Leah Blyth (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Stronger Families and Stronger Communities) Share this | Hansard source

As someone who worked in university administration for more than two decades, I've seen higher education from the inside. What I see now is a system in decline, and artificial intelligence is simply the latest development to expose its flaws. AI cheating is rampant across our universities. Students can now progress through entire degrees without even opening a textbook, attending a lecture or developing any real 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 boast of—detection software and academic integrity codes—are in truth little more than window-dressing. The result is that a student can now emerge on graduation day, cap and gown in place, with a degree certificate in hand and yet know almost nothing of substance about their field. For families who have worked hard and saved to put their children through university, this is nothing short of a scandal.

But here is the uncomfortable truth: perhaps this is not entirely a bad thing. Long before AI arrived, universities were already 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 witnessed an obsession with ideological conformity. Courses that once challenged students with history, philosophy, science and literature have too often become platforms for fashionable dogma. This is not merely my personal impression; there is evidence that students who have passed through this system often emerge less intellectually flexible than those who have not. Rather than learning to debate, to question or to weigh evidence, they are taught to repeat. The paradox is that, in this age of information abundance, many graduates think more rigidly than ever before.

Instead of the open minds that higher education once promised, we now see cohorts of students who treat dissenting views as threats to be silenced. If students are turning 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 The Wealth of Nations or Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Today it is more likely to ask for a reflection on the student's lived experience or a predictable denunciation of supposed sins of Western civilisation. That is the deepest tragedy.

Universities have allowed themselves to become degree factories. They are no longer temples of learning and experience but expensive bureaucracies selling credentials, not knowledge. Degrees are marketed as tickets to a job rather than as the cultivation of an educated mind. Universities know that as long as employers demand degrees, students will keep paying, regardless of the quality of the education they receive.

It is convenient to blame AI for this collapse, but the real decline began long before. There are fields that require deep learning and that contribute to society like the economy, medicine, engineering, teaching, science and law. 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 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 universities cannot adapt by rediscovering the essence of education, then AI will expose them as obsolete. A university that does not teach, that does not value truth and that does not demand intellectual effort is no university at all. AI cheating is not the cause of the problem; it is the symptom. The real disease is a university culture that has abandoned knowledge in favour 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.