AI could transform education . . . if universities stop responding like medieval guilds

When ChatGPT burst onto the scene, much of academia reacted not with curiosity but with fear. Not fear of what artificial intelligence might enable students to learn, but fear of losing control over how learning has traditionally been policed. Almost immediately, professors declared generative AI “poison,” warned that it would destroy critical thinking, and demanded outright bans across campuses, a reaction widely documented by Inside Higher Ed. Others rushed to revive oral exams and handwritten assessments, as if rewinding the clock might make the problem disappear.

This was never really about pedagogy. It was about authority.

The integrity narrative masks a control problem

The response has been so chaotic that researchers have already documented the resulting mess: contradictory policies, vague guidelines, and enforcement mechanisms that even faculty struggle to understand, as outlined in a widely cited paper on institutional responses to ChatGPT. 

Universities talk endlessly about academic integrity while quietly admitting they have no shared definition of what integrity means in an AI-augmented world. Meanwhile, everything that actually matters for learning, from motivation to autonomy, pacing, and the ability to try or fail without public humiliation, barely enters the conversation.

Instead of asking how AI could improve education, institutions have obsessed over how to preserve surveillance.

The evidence points in the opposite direction

And yet the evidence points in a very different direction. Intelligent tutoring systems are already capable of adapting content, generating contextualized practice, and providing immediate feedback in ways that large classrooms simply cannot, as summarized in recent educational research. That disconnect reveals something uncomfortable.

AI doesn’t threaten the essence of education: it threatens the bureaucracy built around it. Students themselves are not rejecting AI: Surveys consistently show they view responsible AI use as a core professional skill and want guidance, not punishment, for using it well. The disconnect is glaring: Learners are moving forward, while academic institutions are digging in.

What an ‘all-in’ approach actually looks like

For more than 35 years, I’ve been teaching at IE University, an institution that has consistently taken the opposite stance. Long before generative AI entered the public conversation, IE was experimenting with online education, hybrid models, and technology-enhanced learning. When ChatGPT arrived, the university didn’t panic. Instead, it published a very clear Institutional Statement on Artificial Intelligence framing AI as a historic technological shift, comparable to the steam engine or the internet, and committing to integrating it ethically and intentionally across teaching, learning, and assessment.

That “all-in” position wasn’t about novelty or branding. It was grounded in a simple idea: technology should adapt to the learner, not the other way around. AI should amplify human teaching, not replace it. Students should be able to learn at their own pace, receive feedback without constant judgment, and experiment without fear. Data should belong to the learner, not the institution. And educators should spend less time policing outputs and more time doing what only humans can do — guide, inspire, contextualize, and exercise judgment. IE’s decision to integrate OpenAI tools across its academic ecosystem reflects that philosophy in practice. 

Uniformity was never rigor 

This approach stands in sharp contrast to universities that treat AI primarily as a cheating problem. Those institutions are defending a model built on uniformity, anxiety, memorization, and evaluation, rather than understanding. AI exposes the limits of that model precisely because it makes a better one possible: adaptive, student-centered learning at scale, an idea supported by decades of educational research. 

But embracing that possibility is hard. It requires letting go of the comforting fiction that teaching the same content to everyone, at the same time, judged by the same exams, is the pinnacle of rigor. AI reveals that this system was never about learning efficiency, it was about administrative convenience. It’s not rigor . . . it’s rigor mortis. 

Alpha Schools and the illusion of disruption

There are, of course, experiments that claim to point toward the future. Alpha Schools, a small network of AI-first private schools in the U.S., has drawn attention for radically restructuring the school day around AI tutors. Their pitch is appealing: Students complete core academics in a few hours with AI support, freeing the rest of the day for projects, collaboration, and social development.

But Alpha Schools also illustrate how easy it is to get AI in education wrong: What they deploy today is not a sophisticated learning ecosystem, but a thin layer of AI-driven content delivery optimized for speed and test performance. The AI model, simplistic and weak, prioritizes acceleration over comprehension, efficiency over depth. Students may move faster through standardized material, but they do so along rigid, predefined paths with simplistic feedback loops. The result feels less like augmented learning, and more like automation masquerading as innovation.

When AI becomes a conveyor belt

This is the core risk facing AI in education: mistaking personalization for optimization, autonomy for isolation, and innovation for automation. When AI is treated as a conveyor belt rather than a companion, it reproduces the same structural flaws as traditional systems, just faster and cheaper.

The limitation here isn’t technological: it’s conceptual.

Real AI-driven education is not about replacing teachers with chatbots or compressing curricula into shorter time slots. It’s about creating environments where students can plan, manage, and reflect on complex learning processes; where effort and consistency become visible; where mistakes are safe; and where feedback is constant but respectful. AI should support experimentation, not enforce compliance.

The real threat is not AI

This is why the backlash against AI in universities is so misguided. By focusing on prohibition, institutions miss the opportunity to redefine learning around human growth rather than institutional control. They cling to exams because exams are easy to administer, not because they are effective. They fear AI because it makes obvious what students have long known: that much of higher education measures outputs while neglecting understanding.

The universities that will thrive are not the ones banning tools or resurrecting 19th-century assessment rituals. They will be the ones that treat AI as core educational infrastructure — something to be shaped, governed, and improved, not feared. They will recognize that the goal is not to automate teaching, but to reduce educational inequality, expand access to knowledge, and free time and attention for the deeply human aspects of learning.

AI does not threaten education: it threatens the systems that forgot who education is for. 

If universities continue responding defensively, it won’t be because AI displaced them. It will be because, when faced with the first technology capable of enabling genuinely student-centered learning at scale, they chose to protect their rituals instead of their students.