As a current Senator, and as someone who worked in university administration for more than two decades, I have witnessed higher education from both the inside and the outside. What I see today is a system in serious decline, and artificial intelligence is only the latest development to expose its flaws.
AI cheating is rampant across our universities. Students can now progress through entire degrees without ever opening a textbook, attending a lecture, or developing any understanding of their discipline. With a few well-phrased prompts, AI can produce polished essays, pass online quizzes, and even generate ‘original’ research papers. The safeguards that universities claim to have put in place are largely useless.
The uncomfortable truth is that a student can now emerge at graduation day, cap and gown in place, with a degree certificate in hand, and yet know almost nothing of substance about their field. For many Australians, who have scrimped and saved to put themselves or their children through university, that is a scandal.
And yet I must add a further uncomfortable observation: perhaps this is not entirely a bad thing. Because long before AI arrived, universities had already begun failing in their most basic responsibility, teaching proper foundational concepts. For years, I saw curricula stripped of the rigorous, knowledge-based content that once defined the great traditions of higher learning. In its place, we have seen an obsession with ideological conformity. Courses that once introduced students to history, philosophy, science, and literature as bodies of knowledge to be grappled with are now too often platforms for fashionable dogma.
This is not merely my personal impression. There is evidence that students who have been through this system often emerge less intellectually flexible than those who have not. Rather than learning to debate, to question, to test and weigh evidence, they are taught to repeat. The paradox is that in the age of information abundance, many graduates think more rigidly than ever before. Instead of the open minds that higher education once promised, we see cohorts who treat dissenting views as threats to be silenced.
If students now outsource their assignments to AI, it is partly because they have been given fewer opportunities to engage with ideas worth wrestling with. Once, a university essay might have asked a student to grapple with Plato’s Republic, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, or Darwin’s Origin of Species. Today, it is more likely to ask for a reflection on the student’s ‘lived experience’ of identity, or an essay reflecting upon the sins of the ‘patriarchy’.
This is the deepest tragedy: that universities have allowed themselves to become degree factories. They are no longer temples of learning but expensive bureaucracies selling credentials, not knowledge. That product is marketed as a ticket to a job, rather than as the cultivation of an educated mind. Universities know that as long as employers continue to demand degrees, students will keep paying, regardless of the quality of education they receive.
It is fashionable to blame AI for this collapse. But the real decline began when universities disdained the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and substituted indoctrination for instruction. AI has simply made the underlying hollowness impossible to ignore. When a machine can produce the same essays as a graduate, it raises the obvious question: What exactly was the student learning in the first place?
This crisis calls for more than tinkering at the edges. It demands a fundamental review of how we fund our universities. Right now, billions of taxpayer dollars flow into ‘junk degrees’ that produce neither rigorous knowledge nor useful skills. Why should a plumber in Port Pirie, who never went to university, be forced through his taxes to subsidise courses in postmodern grievance studies that leave graduates both unemployable and intellectually stunted?
Public money should be redirected towards disciplines that genuinely contribute to our society and economy: medicine, engineering, teaching, science, law. These fields require deep, rigorous learning that cannot simply be outsourced to a machine. They also provide the skills and knowledge that a nation needs to prosper. By contrast, degrees that are little more than ideological training camps should be funded only by those who choose to take them.
Universities themselves must also rediscover their original mission. They must once again become places where the pursuit of truth is valued above fashionable politics, where young minds are trained to think, to reason, to argue, and to disagree without fear. That means defending free inquiry, restoring a curriculum built around genuine intellectual traditions, and refusing to treat students as customers buying a piece of paper.
AI will not disappear. Nor should it. Like the calculator or the word processor before it, AI will become a tool of professional life. But if our universities cannot adapt by rediscovering the essence of education, then the arrival of AI will expose them as obsolete. A university that does not teach, that does not value truth, that does not demand intellectual effort, is no university at all.
As someone who has devoted much of my life to higher education, I take no pleasure in making this argument. But it must be said. AI cheating is not the cause of the problem; it is the symptom. The real disease is a university culture that has abandoned the pursuit of knowledge for the pursuit of ideology. Unless we change course, we will continue pouring billions into a system that produces neither wisdom nor skill. And that is the ultimate academic fraud.
Senator Leah Blyth Shadow Assistant Minister for Stronger Families and Stronger Communities
