Convenience vs. Critical Thinking: Australian Academia at a Crossroads Where Artificial Intelligence and Falling Standards Challenge the Classic Academic model

As part of Digital Learning Week in September last year, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Education, Stefania Giannini, outlined the challenges, the contested spaces and the potential benefits of an AI-driven education sector. Giannini argued:

For the first time in history, technology is not silent. It speaks back.

The ramifications of this developing technology are manifold, challenging educators worldwide to strike a balance between restriction and integration. Central to this debate is a core question for young people:

What does it mean to be a student?

For many, university is as much about networking as it is about curriculum, and perhaps principally about the opportunities for friendship and social connection that campus life provides. Increasingly, Australian campuses are shifting away from providing such opportunities, and the only ‘networking’ that can be found lies in the strictly digital sense of interconnected cyberspaces.

Speaking to this dilemma is difficult for educators, many of whom have been instructed to adapt their professional approach and their personal values in a local sector fundamentally ill-prepared for a massive technological shift. Giannini believes one of the core priorities for UNESCO should be the facilitation of “global solidarity and shared standards” wherein no country can be expected to “navigate this transition alone”; nevertheless, different approaches have already emerged along national and cultural lines.

As reported in The Guardian, Dr. Andrew Paterson, formerly of Flinders University in the now defunct College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, was one of the first Australian academics to speak out publicly against plummeting tertiary expectations and standards:

They’d failed academically, they’d failed placements, yet they received their parchment.

Ballooning student numbers, a reduction in face-to-face teaching, and the erosion of the lecture as the preferred mode of delivery is now the norm in modern Australia. It was recently announced that the newly formed Adelaide University would prioritise online teaching entirely, boasting that the new students of 2026 can study 100% online. Is this what Deloitte was paid a considerable sum to ‘achieve’? The same company caught cheating on its own homework and delivering an AI composition to meet their government brief to the tune of $440k is somehow trusted to oversee the students of tomorrow?

This trend towards a ‘digital future’ is mirrored nationally with many universities turning to third-party online program managers (OPMs), essentially outsourcing the role of a public university. It is odd to watch university campuses being expanded exponentially across our capital cities by obsessive vice-chancellors while academics find themselves teaching to empty halls.

Both the Albanese Government and the Australian media have been strangely slow and openly reluctant to break this to the public—I wrote this piece in 2025 and have been told, repeatedly, that this is ‘not a news story’—but Steve Cannane, Jonathan Miller and Lara Sonnenschein at the ABC had more luck than I did:

Australian universities are paying external consultants and contractors an estimated $1.8 billion a year without disclosing which firms are hiring and what the money is being spent on.

The terminal decline of the Australian education systemis news. Obviously.

The rest of the world is not doing this.

Campus life is still a fundamental feature of university teaching across North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Globally, universities are still busy places where finding a seat in the cafeteria poses a challenge, compared to local ‘ghost campuses’ where hospitality staff are losing hours because there is nobody around to serve. Australia may be changing too enthusiastically.

There are many arguments to be made for and against the adoption of digital learning…

One question concerns accessibility, with the digital divide now shifting into a more explicit division around who does and who does not have access to AI. If our entire educational approach is to be pinned on the blanket adoption of this technology, then this notion of accessibility becomes a key concern.

Conversely, there is the argument that online teaching and learning spaces provide a wider pool of potential students with accessibility in the sense that physical barriers to attending campuses—such as a lack of ramp access or the presence of potential psychosocial hazards— can be reduced by a wholly digital approach.

Similar conflicting arguments surround the death of the lecture in Australian education…

Critics argue that lectures have been the preferred mode of delivery in global higher education for more than nine centuries, central to the very concept of a university, while adopters of new technologies argue that student attention spans have shrunk in response to social media. They advocate ‘group discussion’ and ‘student led facilitation’ over the classic model, with lecturers discouraged from speaking for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

There is little argument, however, around the detection of AI…

It is widely acknowledged within the sector, by students, academics and administrators alike, that AI detection tools are inadequate. The high probability of ‘false positives’ stands beside the high probability of an AI detection tool failing to identify the presence of AI altogether.

Even the Pope has weighed in and urged Catholic students not to let AI do their homework. But the apple has already been plucked from the tree. In a secular world where ChatGPT can provide an original answer to a complex essay question in literal seconds, with low probability of detection, the temptation for undergraduates to press a button is not, in any reasonable sense…resistible.

Prime Minister Albanese has declared that “80% of the workforce” should have at least a vocational education and training (VET) or university qualification by 2050 as part of the Australian Universities Accord. This aspirational target is laudable in the sense that financial barriers to university entry should be broken down posthaste; barriers relating to capacity, however, are still open for debate.

There is a squeamishness in Australian education around the concept of ‘elitism’ when it comes to academic achievement. We don’t display the same squeamishness when we discuss elite sport, where it is understood that there are bars—figurative and literal—to leap over. Culturally, Australia needs to be careful, because other nations do value intellectual excellence and place this at the centre of their education policy.

The rise of midwittery in Australian universities has leapfrogged from meme culture to become a serious social concern. While the term ‘midwit’ is, in itself, politically charged and contentious, it is useful in this context. ‘Midwit’ refers to people of slightly above average intelligence who nevertheless lack the core critical thinking skills necessary for academia or leadership, and instead advocate group conformity. Whether one embraces this emergent ‘midwit’ meme or rejects it, the last thing a university should ever promote or impose is conformity in its students. Questioning teachers and challenging traditional assumptions with a well-constructed, human-generated essay used to be the whole point.

As academic standards are lowered, surely it is inevitable that universities will lose their sense of purpose. The danger of remaking the sector to allow 80% of the workforce to excel is that Australian universities may become pseudointellectual echo chambers wherein political bias, wishful thinking and collective ideology are placed above objective evidence and persuasive argument. Worse, they may become performative institutions where every student is automatically awarded their degree as a rite of passage.

If 95% of that 80% are using AI to cheat, then academia has an existential problem.

Likewise, when the word ‘education’ becomes synonymous with indoctrination, as many progressives are now acknowledging, the social consequences stretch far beyond academia. Universities are supposed to be forums where an idea—any and every idea—can be challenged and explored.

For the Australian government, key questions become:

How can we responsibly incorporate emergent technologies while fostering an educational culture in Australia that matches our overseas cohorts? What can we do to keep local universities alive?

Why is so much being spent on external consultants? What do these organisations even do?

And how do we smash the financial barriers to accessing higher education without sacrificing what higher education means?

For the media:

Why is everyone scared to discuss this issue?