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The end of pretend - AI and the case for universities of formation
Jim Dickinson, WonkHe, 2025/12/01

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Jim Dickinson offers "a secret that would get me thrown out of the Magic Circle," specifically that "the industrial model of education was built on scarcity, and scarcity made a certain kind of pretending possible... a period of pretending that the old skills still mattered." Why? "Maybe the sorting and the signalling is the problem. The degree classification system was designed for an elite era where classification signalled that the graduate was better than other people." The existence of AI eliminates that scarcity. So "if the content delivery can be automated, the campus has to be for something else. That something else is formation." In other words, "shift from 'I have information you lack' to 'I can work with you on problems that matter.'... from 'I'm better than you' to 'I can contribute.' From pretending to becoming." Maybe it's cultivating judgement, maybe it's knowing how we know. "The hopeful answer is that universities can be places where people become more fully human."

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The art of reimagining universities: a vision for higher education
Rathna Ramanathan, HEPI, 2025/12/01

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According to this article, the problem with universities is that they're siloed. "This made sense when knowledge was more stable, and career paths were more predictable. But today's urgent challenges don't heed disciplinary boundaries and require insights from science, policy, economics, ethics, design, and creative practice simultaneously." Maybe. But no matter how they're structured, universities need to sustain an interest in addressing today's urgent challenges if they're to remain relevant. This is reflected in what Rathna Ramanathan calls 'the deeper shift': "the principle of 'addressing shared conditions' (that) makes complicity in global crises unavoidable rather than optional, preventing justice and sustainability from being relegated to elective courses or diversity initiatives." Do read the comments as well as they provide some necessary pushback.

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Goodbye, ivory tower. Hello, inclusive communities
Karim Seghir, The PIE News, 2025/12/01

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I'm not sure how good of an example Ajman University in the United Arab Emirates is, but to my mind they're at l;east saying the right things about migrating the university from an ivory tower to the community it serves. "To foster genuine openness to the world outside, Ajman University (AU) has removed the physical barriers around our perimeter... Community members will soon gain access to even more spaces at AU, including the library, the industry incubator, the innovation hub, and athletic facilities... the most significant measure of Ajman University's success will be our ability to foster social change and nurture the changemakers who will drive it forward." 

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Massification and its Unacknowledged Trade-offs | HESA
Alex Usher, HESA, 2025/12/01

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Alex Usher gives the idea of 'massification' of university access a light overview, ending with a call to reconsider what we expected to get from it. There were three major failings, he says: job mismatch, underfunding and cost, and the lock the upper classes still held on elite institutions. And, he says, "there are huge swathes of the population that deeply resent the idea that they need to spend more time in school in order to enjoy a middle-class life." I don't think we can pin the rising inequality in society on universities, though there's a case to be made that they oversold promises of social mobility. I think we should offer higher education to anyone who wants it, because the social benefits are so great, but at the same time we need to somehow decouple the need for it from the possibility of having a good life. 

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If You Want Skilled Workers, Stop Treating Them Like They’re Disposable
Ann Kowal Smith, Forbes, 2025/12/01

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I rarely agree with Forbes but they're on point here: "Companies that want skilled workers must fund training, reward mentorship, and support education. You can't harvest what you refuse to plant... If companies want workers, they have to flip the script: stop acting like entitled beneficiaries of the education system and start behaving like investors in the future of work." There are examples, as the article points out. 

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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