A community college tutor who spent years building trust with vulnerable students now spends her time helping them use tools that do the thinking for them. A programming instructor says almost every faculty meeting is about training teachers to use AI "rather than helping us teach students how to think and learn." An IT professional at Texas A&M was pushed out for refusing a Copilot mandate.
These accounts, collected by journalist Brian Merchant in a new investigative report, paint a consistent picture: AI adoption in education is being driven by institutional cost-cutting, not pedagogy, and the people closest to students are paying the price.
The Double Bind
The most striking pattern across these stories is the contradiction educators face daily. Universities hand students ChatGPT subscriptions while expecting faculty to enforce academic integrity. California State University wants to become the "largest AI-driven university in the world" while professors struggle with undetectable AI-generated submissions. Students get the tools; teachers get the blame.
One CSU professor, speaking anonymously, pointed out the absurdity: the same institution providing free AI access to students expects consequences for using it on assignments. For students at access-oriented institutions who are already stretched thin, the promise of AI shortcuts is almost impossible to resist.
Lauren Krouse, a community college tutor, described how her college rolled out Khanmigo (Khan Academy's AI tutor) despite staff concerns about both job displacement and the erosion of critical thinking. Her hours were cut. She eventually quit.
Real Costs, Measurable Losses
The job losses are concrete. An essay grading operation that once employed 45-60 people during training periods now uses 8-12. AI scores the majority of standardized test essays, with humans only handling the exceptions the system cannot process. An edtech contractor named Michelle lost a six-month contract after her company was, in her words, "lovebombed" by generative AI platforms that produced error-prone, plagiarism-heavy content.
At Texas A&M's AgriLife division, IT professional Caleb Polansky faced termination threats for declining Copilot training. He resigned rather than comply. At the University of Auckland, a candidate for an ethics coordinator position was rejected specifically for declining to use AI in research ethics decisions.
The Los Angeles Unified School District's $17 million educational chatbot deal ended with the FBI raiding the superintendent's home.
Even in athletics, a strength and conditioning coach reported that AI-generated training programs scheduled intense workouts right before championship games. The programs eliminated the coach-athlete relationship that made the job meaningful.
Teaching as a "Bullshit Job"
The programming instructor's quote hits hardest: teaching itself is becoming a "bullshit job" when AI writes the assignments and AI grades them. A university lecturer posed the question that frames the entire report: "If AI is writing the work and AI is reading the work, do we even need to be there at all?"
One librarian described watching colleagues abandon core professional values like equity, intellectual freedom, and privacy to board what they called the "AI hype-train," despite AI tools contradicting the American Library Association's own principles.
The through-line across every account is the same. These aren't people who fear technology. They are people watching institutions use AI as a justification for cutting labor costs while claiming to innovate. The tutor who built relationships with students, the coach who designed programs around individual athletes, the grader who understood context - all replaced by systems that are cheaper but measurably worse at the actual job.
As one anonymous lecturer put it: "This whole profession never really recovered from PowerPoint. This is just the nail in the coffin."