Your University is Scared of Chat GPT and for Good Reason.

Ask a teenager in Manila, a postgraduate in Manchester or a retiree in Marrakesh what they are using to learn right now and you might hear the same answer: ChatGPT. And probably, if you look in the mirror, you will find you are using it too. A tool that appeared without fanfare, no curriculum, no manifesto, just a blank box that would answer almost anything. In doing so it unsettled one of education’s oldest truths: knowledge has always been rationed by gatekeepers.

In Britain, higher education once imagined itself as a public good. Blair promised mass participation as part of his modernising project, but Cameron bound that promise to debt by tripling tuition fees. Universities now operate less as places of learning and more as businesses competing for fee-paying customers while defending their prestige through ritual and performance. And do not get me started on America, where students graduate with McMansion mortgages before they have even started their first job.

Yet tuition fees are only one barrier. For centuries, education has been policed not only by money and time but by cultural codes. The right accent, the right phrasing, the right academic idiom were stamped and approved as markers of legitimacy. Everyone else was reminded they were on the outside. ChatGPT does not ask for paperwork. It tears through the checkpoint.

The shift is clearest when you look at who benefits. For the working-class student juggling shifts, for the neurodivergent learner who cannot sit still through a lecture, for the reader lost in academic jargon that obscures more than it reveals, the barriers have always been the same. ChatGPT ignores them all. It explains concepts without judgment and with endless patience, where once clarity meant waiting for office hours or paying for private tuition. It rewrites feedback into plainer terms, phrases arguments in fluent prose and even summarises dense texts for those without the time or focus to read them whole. It does not erase a student’s voice, but it prevents them being disqualified by pace, grammar, or the stamina demanded by a system designed for a narrow ideal of the student.

What was once treated as neutral standards, polished English, endless reading, the ability to decode the academy’s specialist tongue, begins to look less like evidence of intelligence and more like a set of codes designed to exclude. When a free tool can level those codes at the click of a button, it becomes clear they were never the essence of education. They were the performance.

This does not only apply to universities. Schools reward those who learn to package ideas into testable forms rather than those who risk asking the wrong question. Scholarship applications and job markets still treat polished English as proof of intellect. The pattern is familiar, and now the trick is obvious: if the signals of legitimacy can be automated, then legitimacy was never about thought. It was always about performance.

Institutions, understandably, are scrambling. Plagiarism policies rewritten overnight, detection software rolled out despite being unreliable, solemn warnings about dishonesty and laziness. But why the alarm? Why the rush to ban, to detect, to discipline? Perhaps because the stakes are higher than plagiarism. If anyone can generate writing that looks academic, then the old signs of prestige stop working. What are students paying for if essays can be automated? What remains of the hierarchy once its codes can be reproduced by anyone with an internet connection?

For decades, education has rewarded mimicry. Students were trained to reproduce structures of argument that signalled competence rather than to pursue ideas that might destabilise convention. This rewarded those already fluent in the cultural language of the academy while punishing those who were not. ChatGPT does not expose laziness; it exposes the hollowness of a system that confuses polish with intelligence. And if that sounds brutal, it is only because the system has relied on that confusion for so long.

Of course, the tool is no miracle. It mirrors the biases and blind spots of the data it was trained on, simplifies when it should complicate and can flatten nuance into summaries designed for speed. It hallucinates facts, collapses complex ideas and cannot replicate the surprise of dialogue or the responsibility of teaching. Worse, it guzzles electricity. Every neatly phrased essay carries its own carbon footprint. Somewhere a server farm is sweating just so your essay feedback can sound more understandable. Useful, perhaps. Sustainable, hardly.

But its importance lies not in what it replaces but in what it reveals. Against the backdrop of debt-laden degrees and profit-driven universities, ChatGPT feels less like a gadget and more like a rupture. It offers fragments of what higher education once promised but no longer guarantees: the chance to follow a thought, test a theory, ask a question without waiting for permission, or, for the curriculum to cover it.

Paulo Freire wrote that education is freedom, not because it hands down approved knowledge but because it allows people to recognise the structures that shape their lives and to understand how to intervene. ChatGPT is not a teacher, but it lowers the walls. It gives students the chance to reclaim time, direct their own questions, and move laterally across subjects rather than march through the narrow corridors of a curriculum.

This is why the panic matters. The fear is not that students will stop thinking. It is that they will start thinking without asking first. If knowledge can be pursued without proximity to institutions, without fluency in their codes, then what is left of their monopoly?

Universities are not irrelevant. They remain vital as spaces of encounter, dialogue and collective thought. But their role is no longer guaranteed. If they cannot claim to guard the gates, then they must decide what purpose they serve. Will they continue to ration access and trade in prestige, or will they build something less defensive and more expansive?

The question is not whether AI has changed education. It already has. The question is what universities will do once their authority is no longer guaranteed. If learning can now begin outside their gates, what should they build on the other side?