Large Language Models (“AI”) are transforming our world. How is Carnegie-Mellon’s linguistics department preparing students to contribute to the Age of AI? Professor Uju Anya has been in the news lately. Example:
On Sept. 8, [2022, as Queen Elizabeth II was on her deathbed] Anya tweeted from her personal account, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving and raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
(Note that use of the phrase “chief monarch” shows an inability to use the English language. There are no non-chief monarchs. Wokipedia: “The word monarch comes from the ancient Greek words monos (meaning “alone”) and arkhein (meaning “to rule”).” Also, is it fair to characterize the UK in 2022 as an “empire”? “Small Islamic island nation,” perhaps? If we are looking back to the 19th century and want to paint the former empire in a better light we could say “Ender of the Arab and African slave trades that began circa 700 AD (Arab) and BCE (African).”)
As with What does Syracuse University teach for $100,000 per year?, nobody asks what students at CMU, each of whom theoretically pays $93,614 per year for the privilege, are learning from Prof. Uju Anya. (Let’s also not forget the taxpayers, who contribute in the form of subsidized student loans (sometimes entirely forgiven!), tuition grants, research grants, tax exemptions for the university’s endowment, and tax deductions given to donors (that increase the burden on other taxpayers).) She’s the author of Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil.
What if Anthropic isn’t hiring anyone for their Speaking Blackness in Brazil group? Prof. Anya teaches “Hip Hop and Funk Discourses of Black Womanhood in Brazil and the U.S.” (all course materials hidden behind a paywall to exclude those who don’t pay $93,614 per year to CMU). That would prepare a CMU graduate to work in the Black Womanhood in Brazil department at OpenAI.
More work by this professor whom the CMU administrators were wise enough to agree to pay every week until she dies (“tenure”; the lifetime paycheck drawn from the students paying $93,614 per year and from the taxpayers (“the chumps”)):
Her Instagram seems to have been locked down recently:
(Note that the “lesbian” is given priority over the “mom” role. Would that work for a cisgender heterosexual man? List sex habits before “father”?)
Google indexed her tenure announcement from two years ago, but it can no longer be viewed:
Finally, ChatGPT found that if you’re a federal taxpayer (“a chump”) you kicked in $180,000 via the U.S. Department of Education for “An HSI-HBCU collaboration to create open access Spanish language curricula celebrating Blackness in Latin America (P017A230050)”, from which Uju Anya was paid.
Phil, so proud of you for highlighting a Great Scholar (yet again!). How do you find the time for all this? I had a difficult time understanding what it is Anya actually Scholarizes, but I’m sure it is Really Impressive if you are covering it. My days are so busy just keeping Really Honed on my own Singular Global Expertise of Black Studies Plagiarism that it’s difficult to find the time to understand the Great Work of other Great Scholars like Anya, hence I really appreciate your summary.