John Raine: Can universities recover their mojo in the AI age?

 

The Path of Cultural Re-Engineering 

The 2020s have been a period of cultural change in academia throughout the Western world. In countries such as the USA, Canada, the U.K. and Australia, where universities have been heavily captured by ideological agendas, we have yet to see a much loss of momentum in “progressive” left wing politics on campus.  

It has been common to see virtue signalling performances such as a University of Oxford lecturer flaying himself and his white students for the colonisation crimes of their British ancestors. Can we look forward to the day when it is acceptable once again to feel pride in one’s country’s history, while acknowledging its failings? 

New Zealand universities have increasingly been seen internationally as an extreme case of the march of critical social justice and diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI) politics through tertiary education. There are many stories of staff who have objected to working in an environment of cultural authoritarianism having little option but to either remain silent, find themselves on a redundancy list, or resign. 

Despite efforts to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech by the Christopher Luxon-led Coalition government, Te Ao Māori cultural obligations on staff and students have not lessened significantly. The Treaty of Waitangi is silent on education, but Treaty Principles content continues to be mandatory in some university taught courses such as engineering, medicine, nursing, the law and teacher education. A major revision to research publicly funded through MBIE is in progress, but we have yet to see whether it will cease funding of culturally interesting but scientifically valueless projects.  

The politicisation of New Zealand academia has reflected that in other Western countries around race, climate change alarmism and gender identity. New Zealand’s distinctive focus in racial politics has been around the infusion of Te Ao Māori into the university and significant decolonisation activism, but we have seen numerous antisemitic or pro-Palestine protests in this country as well, notably in 2024. 

For balance in teaching, academics should present relevant counterviews alongside their preferred political view. The university itself should stand back from any ideological or political position.

On top of these political and cultural issues, universities are living with unresolved bloat in administrative staffing and the steady ingress of artificial intelligence (AI) into post-secondary education. Both of these developments cause additional financial stress. 

Ongoing Treaty-focused cultural re-engineering has been promoted in education at all levels by the Ministry of Education (MoE) since 2000. At this point, a complete rebuild of the MoE is needed, requiring policies and operations to be culturally neutral.  While the MoE must clearly advise the government of the day on the latest educational developments worldwide and recommend policy, we cannot afford for this advice to be entangled with ideology, e.g. around race or gender. Can we be confident that the MoE right now is simply implementing Education Minister Erica Stanford’s reforms which are focused on maths, literacy and science basics? 

Universities - Now with Artificial Intelligence in the Frame 

Universities still wrestle with maintaining an environment of open inquiry and academic discourse, free from political or cultural indoctrination. However, academic freedom is not entirely protected and will likely not be as long as the ironically now-intolerant progressive liberal ideological thinking dominates areas of academia such as education and the social sciences. Claims for the value of Māori traditional knowledge continue beyond validated science – for example Professor Jacinta Ruru on tack­ling the “cli­mate crisis” by embracing “Indi­gen­ous lead­er­ship in con­serving our lands and waters” (Otago Daily Times 27^th February 2026). However, freedom of speech must also be protected.

To the present, other major challenges are likely to be occupying university managers’ minds. A fundamental reshaping of universities worldwide is probable as a result of the ongoing commoditisation of tertiary education, accelerated by the growth in education technology and online learning. Moreover, we face rapid changes caused by the penetration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the education system, reflecting the adoption of AI in both the public and private sectors. This trend will continue even if we were to see extreme resistance such as an attempt by climate activists to sabotage the 280 MW Data Grid Southland Data Centre (due to enter service in 2028).

Research has shown that students learn best from live teachers, being required to read real books, and to use handwriting. Nonetheless, credentialled AI or AI-led programmes will deliver high quality content, automated assessment and low-cost micro-credentials. More employers will accept graduates with an online AI-delivered qualification, for example in computer science, accounting, business studies, or communications. Some employers will doubtless rely only on the normally more rigorously assessed university degree.

University staff will maintain their true value proposition in deeper intellectual learning, teaching critical thinking through increased face-to-face tutorial engagement with students, and research‑led higher level teaching. Moreover, the essential laboratory, clinic or studio-based content of professional programmes such as in architecture, design, engineering, medicine, nursing and the bench sciences, is an obvious area that enables universities to differentiate themselves from online AI offerings. 

This is particularly true in the domain of discovery research and innovation where the universities’ role in research will continue unchanged in principle, but with government funding now focused tightly back on fundamental and applied science, engineering, and medicine. AI already facilitates research through areas such as literature search and organisation of information, hypotheses, advanced modelling, data analysis, and areas such as ethical compliance, text generation and report editing. 

Despite the advent of sophisticated AI instruction systems and live face-to-face lectures becoming less common, in areas such as the humanities, social sciences and law, university staff will retain a key specialist role in live teaching of students in areas like argumentation, exposure to and interpretation of contested ideas, and critical reasoning.

Universities will distinguish themselves from online AI qualification offerings by marketing their capacity to deliver accredited degrees with trusted evaluation and assessment through written and oral examinations, and tighter guarantees of rigorous assessment of students’ real capabilities. 

Nonetheless, lecturers will multiply up their classroom presence virtually, with lifelike avatars of themselves delivering textbook content online, with AI setting and marking formative assessments, competing at one level with credentialled online AI offerings. AI tutors will increasingly be used for some routine tutoring such as language laboratories. 

In teaching evaluations, we can expect students to report that their deep learning is better with face-to-face tutorial time. We can also imagine students having an annual vote for the best and worst AI version of their actual lecturers and course delivery. Lecturers lacking a dynamic presence in the large classroom may rely on engaging their students in one-on-one or small group tutorials to avoid being graded worse than their AI replicants! One can still imagine comments such as, “Our Electrical Engineering lecturer in power systems was incredible – completely indistinguishable from his AI avatar, even in one-on-one conversations in his office!”  

In all of this, we have to remain vigilant over the tendency for online AI content to slide away from hard fact towards a group belief or politicised view. Humans must still be able to access unvarnished facts and tell fact from propaganda, whether coming from another human or from their online assistants and mentors. 

Overall, lecturers will still have a key role in guided inquiry, debate of ideas, and supervised research. The university will to some extent revert to something closer to the earliest universities, with students gathered around the master for very personal tutoring. The original University of Bologna (1088) which focused on the law, was student-controlled and “masters” hired to teach the students, typically at the master’s own home. Greater numbers working from home post-Covid 19 have not led to this extent of recapture of the character of the earliest universities - yet.

Reducing Administrative Bloat and a Better Financial Footing

Because of the move to a market-led funding model for the universities in 1990, they have since been funded partly through student fees. They have also operated under increasing financial pressure as increases in Government funding had fallen by as much as ~40% below the cumulative CPI increase by 2023. 

The period 1990-2020 was marked by rapid bureaucratic growth. The ratio of non-academic to academic staff blew out to 1.5 to 1 - much higher than in Australia, the UK, or the USA (where it is about 0.8 to 1). Much student fee income has gone into greatly expanded central services, to some extent ironically, into areas such as marketing, communications, business and community outreach which have made the universities more visible to student “clients” and other stakeholders than was the case 40 years ago. But there has also been huge growth in the employment of numerous non-academic “managers” and support staff in areas such as Human Resources, Health and Safety, Student Learning Support and Pastoral Care, Māori and Pasifika directorates, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) support. 

I recommend that Government works with the universities on a new capped enrolment model that focuses away from growth back onto excellence, with enrolments reduced as a fraction of New Zealand’s growing population. This would push more school leavers towards much-needed polytechnic trade qualifications and cheaper online options. 

Reducing overhead costs must be a key part of this process and the system should aim to bring the ratio of non-academic to academic staff down to at most 0.9 to 1, preferably less.  This would be aided by the widespread penetration of AI in areas of the administration such as finance, student enrolments and academic administration. Moreover, a capped enrolment system with entry merit-focused could reduce non-academic staff requirements through a lesser need for marketing and public relations activity.

Overall, the beneficial effects of such changes would include greater operational efficiency, a proportionally lower draw on taxpayer funding and increases in student fees themselves being held below the rate of inflation.

Looking Ahead

Our universities must strive to maintain cultural and political neutrality and recognise the cultures of all of the ~100 ethnicities of their student population. Māori culture and a truthful history of our country must be optionally available to all students, but decolonisation activism has no place in the taught curriculum. By all means teach “other ways of knowing”, but such instruction should sit separately from modern science. 

Engineering, Medical and Science curricula must be constantly updated to recognise the latest emerging knowledge but without losing the fundamentals that underpin these disciplines. This is a further challenge that AI may either help or hinder.

In the end, universities must move cost-effectively into the AI age while ensuring that they continue to embrace the fundamental idea of what a university is, e.g. as embodied in this statement from the Bologna Accord of 1988 on the role of the university in the search for impartial truth:

“The university is an autonomous institution at the heart of societies differently organised because of geography and historical heritage; it produces, examines, appraises, and hands down culture by research and teaching. To meet the need of the world around it, its research and teaching must be morally and intellectually independent of all political authority and economic power.”

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John Raine is an Emeritus Professor of Engineering and has formerly held positions as Pro Vice Chancellor (Research and Innovation) at AUT, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Albany and International) at Massey University, and Pro Vice Chancellor (Enterprise and International) at University of Canterbury.