The week in higher education – 30 March 2023

Since ChatGPT exploded into the higher education sphere over the last few months, there have been fears that students would use the chatbot to cheat in assessments. But there has been little data for how much it is being used, until now. An investigation by The Tab reveals the website was visited more than a million times over December and January – coinciding with the winter exam period – across just eight Russell Group universities. More than 850,000 of these hits were from the University of Warwick alone, with a spokesperson saying it was reviewing the design of future exams. University of Manchester guidelines class all words or ideas generated by the chatbot as cheating, so perhaps it is unsurprising that its students clocked up just 554 ChatGPT visits on university wifi over the same period.

Visiting professors can be something of an unknown quantity. Will their teaching match up to their research? Will they rub along with everyone in the faculty kitchen? It is this uncertainty that the University of Lincoln marshalled to defend its appointment of Ike Ekweremadu, a Nigerian politician recently found guilty of organ harvesting. Lincoln insisted that Ekweremadu had a “distinguished track record of public service” up until he lured a 21-year-old street trader from Lagos to the UK to unwittingly provide a kidney for his sick daughter. “Visiting professors are often, as in this case, non-resident at the university, unpaid and advisory,” the university told the LincolnshireLive news site. Thankfully, enigmatic visiting professors are rarely wrapped up in quite such “horrific” business, to quote chief crown prosecutor Joanne Jakymec. Lincoln said it had suspended Ekweremadu without prejudice when the case was being heard, understandably scrapping his appointment when he and his wife Beatrice were found guilty of conspiring to exploit the young man for his body part. You never can tell.

When it comes to intellectual rivalries, it can feel like everything’s on the line: professional credibility, public profiles, not least a sense of self worth. There are those who feel these stakes are a little low, such as Jonathan Portes and Christopher Snowdon, economists at King’s College London and the Institute of Economic Affairs, respectively. Not satisfied with Twitter slap fights across the ideological divide, the right-leaning think tanker bet the left-leaning academic £1,000 in 2018 that child poverty would not top 37 per cent in 2021-22. In The Spectator, where he is a regular contributor, the libertarian dismissed those who think the wager was bad taste as “lemon-suckers”, arguing that the two were debating the validity of economic forecasting, not child poverty, later tweeting a picture of them having a friendly drink in a London pub. Of course we can’t all be such cards, but perhaps a little flutter would liven up free exchange among economic faculty?

If only the young had wisdom and the old energy, as the saying goes. Contestants on the BBC’s University Challenge need both, but viewers are often perplexed by the advanced years of those who make it to the hallowed Granada studios in Manchester. They were particularly riled by the recent matchup between Jesus College, Cambridge and UCL, because the average age of the latter (41) was nearly double that of their Oxbridge rivals. Singled out for particular concern was poor team captain James Salmon, whose grey hair suggested he might well be pulling up the average. “I’m 10 years too old to be on University Challenge and I suspect I’m younger than all of the UCL team,” grumbled one viewer. The BirminghamLive news site quoted another who alleged Mr Salmon was “surely a lecturer”. Mr Salmon, who is in fact a physics and astronomy student, told the site he was a novice to quizzing, talking up his team-mates’ experience. Perhaps more would have cheered the win if only he looked a little less experienced himself.

The cost-of-living crisis has left many university staff across the world struggling to keep their heads above the water. One academic in Florida has decided to do the opposite, though, and will attempt to break the world record for living underwater for 100 days. Joseph Dituri, an associate professor at the University of South Florida, is seeking to examine how the human body responds to long-term exposure to extreme pressure. He will live 30 feet below the surface in a 100-square-foot capsule, The Times reported, and will be supervised by a medical team to undergo psychosocial, psychological and medical tests. The 55-year-old believes the increased pressure might even improve his health, saying that he might emerge after 100 days “super-human”.