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Regarding the Sept. 21 BDN article “UMaine goes all-in on AI amid upcoming layoffs and tech fears”: After 20-plus years at the University of Maine teaching and mentoring thousands of students, I am neither shocked nor surprised at past and current states of campus and system dysfunction. More recently, I’ve seen administrators shoving AI down students’ and faculty’s throats while eroding support systems that actually promote thinking, learning, civic responsibility, and humanity.
I believe UMaine is becoming just another institutional wealth pump, supporting a bloated bureaucracy and out-of-touch elite class at the expense of ordinary people and the public good. It is obscene to me that combined salaries of the president and vice chancellor of finance approach $1 million and spending on AI exceeds that, all while workers, support staff, and students struggle to make ends meet. I wonder how much of that AI spending trickles up to enrich our ruling technofascist broligarchy?
If the vice chancellor wants to outsource his own thinking to chatbots on his own dime and time, that’s his business, but surely we can hold administrators to higher standards when they act on behalf of our public university with public funds. And if the job of a vice chancellor is simply coasting from one budget crisis to the next with no accountability, couldn’t a chatbot do that just as effectively and for a fraction of the cost? And I’d bet it could even organize its own emails!
Steve Coghlan
Argyle Township