Artificial intelligence is not knocking politely on the door of higher education; it is kicking it wide open. Universities that stood for centuries as the ultimate gatekeepers of knowledge are now watching that monopoly evaporate in real time.
By Hani Shehada: As the world prepares to mark World Teachers’ Day on October 5, it is worth reflecting on the profound transformation facing education today. Teachers have long stood as the backbone of learning, guiding generations to think critically, question deeply, and imagine boldly. Yet at the very moment when we should be celebrating their role, a new force –artificial intelligence — is reshaping not only how we learn, but also what it means to teach and to think.
Artificial intelligence is not knocking politely on the door of higher education; it is kicking it wide open. What we thought would take decades is happening in years. In some cases, in months. Universities that stood for centuries as the ultimate gatekeepers of knowledge are now watching that monopoly evaporate in real time.
Here lies the irony, the very institutions that claim to prepare us for the future are themselves unprepared for the speed at which the future is arriving. And that forces us to ask a deeper question: what were universities for in the first place?
As world leaders, policymakers, and civil society gathered at the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York, the role of artificial intelligence in shaping the lives of young people was already on the agenda. Panels such as “Youth and AI: Risks, Opportunities, and Insights from Across the Generational Divide” underscored the urgency of addressing how education systems adapted — or failed to adapt — in the face of this accelerating technological disruption.
Schools exist to give everyone a foundation, to ensure that all children, regardless of background, can read, write, calculate, and understand the basics of history and science. But higher education was something different, almost sacred. It was never just about transmitting facts. It was about stretching the human mind, cultivating judgment, writing essays to wrestle with ideas, solving problems that have no easy answers. It was about using the brain as a muscle, building intellectual strength through effort, failure, and discovery.
That muscle is now at risk of atrophy. AI, with its speed and ease of use, is offering answers before students have even formed the questions. It drafts essays in seconds, solves equations instantly, and summarizes complex theories in digestible bullet points. What once demanded hours of reading, debate, and intellectual struggle is now a copy-paste away. The temptation is irresistible. And yet, the consequence is devastating, the less we use our minds, the less capable they become. The more we trust AI, the more we outsource thinking itself.
I see this tension daily in my work with Education Above All Foundation. In refugee camps and fragile states, young people cling to education as their last form of agency. Increasingly, AI is not a distant innovation but sometimes the only teacher available. It is inspiring, opening doors to lectures once out of reach, but also alarming, as it risks replacing the hard intellectual struggle that actually trains the mind to think.
The Problem of Trust
And even if we accept this trade-off, there is a deeper problem, can we even trust the knowledge AI provides? AI is not neutral. It is trained on data that reflect the biases, gaps, and blind spots of human societies. When the data are dominated by Western sources, what happens to perspectives from the Global South? When complex theories are compressed into concise summaries, what subtlety is lost? What is erased in translation?
For a refugee student in a camp, AI might be the only professor available, yet that professor could present a version of history, science, or philosophy stripped of context, nuance, and plurality. Worse, it may deliver its packaged knowledge with absolute confidence, masking bias as objectivity.
As someone who reviews student essays and research, I can already see the subtle shifts, sentences polished by machines, arguments that sound plausible but lack depth, citations that evaporate when checked. AI provides confidence without accountability, and this is not a theoretical concern. These systems are already known to hallucinate sources, misrepresent facts, and compress complex ideas into shallow summaries. They are built to provide answers, not to cultivate doubt. But doubt is the essence of scholarship. If higher education is reduced to feeding prompts and receiving pre-packaged responses, we are not only outsourcing thought, we are reshaping knowledge itself into something narrower, shallower, and more homogenous.
What’s at Stake
The consequences of AI in higher education extend far beyond university walls. For centuries, universities have been the incubators of society’s thinkers, innovators, and leaders. If that incubator is hollowed out, the ripple effects will touch every field, medicine, law, governance, art. Imagine doctors trained to trust algorithms more than their own judgment, judges leaning on AI briefs without interrogating their reasoning, policymakers unable to see beyond the outputs of opaque systems.
For marginalized youth and refugees, the danger is even greater. On one hand, AI promises unprecedented access to world-class education without borders or visas. On the other, it risks trapping them within knowledge systems not built for them, frameworks that erase their languages, histories, and perspectives. I have sat with scholarship students in Gaza, Afghanistan, and refugee communities across the Middle East who dream of becoming doctors, lawyers, and teachers. For them, higher education is not an abstract aspiration, it is survival and dignity. Yet if AI continues to be trained on data that exclude their voices, the knowledge they receive will always be someone else’s version of the truth. That is the new face of exclusion, subtle, invisible, and harder to confront than a locked classroom door.
The Role of Institutions
Universities must reclaim their purpose, not as dispensers of information, but as cultivators of intellect. They must shift away from assignments that AI can mimic and toward experiences AI cannot, oral defenses, collaborative projects, fieldwork, laboratories, artistic creation, and above all, the practice of judgment. Exams should measure reasoning, not regurgitation. Essays should test synthesis, not summary. Lecturers must teach students to validate information, to challenge sources, to recognize when a text is biased or incomplete.
The Future We Choose
AI will not wait for us. It is moving faster than reform, faster even than our ability to grasp its consequences. The real question is not whether AI will change higher education, it already has, but whether we let it hollow out its meaning, or harness it to deepen what education is truly for: developing minds, not just delivering answers. As an educator and a parent, I ask myself daily, what kind of minds are we raising? Machines will keep getting smarter, that is certain. Our task is to keep young people sharp enough to ask the questions machines cannot. If we fail, we risk surrendering not just our universities, but the very essence of what it means to be human.
(Hani Shehada is a regional manager at Education Above All Foundation’s Al Fakhoora Programme. He works on global interventions that provide access to higher education for young people whose futures have been disrupted by war and injustice.)
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views or stance of the organization. The organization assumes no responsibility for the content shared.