Guest column | In AI age, varsities need to create thinkers again

As we deliberate on AI in higher education, the rational response may not be an outright ban or another set of guidelines; we need a different reaction from our universities producing public intellectuals who undertake unique, creative production in the AI age

Across the globe, the AI revolution has sent through a wave of deliberation on its adoption in universities. Universities are responding differently to its adoption on campus. Earlier this year, the University of Chicago prohibited the use of AI in its social sciences courses. The university specified that the courses will be run ‘analog’, without the use of laptops and AI and shifted to handwritten essays and exams.

It is time to move from viewing universities merely as degree-granting institutions to recognising them as centres of ideas.

A larger reason for this has been the difficulty in enabling ‘thinking individuals’, who are interested in deliberation, assessments, and are comfortable with being wrong in front of others. On the other hand, MIT has taken a more positive approach towards AI. It has taken a stance to commit to deeply studying how AI impacts learning in the longer run. In the immediate term, MIT has committed to adapting its training to ensure that students are trained in skills, judgement, and attitudes to succeed as leaders in an AI world.

When we juxtapose this with Indian universities and enquire about how they are addressing AI — we notice a pattern of waiting or deliberating. IISc has emerged a frontrunner by constituting a committee back in 2023 for exploring potential benefits and negative impacts of AI usage in educational institutions. The committee recognised the widespread use of AI and, as a result, declared a need to modify assessment modules. IIT Delhi has issued AI disclosure rules and made an AI course mandatory this year. UGC, on the other hand, has ruled that while AI may help with a thesis, it should not form and write its core ideas.

These are important first steps, but Indian universities are yet to address how AI’s proliferation will change the way classes are taught or what is the outcome of a degree. And these are precisely the questions that decisively impact students entering Indian universities. The gap between simply reacting to AI development and rethinking education delivery is the real problem that Indian education must address. Indian students are increasingly adopting AI.

Surveys have indicated that usage of AI among Indian university students now ranges in the mid-to-high 80 percentiles. A third of the surveyed students mention that AI has helped them in understanding concepts better, something they cannot usually achieve in their university classrooms.

The Indian higher education system now must address a fast-changing reality. Our traditional systems have worked on the assumption that information is scarce, so it must be taught, tested, and rewarded. A bachelor’s degree is traditionally supposed to give an indication that a student understands a subject. A master’s degree takes it further to provide specialisation. A PhD then gives a student authority in a specific field.

This pyramid made sense when information was traditionally hard to get. It makes much less sense now that an AI model can retrieve, summarise, and explain almost anything, instantly, for free. Now, in this context, it must lead to a rethinking of how our higher educational institutions should approach learning. What AI still cannot give us is individual-driven judgement. And this is what our institutions have historically bred for a long time — from BR Ambedkar to Lohia. However, this has slowly changed as more and more educational institutions started rewarding the ‘correct answer’ over ‘deliberated discussion’. AI has just made that older failure harder to ignore.

So, as we deliberate on AI in higher education, the rational response may not be an outright ban or another set of guidelines. What we need is a different reaction from our universities producing public intellectuals who undertake unique, creative production in the AI age. This prompts us to massively reform university teaching to enable an environment of deliberation and thinking. We do not need every graduate to become a thinker. We need enough of them in terms of a visible, functioning cadre of young people entering public life with ideas— so that the next generation of Indian thought is not relying on traditional systems. It may be time we move from looking at a university as a degree institution to calibrating it as a centre of ideas. This is the reform worth having urgently.

sirjan@panj.org.in