doing at and for Pitt and its people and programs. The list is now over 100 faculty and administrators from across Pitt’s full breadth. Some of this is teaching; some of this is research; some of this is administration. Some of it is practical; some is conceptual. Some is technical; some is social and personal. All of it is motivated by curiosity.
PASTA originated in a panel convened by Pitt’s University Senate in April 2023 - shortly after the first public release of ChatGPT - titled “Unsettled: Frames for Examining Generative Artificial Intelligence.” I gave a short talk about governance, but the more important product of that panel was bringing together several colleagues from across the university in a relatively open, curiosity-based, cross-disciplinary conversation. I said to the group afterward: let’s not let this energy simply dissipate. And we did not. Since the start of the Fall 2023 semester, what we now call PASTA has been meeting monthly, in person, for a mostly unscripted, mostly free-flowing conversation about AI and higher education and sometimes about AI and Pitt. I organize a light agenda by soliciting ideas from the list; I send out reminders of the lunch; I am the focal person for “can I join PASTA?” messages. Roughly 25 people attend each lunch.
The tenor and substance of the ongoing lunch conversation has ebbed and flowed in interesting and not entirely predictable ways, which means that lunch attendance varies somewhat as topics engage some participants more and other participants less.
Nevertheless, both formal and informal conversations and collaborations have spun out of PASTA, with more (I hope) yet to come. But being “productive” in any specific sense is not PASTA’s purpose, if PASTA has “a” purpose. (In certain quarters of the university, PASTA is referred to as constituting one among several repositories of interest and expertise concerning AI.) PASTA is a sort of grassroots incubator of relationships and ideas, some enthusiastic about AI, some deeply critical of AI. It offers an open forum of a sort that - in my experience - is all too rare in higher education. PASTA is not part of any school or department or institute. We have had different organizations around the university volunteer pay for the food (usually pizza, not pasta), but none of the members are “accountable” in any hierarchical or other formal sense. I “coordinate” PASTA, because someone (or some group) needs to.
I would be interested in learning about similar grassroots efforts at other colleges and universities.
What others have to say
Selections from new-ish commentary about the institutions of higher education and institutions of expertise, shared because these folks have me thinking, not necessarily because I agree.
Hollis Robbins at Anecdotal Value, “The Two-Minute Mile Problem.”
In 10 years, when students can get personalized content mastery for free or cheap and arrive at college having completed what we currently teach in years 1-2, what exactly are we selling? Research apprenticeship? Network access? Credentials? Time to mature? What’s the honest answer?
This last question is the only one that really matters. … If universities cannot articulate what they’re selling beyond “the credential” and “time to mature,” then they are vulnerable to any competitor who can provide credentials faster and cheaper. The luxury good model (small, expensive, mentorship-intensive) is economically viable but serves a tiny fraction of current enrollment. The democratization model (technology-enabled content plus guaranteed mentorship) has never been successfully operationalized at scale. The middle ground, where most universities currently operate, assumes students will continue paying premium prices for services they don’t access.
(Not to mention what becomes of graduate and professional education and to a faculty model that at least nominally, usually, blends research and teaching. There is a “Back to the Future” question here. Before the invention of the Carnegie Unit and standardization of the four-year undergraduate degree, “research” as we usually understand it today was still a novelty in American universities (colleges, mostly), and a lot of students completed degrees far faster and at much younger ages than they usually do today.)
Rob Nelson at AI Log, “Trump offers carrots to nine universities.”
Since the 1940s, the U.S. has had a system in which the federal government gives universities massive amounts of funding and the world receives rewards in terms of useful knowledge. That system is gone, and in its place a system of patronage is emerging that will be used to reward the regime’s allies and punish its enemies. ... Anyone looking to preserve science through compromise with autocrats and kleptocrats is deluding themselves.
Henry Farrell at Programmable Mutter, “The Village and the Sewer.”
Why is it that we (for those of us who live in the US, and some other countries) are trapped in a system where the self-images of both the professions and tech innovation are increasingly organized around their worst rather than their best aspects?
(Farrell’s essay reminds me that we are a long, long way from Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”)
Bryan Alexander at AI, academia, and the Future, “When opposing AI on campus means ending much of academic computing.”
Yet perhaps a movement is building among academics. Spurred by their experience and considerations of AI, they would like to see their campuses become more retro. Maybe we’ll see calls for unplugging classrooms and other institutional spaces, for non-networked or otherwise locked down devices and labs, for carving out an academic space in defiance of a world increasingly reshaped by AI.
(I have not seen evidence of such a movement at my university, but maybe I do not talk with the right colleagues.)
Jay Akridge, Trey Malone, and John Anderson at Finding Equilibrium: Two Economists on Higher Ed’s Future, “Rebuilding Trust in Higher Education: A Land-Grant University Perspective.”
Land-grant universities have an opportunity to reassert their traditional role as objective, unbiased arbiters of reliable information and to provide national leadership in graduating career-ready students/supporting workforce development more broadly.
This can only be accomplished if stakeholders consider university research objective and unbiased, and if academic programs and educational experiences are aligned with an evolving work world. Both require deep, consistent engagement with a diverse set of stakeholders and a demonstrated commitment to the highest standards of scholarship. To make such engagement and the resulting benefits a reality, we outline six strategies to expand and enhance the role of land-grant universities in the face of the crisis factors described above.
My bookshelf
Like a lot of academics, I read a lot. Like a lot of law professors, I read a lot about law and about governance. But I also read a lot of things just for fun and a lot of other things because you never know where interesting ideas might come from.
Just completed this week: Philipp Blom, “The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914” (Basic Books, 2008). From the publisher’s site:
Europe, 1900-1914: a world adrift, a pulsating era of creativity and contradictions. The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpowers. The twentieth century was not born in the trenches of the Somme or Passchendaele — but rather in the fifteen vertiginous years preceding World War I.
In this short span of time, a new world order was emerging in ultimately tragic contradiction to the old. These were the years in which the political and personal repercussions of the Industrial Revolution were felt worldwide: Cities grew like never before as people fled the countryside and their traditional identities; science created new possibilities as well as nightmares; education changed the outlook of millions of people; mass-produced items transformed daily life; industrial laborers demanded a share of political power; and women sought to change their place in society — as well as the very fabric of sexual relations.
From the tremendous hope for a new century embodied in the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris to the shattering assassination of a Habsburg archduke in Sarajevo in 1914, historian Philipp Blom chronicles this extraordinary epoch year by year. Prime Ministers and peasants, anarchists and actresses, scientists and psychopaths intermingle on the stage of a new century in this portrait of an opulent, unstable age on the brink of disaster.
The Vertigo Years is an ambitious book - a one-volume assessment of the gravity-eroding, giddying sweep of European cultural, social, political and spiritual change that permeated the first 15 years of the 20th century. But Philipp Blom has pulled it off triumphantly.
The vertiginous atmosphere of a tumbling prewar society - at the same time exciting and frightening - is described with atmospheric clarity. The combination of easily worn scholarship, fascinating character studies and fluent story-telling that is often very funny makes this a hugely enjoyable and illuminating book.
I agree. It is a terrific book, published more than 15 years ago yet with particularly interesting resonance in 2025. Read it yourself to see whether you agree.
Next up: David Goldblatt, “Injury Time: Football in a State of Emergency” (Harper Collins, 2025). Football (soccer) is, of course, an institution of institutions and a fascinating subject in its own right. Goldblatt is perhaps the greatest living student of the game.
Thanks for sticking with me.