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2026-08-16 05:03:18 - Paul D. Foy -
TheUniversityOfCambridge

I thought I'd do a post on the University of Cambridge, using my trusted AI tool Wispr Flow. That is a stream-of-consciousness approach. I do have some experience of the University of Cambridge myself because I was a student there so I can speak with a small degree of authority. Although my experience of it was when I was in my very first formative period of my life, early on as a young man. Now apparently the University of Cambridge is a loose confederation of colleges. That is, the University provides teaching and assessments of students and administers the buildings and the facilities of the campus. Whilst the colleges have the role of providing accommodation, on a full-board basis in many cases, and pastoral care for the students and help with learning, provision of supervisions and group tutorials, that kind of thing. This pastoral care is an interesting way of putting it. It didn't extend to finding a girlfriend for you but that's another long story. Now there's been quite a bit of controversy recently regarding the University of Cambridge because one of its professors had a claim of plagiarism against him, the poor man, the poor unfortunate man, and it led to a rather sad outcome. Well my opinion on this one is that, in some senses, the university has been hoist by its own petard in that front. As traditionally an assessor of students and a grader of students, it seems that this process has gone wrong in some sense for its own staff, that is, its lecturers. Perhaps a case of plagiarism is simply a misassessment of the professor. Perhaps the professor should have been a lecturer, a doctor, and not a professor or something like that. Anyway it doesn't seem to me a very serious thing to tell the truth and it's about as serious as your grade on graduation. It's a snapshot of a moment in time. Perhaps he had got some untoward practises at one stage in his life or used somebody else's work, God forbid, but it doesn't seem all that serious to tell the truth. It sort of begs the question of what the role of an academic is, particularly in this age of AI. Now I'd certainly like to comment on universities and AI and Cambridge in this way because they're all intimately related. It seems to me that, just as there was the industrial revolution of the 19th century in which the manual, physical working man was replaced by machines, the AI revolution is the way in which the dissemination of information, the recording of information, the passing on of information is itself automated. It is the automation of the administration of the office function of the pen and paper job. So perhaps the administrators, this kind of role the office job, they themselves have been hung by their own petard in that they have been replaced in some sense by AI. I once came across a characterisation of AI by a fairly learned person, an academic I think it was, and they're rather brass-necked individuals in that they have taken all that scholarly persons had to offer. The writers of books, etc. , digested them, assimilated them in various ways, and offered it up for sale back to the same authors at a profit. That's quite clever, isn't it? It's certainly a business endeavour if anything but I don't view AI too harshly to tell the truth. It's an incredible facilitator in the dissemination of information and it can only improve in its accuracy. It will come to be viewed as simply a tool to get the answer, to know what you want, with little more fuss than typing in a question and receiving the answer back on almost anything effortlessly. I don't think it can be decried too much. I think some, which rail against it, are perhaps the 90s equivalent of the 19th-century Luddites or the Chartist revolution, something like that. I think academics and lecturers have got to lighten up because I don't see them too threatened by these things. I think the tenets of a lecturer and a university personnel remain and are threefold: 1. They're engaging in research, that is, the finding of new things, the finding of new forms or feeds for the AI for the automated systems. 2. They are engaging in student education and welfare to some extent. That is, the passing on of these techniques and tools, the dissemination of information as the guides to AI, things like that. 3. There are the administrators and the office workers in the institution: the coordination of the provision of athletics tracks, libraries, lecture rooms, that kind of thing. The administration of everything. I think the collegiate system in Cambridge is fairly unusual amongst universities. Most universities have an accommodation function, that is, they administer themselves, that is, the university does it, halls of residence and places in which students live. This is hived off to the colleges by the University of Cambridge and actually Oxford as well. Then of course another criticism of AI is that there's no recognition for anything. Instead of selling your book, your ideas, your contribution to individuals, and getting a take, by the price of the book from each individual, AI is taking it for not much price of a few books perhaps. It is then spitting all the information back to anybody that cares too, wanted at a profit to the developers of the AI of course. Well it's a fair comment. But what do you do, hold back progress? Hold back automation? I think when assessing the worth and the contribution of people, it should be based on real things. Have you done real things? Have you met the needs of people? How extensively have you met the needs of people? Perhaps you can be paid well if you've extensively met the needs of many people. As a university lecturer you're providing the feeds, perhaps, for the input. You're indirectly helping a lot of people meet the needs of a lot of people. It's a job that's reasonably well remunerated, I would say. Recognition, well that's a rather subjective thing. Base recognition on hard-and-fast things: provision of food and accommodation and water and that kind of thing. That's how I see things but admittedly my own discipline, mathematics, is very difficult to create a case for meeting people's needs. Most of the needs of mathematicians are met by other mathematicians and the only needs mathematicians are meeting are often other mathematicians. That's quite a difficult one but you've got to think more broadly on these things and how the wider needs of society, how the cultural aspects and the language of society, are met by mathematicians, for example. Same perhaps for many artists' discipline, perhaps like history. This is a somewhat rambling post but this issue is quite involved and difficult to get to grips with, to tell the truth.