The AI Crisis in Higher Education: A Strategic Proposal

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What is to be done? It is a question every university has asked about ‘artificial intelligence’ since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Language models are now a routine part of how staff and students work, yet there is no agreement about what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate use. They have become ubiquitous without being normalised.

In this short book, Mark Carrigan argues that the result is a multidimensional crisis of trust, in which staff and students increasingly suspect one another of using models in problematic ways. Universities face a dilemma: they must adapt to AI to protect the value of their degrees, and integrate AI to preserve the relevance of what they teach, yet each agenda tends to undercut the other. Meanwhile the economics of the AI industry are profoundly unstable, and the terms on which these models are offered are likely to change dramatically once the investment bubble bursts or the major labs go public.

Rather than another ‘AI strategy’, Carrigan proposes strategic under-integration: securing assessment where it matters, integrating models cautiously and without lock-in, and building the relational capacity universities need to cope with ongoing technological change. The window of visibility is still open, but it will not stay open for long.