AI Is Not to Blame: Higher Education Has an Agency Problem
Updated: Aug 30
Higher education is navigating one of the most significant transitions in its modern history. Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how knowledge is accessed, produced, assessed and communicated. Universities are under increasing pressure to respond quickly, integrate new technologies and prepare students for a future that is still taking shape.
Yet amid this acceleration, I think a deeper challenge is becoming visible. It is not simply AI that is destabilising higher education. It is what happens to human agency when the conditions around learning change faster than our ability to make sense of them. For university lecturers, programme directors and teaching teams, this is no longer a theoretical conversation. It is a lived reality unfolding inside lecture theatres, curriculum meetings, assessment redesign processes and increasingly complex interactions with students.
And perhaps the most important question is no longer simply: How should we use AI?
It is: What do we want humans to remain capable of doing, knowing and deciding for themselves?
Beyond Technology: The Real Pressure in Higher Education
In many universities, AI is still discussed primarily as a technological or academic integrity issue. However, on the ground, the reality is much more complex. Lecturers are being asked to:
redesign assessment for AI-informed environments
maintain academic integrity in rapidly shifting conditions
support increasingly diverse and digitally dependent student cohorts
respond to growing cognitive and emotional demands in classrooms
integrate new technologies without always having clear institutional frameworks
adapt teaching practices at a pace faster than pedagogical support systems can keep up
At the same time, many university academics were originally trained as researchers and disciplinary experts rather than as educators. This creates a growing tension between disciplinary expertise and pedagogical responsibility, particularly at a time when teaching is becoming more complex rather than less.
The challenge is therefore not simply learning how to use another technology. It is learning how to make thoughtful educational choices when the landscape itself is changing. And that requires agency.
AI Is Not the Problem
In moments of rapid change, we have a tendency to look for something that will explain the uncertainty. AI can easily become the threat, the solution, or the scapegoat
But AI does not decide what education should become. Humans do.
We decide what technologies enter our classrooms. We decide what we automate. We decide what students still need to practise for themselves. We decide what counts as learning, what counts as knowledge and what kinds of human capability education should develop. Technology can change the conditions in which these decisions are made, but it does not remove our responsibility for making them. And this is where I believe the conversation about AI in higher education needs to shift.
The central question is not whether AI will transform education. It already is! The more important question is: What will we do with what we know?
From Access to Knowledge to Judgement
For a long time, education operated within conditions of relative information scarcity. Teachers and universities played an important role in providing access to knowledge. AI changes those conditions dramatically.
Information can now be generated, summarised, explained, translated and reorganised almost instantly. Then again, access to information is not the same as understanding. Just like understanding is not the same as judgement.
A student can receive an answer without knowing whether the answer is reliable. They can generate an argument without understanding how that argument was constructed. And they can complete a task without necessarily developing the capability the task was intended to build. This does not make educators less important.
I believe it makes a particular dimension of the educator's role much more important. The educator increasingly becomes a Knowledge Mentor.
The Knowledge Mentor simply someone who transmits information, but someone who helps learners navigate knowledge, question it, connect it, test it and gradually develop the judgement to stand on their own.
The Agency Gap in Higher Education
One of the less visible consequences of rapid technological change is what I think of as an agency gap.
When conditions change faster than people can understand them, change begins to feel as though it is happening to us. Educators wait for policies. Students wait for rules. Institutions wait for certainty. And everyone tries to determine what they are now allowed to do. But know this, agency does not require certainty!
Agency is our capacity to understand the conditions around us, recognise the choices available within them and make informed decisions about how we want to proceed. That distinction matters enormously in an AI-shaped educational environment.
The goal cannot be to provide educators or students with a perfect roadmap for AI because there isn't one. The landscape will continue to change fast. What we can, and should, develop instead is the human capability to navigate that landscape.
The Educator as Knowledge Mentor
This changes the educational question. Instead of asking only: How do we stop students from using AI? or: How do we integrate AI into teaching? we can begin asking:
What does the learner still need to understand for themselves?
What capability is this learning experience intended to develop?
Where does productive struggle matter?
When does AI support learning, and when does it bypass it?
How do students learn to recognise what they do not know?
How do they evaluate the reliability and limitations of AI-generated information?
What decisions should remain theirs?
How do we help them develop the judgement to make those decisions well?
These questions move us beyond the simple binary of adopting or resisting AI. They bring us back to education itself.
Agency is Developed, Not Given
From an educational psychology perspective, agency is not simply independence. Nor does it mean having unlimited choice. Human beings always develop within conditions: social, cultural, institutional, technological and relational.
Agency develops through learning how to understand those conditions and act meaningfully within them. This is why the role of the educator remains so important. We do not need to give learners a predetermined roadmap.
We need to create the conditions that help them understand the landscape they are entering, recognise the possibilities within it, evaluate their choices and gradually develop the confidence and judgement to decide where they want to go.
AI can participate in that environment but it cannot take responsibility for the human development taking place within it.
What Should Higher Education Protect?
Perhaps one of the most important questions for universities now is not simply what AI makes possible.
It is what education is responsible for developing. If AI can increasingly produce the essay, summarise the reading, generate the presentation and answer the question, then we need to become much more precise about what the educational experience was intended to develop in the first place. Was it the document? Or was it the thinking required to create it? Was it the answer? Or the ability to recognise which questions were worth asking? Was it access to knowledge? Or the development of judgement about what to do with that knowledge?
These distinctions will matter enormously because the future of higher education will not be determined only by what artificial intelligence becomes capable of doing. It will also be shaped by what we continue to ask human beings to learn to do for themselves.
Perhaps this is where our attention belongs. Not on protecting education from AI, but on protecting and developing the human capabilities that education exists to cultivate. Curiosity. Discernment. Judgement. Responsibility. Connection. And ultimately, agency.
In a world where knowledge is increasingly easy to access, the most important educational question may no longer be: What do you know? It may be: What will you do with what you know?
I would love to hear your reflections on this topic.
Was this article inspiring and helpful?
Share it on social media
Pin it!
Send it to a creative friend who needs to read this
Comments