This special two-part post is the fourth in a series of blogs that reflect on the educational and organisational challenges facing universities as they navigate intersecting existential, epistemic crossroads. I have called the series ‘The Mirror University’ for several reasons. The Mirror Universe is an alternate reality from the cultural phenomena that is Star Trek, in which people who exist in the prime universe have ‘evil’ alternates in the mirror universe. These alternates maintain the structures, relationships, roles and even identities of the ‘prime’ characters but exhibit traits, morals and behaviours that are the anthesis of the higher moral ground taken by our heroes. The mirror university maintains the structures, organisation, practices, and mythologies of what we understand to be a higher education institution but behaves in ways that are the antithesis of the ways of being they aspire to.

The mirror university is a construct.
It doesn’t represent any single institution.
It is not an allegory for the overarching influence of ‘management’.
 
The aspirational contradictions create a sense of emotional and idealistic liminality for those whose personal, intellectual, or professional identity is deeply rooted in the altruistic conceptions of university as a site of transformational social good for the community, our students, and the academy itself.

 

TLDR version: This post argues that marketisation, competition, and the drive for efficiency have devalued collegiality and creativity in academia. The post proposes a manifesto for a creative university, emphasising four key modalities: creating experience, discovery, discontinuity, and connection. It critiques the over-reliance on AI and technology, asserting that human capabilities and the potential for envisioning the future state that education occupies remain essential in teaching and research. The post stresses the importance of maintaining a human-centric approach in higher education, balancing technological advancements with the irreplaceable aspects of human creativity, connection, and the ability to navigate uncertainty.

 

Building a collegial and collectively inspirational and creative culture within universities is an increasingly challenging, polarising and some would argue utopian ambition. The strain of the combined forces of marketisation, global competition, culture wars, student satisfaction metricisation and research rejection culture have devalued collegiality and, in many cases, marginalised idealism and creativity, especially in how the academic and professional communities act with, to and for each other (see Dearlove, 1995). Creativity amongst faculty and staff is stigmatised in many higher education institutions and is often made the cultural corollary of disruption (or disruptive behaviours) and change resistance.

Lohiser & Puccio (2020) contextualise Kirton’s Adaption-Innovation Theory (2004) to describe how creativity has become negative performance attribute for employees. The theory makes the argument that highly adaptive people seek to improve processes, policies and practices within the frameworks set out by the institution. Highly innovative people seek to improve processes, policies and practices by going outside the established frameworks, ideating new solutions to problems that challenge structure and norms. Lohiser and Puccio use this framing to argue that in the context of universities ‘…laypersons have a bias toward perceiving an “innovative” person as being more creative than an “adaptive” person. Thus, this bias reveals how creativity is perceived by laypersons – as discordant; as bucking the system; as disruptive.’

A challenge for higher education institutions is to effectively embed creativity across all our academic practices without it being perceived or deployed as a demonising activity nor having it rendered as superficial or an indulgence in the face of more pressing, mission-critical or strategy delivering priorities. In the inexorable drive towards marketised institutions, creativity has been substituted for continuous innovation responding to rolling crises that reward rapid commercialisable ideation and leverage the fear of not innovating fast enough when challenged to do so by the ‘crisis’ (see Bryant, 2024). As del Cerro Santamarfa (2020) concluded:

One of the by-products of neoliberalism is innovation, the call to constant change and renewal and “continuous improvement.” This call for constant innovation in higher education has been made as an organizational and institutional requirement with apparently no alternatives. Constant innovation, a particular instance of the creative destruction in neoliberal capitalism, is presented as a fait accompli to which we must adapt and surrender without resistance.

In the whirlwind of the sectors rapid and hype-fuelled responses and procurement of solutions to GAI, the positionality and importance of creativity is once again questioned, through the lens of expediency, productivity, and a general fear of not falling behind and missing the zeitgeist. GAI amplifies the risk of an even deeper embedding of a university culture that devalues creativity as a luxury good in an era of technological supremacism and ideological absolutism (Dare & Yamada-Rice, 2022). This puts the financial aims of the university in direct competition with its capabilities to create and collaborate on solutions that address the world’s most critical challenges (Leslie, 2023). It would be naïve of me to argue that those two concepts are not interlinked, especially with the scarcity dividend of reduced government funding ensuring that revenue generation and efficiency savings are needed to fund research and teaching innovation. My argument here is that enabling of the human capacities of creativity, imagination, storytelling, and discovery is perceived to come at a cost to the other, more ‘mission critical’ functions of the university. The capabilities of GAI (however flawed) to replace these capabilities further enables more time, more resources, and more people to be directed to these corporate and commercial aspirations and objectives. I argue that this trade-off comes at a significant opportunity cost to the societal impact that research and teaching can generate as part of a creative engine in a post-digital university.

A manifesto for the creative university

The heart of this manifesto is an articulation of the philosophy and practice of creative education and how we understand, reward, integrate and embed the policies, practices and design principles that enable staff, students, and our stakeholders to develop the critical faculties of creativity across all our disciplinary fields and academic practices. Peters and Jandric (2018) in their own dialogue about and manifesto for a digital university assert that:

…knowledge and creativity become the most important commodities, and the ability to produce these commodities (which are often elusive and irrational) is the key to economic success. The main task of education is to produce the creative individual – within the context of educational capitalism, “personal anarcho-aesthetics” normalizes exceptionality. (…) The resulting human capital is rare, unpredictable, and subject to interpretation – through online games of power fostered by algorithms, the question What is creative? often comes down to mere (Internet) popularity.

The sector is coming to the challenge of redefining its creative mission delirious from successive crises, with staff impacted personally and professionally by precarity, the clear deprecation of creativity and the ever-increasing demands for productivity and change to deliver another iteration of the organisation that might survive the next existential funding crisis (real or imagined). Reimagining our ways of working and being in that context is risky, stressful and with scant extrinsic reward. At the core of the mission and identity of a university remains the beating heart of societal impact. Can we use generative AI and whatever technologies follow (or preceded it) to help humans make higher education better in ways we could never have imagined possible? Can we redesign teaching, research and engagement to be more authentic and help staff, students and our communities to understand and design the significant, existential change necessary to respond to the critical challenges facing society? GAI like any technology can be a tool for those purposes. But is it enough? What do we have to add to its capabilities that extend our capability past aggregating past knowledge and into creating and discovering new knowledge and new ways of being?

Post-digital creativity

In 2015, I conceptualised the notion of post-digital learning experiences. It was a framework from enabling learning through experience, created, and framed by the capabilities offered by technology (in this case, social media) and the transdisciplinary integration of social science and humanities perspectives on creative practice. The next sections have been adapted and updated from that blog and the subsequent publications on post-digital learning experiences. What are the modalities that enable our human capability (supported or not by technology) to be leveraged to better deliver the ambitions and aspirations of the university? I propose four modalities relevant to but not exclusive to the challenges of GAI; experience, discovery, non-linearity and connection.

1. Creating experience

Knowles (1970) argues as learners grow through their journey, their experience becomes a ‘increasing reservoir…that becomes an increasingly rich resource for learning for themselves and for others’ (Knowles, 1970, p. 44). The design challenge as Knowles sees it is to provide active as opposed to passive opportunities for students to attach meaning to learning through experience. He describes the creation of learning experiences as the art, the design, and the creativity of teaching. Learning experiences fit into teaching and learning process as connective tissue and sinew, weaving the gaps between knowledge, skills and lived experiences, integrating problem solving, scenario building, applications, and schemas through the thematic links within and between disciplines. The same could be said for any form of professional practice. How do we design tangibility, ambiguity, creativity, and humanity into academic practice so that the outcomes are enhanced, the durability of learning continues to extend, transferability of experience is enhanced and the effectiveness of higher education to make a difference to the critical global and local challenges is exponentially increased?

More than an exemplar for the human impacts of neoliberalism, the decline of the collegiate faculty and the subsequent rise of the academic sole trader creates the conditions for what Heffernan & Bosetti (2021) call incivility. Civility (as opposed to incivility) creates the conditions for experiences to be created. Incivility creates siloes. Collegiality and civility create the conditions for academics and professional staff to feel inspired or challenged or happy or angry at they are experiencing and turn that visceral positive or negative emotion into action.

2. Creating discovery

The notion of making sense from discovery is at the heart of academic practice (Moses and Ramsden, 1992). It is obvious to state that not all knowledge, learning or skills have been written or discovered. There are huge swathes of undiscovered countries. I am particularly fond in an academic sense of two traits of discovery; bricolage and found. Found is a simple term that includes notions of discovery, exploration as well as implying loss. Found is a way of understanding something, explaining something, adding a sense of the undiscovered and the unknown. As a creative modality it enables the discovery of new and exciting ways of thinking and seeing, and the co-opting of knowledge from diverse disciplines to have insights into your own. From seeing an image and telling a story, through to the remix and re-purposing culture of digital media making, through to the finding of meaning, found can change the way learning happens. Found represents creative behaviours that build on curiosity, complex linkages, independent thinking, collective intelligence, the progression of knowledge and an educational ambition that sets to make that sure that there is more to be found. Knowledge as an experience is not static.  It is a body of active pieces waiting to be reconstructed, reinterpreted, rediscovered and reused. GAI if we follow the Richard Hall’s theorising can help actively maintain and nurture the knowledges of the past, however selectively the training data is used in the model.  Bricolage enables makers to learn from mistakes, experiments and play, and then taking a step back as they construct knowledge that comes from each piece of the theoretical or epistemological jigsaw puzzle of knowing (Turkle & Papert, 1993).

A brief diversion: In my research for this post, I discovered the concept of generative ghosts, where AI technology is used to digitally recreate deceased humans through the ingestion of historical data, artefacts like photos and video and the recollections of people who knew them to create a bot of the deceased. The article that proposed further study of this phenomenon (Morris & Brubaker, 2024) went into significant depth about the necessary policy, risks and benefits, entrepreneurial structures and the ethics of interacting with a bot created from the relics of the deceased. Discovery being a powerful creative tool, my mind immediately went to the Öhmen article in part 1 about AI being a God and the links and connective tissues that this intersection created in my thinking about GAI just exploded. Can GAI create a form of ‘life’? Do these generative ghosts have digital dreams of their imagined lives of the family they have been trained to remember? There was of course another Philip K Dick short story from 1966 that explored a similar concept called ‘We can remember it for you wholesale’ which became the 1992 movie Total Recall). Try having that come up in a Claude generated literature review!

3. Creating discontinuity

Discontinuity as a learning experience takes the fear and uncertainty that arises from not knowing if there is something waiting for your next foot fall and learns from the calculations, assumptions and sometimes faith (in the truly atheist sense) that goes through your brain in the split second before you step. Discontinuity or non-linearity of narrative and storytelling are powerful learning experiences that create a sense of curiosity, expose complex linkages and enable independent thinking and collective intelligence by learning through not knowing the answer (or the question) (Mackh, 2018). The experiences of discontinuity and non-linearity enable the student to enter the challenge or problem in the middle, or at the solution phase and work through it in reverse, identifying and challenging their assumptions. Crimmins & Crimmins  2022 argue in the context of creative industries programs that curriculum design needs to ‘demonstrate to students that they are studying/living amid times of economic uncertainty and increasing precarity and epistemological plurality. Learning leaders are be encouraged to develop curricula designed to support students ‘to make sense of the knowledge mayhem, and … to enable [them] to live purposefully [by providing them with the opportunity to develop] … an epistemology for living amid uncertainty’.

Discontinuity and non-linearity are deeply human traits, they thrive on uncertainty and thereby are instrumental to entering liminal states and navigating through them. Devolo and Draeger (2024) in their theoretical paper on AI and foresight argue that liminality emerges from the human/machine interaction that fuels the creative tensions and the capabilities to have foresight and effectively ‘predict’ the future in unpredictable ways, inferring perhaps the AI can be liminal. In the context of teacher education, McNamara et al., (2002) proffer decidedly human traits as critical to traversing and surviving/thriving in liminality offering ambiguity, drama, play, rites of passage, performance and ordeal as necessary to the transition through uncertainty and liminality. To get a ‘definitive’ answer to this question, I will leave the last word to the LLM Claude, who responded:

Prompt to Claude: Can a LLM experience liminality?

Given these factors, it’s difficult to say that an LLM can truly “experience” liminality in the way humans do. We don’t have subjective experiences or self-awareness that would allow us to perceive or reflect on transitional states.

However, one could argue that LLMs exist in a kind of perpetual liminal state in terms of their function:

1. 1. 1. 1. They operate at the boundary between stored knowledge and novel generation.
         2. They constantly transition between different contexts and roles as they respond to varied inputs.
         3. Their outputs often exist in an ambiguous space between reproduction and creation.

These characteristics could be seen as analogous to certain aspects of liminality, even if the LLM itself doesn’t experience them subjectively.

4. Creating connection

Connected learning has emerged in the literature as a way of describing the social engagements and networks of higher education. Meaningful and lasting learning is derived from the shared interests or enthusiasms of the connected learner having opportunities to build and sustain relationships between each other, teacher, their society and discipline (Ito et al., 2020). Siemens (2004) extends the creation and fostering of relationships (through connectivism) by clustering these areas of interest into a community of shared dialogue and thinking. Connection making requires actors to have choice and agency over the connections they make, how they will leverage those relationships and how they hybridise and reside in space to support embodied learning (Fung, 2017 and Bilandzic & Foth, 2017)

Learning comes from the social acts of making, doing, and sharing actions with others. The knowledge and skills acquired and applied through connection can be lasting, transdisciplinary and trans-contextual. The contexts in which connections are applied, nurtured and lost during an education experience or research will evolve and change over the duration of a career (lives) and with it, the skills should equally adapt to new and different challenges. Making, maintaining, and learning through connection is not a simple process to enable, as sociality is a complex, individual and emotional construct. Making and sustaining the creative impact of connections requires an active sense of interaction, motivated by both the engagement in interpersonal networks and seeding of the intrinsic benefit of learning and creating through them. These types of connections intersect personal, professional and educational lives in complex and personally defined and managed ways affording staff and students the opportunity to make and share identity and to tell the stories of their lives to who they choose (Clark & Rossiter, 2008). Connections are not just between people. Connection making can happen within disciplinary knowledges, to facilitate deeper transdisciplinary relationships and to find new linkages between concepts that create sums greater than whole (or vice-versa).

GAI can identify connections, but those connections are limited to the frame of reference provided by the prompt and by scope and biases in the training data it has ingested. The creative capacities of humans see patterns that are not visible, makes connections between their experiences, their own frames of reference and sometimes through their imagination, it makes connection making physically, emotionally and intellectually challenging and satisfying, often simultaneously. What happens when the complexity of our lives intersects with the specificity of the connections we are making. Siemens at al., (2018) ask the question about what happens in an environment of complexity:

…when the modes of interacting with information presented in formal learning environments no longer align with the lived experiences of learners in work and other environments? The existing higher education system—with its focus on credit hours, semester-long courses, and formal credentialing—fails to account for new practices available in a digital, and globally connected, world.

Let me reframe that question. What happens when the tasks, processes, practices and analysis we have delegated to generative AI no longer align with our lived experiences of data or what constitutes feedback or what all of this means to the society we are trying to improve? What happens the digital nomenclature and machine generated plausibility fails to account for a humancentric, personally connected world, one which is infinitely more complex than the middle-groundness and unwarranted certainty that is being generated by AI?

A conclusion

How important are humans to the ontologies of higher education? What do we add to the process of doing higher education? We are everything is my straight answer. Education is a future state, and for all the philosophical assertions of foresight and prediction, generative AI resides in the worlds, knowledge and experience of the very limited past it is trained with. This problem becomes even more pronounced as platforms like CoPilot create training-data limited spaces ibn closed systems, often with singular editorial guidance.

To be educated is to learn something you did not know. To research is to discover answers to questions or prove something you were not certain about. The future state is and will remain the realm of the human actor, stoked by the capacities for creativity, connection, discontinuity, discovery and experience. The future state is unknown and not yet experienced. The yet to be experienced is not always a product of the collection, integration and fabrication of past knowledge. It can surprise and shock even the most analytical of people because it is just that – unknown. And that is the most human thing possible, having faith in the unknown because as Douglas Adams noted in his prescient novel ‘The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy’ about the nature of faith and God:

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,'” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

“But,” says Man, “The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”

“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”

This tweet was written by my dear friend Dr Joanne White in 2016, an academic and passionate teacher who died in 2022 when most of the world was still coming out of lockdown. Her death was something that I felt deeply. A wonderful friend of mine who also knew Jo said to me last year that she was just imagining Jo was still living her life overseas and we just hadn’t heard from her in a while. That dislocation of reality helped because even though it wasn’t rational it was a very human way of imagining a reality to ease transition and to navigate the real sense of liminality I was experiencing. I have used this tweet for almost ten years now to argue for the explicit and unchallenged role of being human in how our society works. That it is humans that create experiences, it is humans that are disrupted and cause disruption, that its humans that make change evident and experienced. No matter how much tech has immortalised and stored her words and her ideas, it is the very human capability of self-protection and imagination that helped me and others who knew the amazing Jo cope with her early death and missing her contributions to our lives. No amount of technology can do that. And I cannot appreciate more the help that it gave me, and to my friend, thank you. I also know that Jo would have deeply wanted to argue with me about so much of what I have written in these two blog posts, as both a person of deep faith and an expert in HCI. And I miss that as well. So, I dedicate these two posts to the memory of the debates and discussions not yet had with you.