The end of higher education

The end of higher education, it turns out, will not arrive with a bang or even a whimper. It will arrive with a press release.

Senior leaders at an Australian university have recently published an op-ed in The Australian newspaper claiming that artificial intelligence (AI) expertise will be integrated throughout their courses, that every student will receive a free ChatGPT subscription, and that this represents the glorious future of higher education. Their article concluded with an astonishing disclosure: 'AI was used in producing this op-ed.'

You could not make this up. I speak as a former Vice-Chancellor, three times over, which perhaps explains my dismay.

One can admire their candour, but the irony is delicious. The Australian, owned by News Corp, has just published an artificially generated argument for why universities should surrender what remains of their intellectual functions to artificial intelligence. This is ironic enough, but there is more.

To compensate News Corp for the use of its intellectual property, OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, pays licensing fees for content taken from The Australian. When ChatGPT's next training run scrapes up that op-ed, it will ingest its own prose, now sheltering behind a News Corp paywall. The Australian will have made ChatGPT's output part of its intellectual property, and OpenAI will pay handsomely for the privilege of reusing its own work.

Absurd, certainly, but not entirely surprising. As I noted in an earlier post (We pretend to teach, and students pretend to learn), human beings are being quietly removed from higher education. Students use chatbots to produce their assignments while lecturers rely on them to produce their lecture notes. AI marks the resulting work, which means, in effect, it is marking itself. AI tools are also deployed to detect whether students are cheating by using AI. The entire enterprise has become a closed loop, capable of running indefinitely without human involvement.

When universities first noticed that AI was producing student essays indistinguishable from the real thing (admittedly not a particularly high bar), they faced a genuine choice. They could return to more demanding forms of assessment: oral examinations, supervised writing, smaller classes, and genuine intellectual engagement. This would have required money, effort and a certain institutional courage. Or they could redefine the problem. Regular readers of this Substack will not need to be told which option prevailed. As I feared, universities are replacing pedagogy with what they would, in other circumstances, call plagiarism.

We are now informed that AI is not a threat to education but its magnificent future. Students must learn to collaborate with AI and universities must develop AI-enabled learning ecosystems. The latter sounds vaguely like a Soviet agricultural initiative and will presumably produce similar yields. Lecturers will be transformed into a kind of educational concierge, hovering nearby to suggest effective chatbot prompts.

As the American academic Hollis Robbins has observed, once universities concede that their lecturers possess no intellectual capacities substantially beyond ChatGPT, the rationale for university education begins to weaken rather alarmingly. Why pay high fees when you can study with a chatbot for free?

What is being quietly abandoned in all this enthusiasm is the only thing universities possess that machines cannot replicate. It is not information; Google finished off that argument years ago. It is not even knowledge in the narrow sense. It is formation, the slow, uncomfortable process by which a person learns to think. Students wrestle with difficult texts, construct awkward arguments, receive criticism and gradually (when the system works) become capable of genuine judgement.

Writing is valuable largely because it is hard. One discovers what one actually believes by attempting, often painfully and unsuccessfully, to articulate it. A polished essay on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, generated in forty seconds, teaches the student nothing apart from how to produce the appearance of thought without experiencing any of the inconvenience. (An excellent preparation for those seeking a career in the brave new world of higher education.)

From Plato onwards, education was understood to be a moral undertaking. Universities were not merely about advanced vocational training; they were concerned with cultivating something that might loosely be called character or, as John Henry Newman claimed, the nurturing of the intellect itself.