This post is the fifth 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.

Life is complex, right?

Complexity is a determining characteristic of life in the modern world. It shapes the prioritisation and importance we are forced to place on competing interests, values or actions. It defines how our certainty can fracture into liminal structures and states of being where we feel lost, our of control and uncertain. It compromises the efficacy of our essential pursuits of simplicity as a way of ameliorating the damage caused by the storms of crisis engendered by complexity. We reside in this state of complexity and our responses to the conflicts that complexity creates, which are often contradictory, visceral and reactive. Snyder in his classic case study on the Korean War (1962 (cited in Hermann, 1963) argues that crisis responses can pull organisations in polar-opposite directions, noting that ‘the crisis may be associated with the closer integration of the organisation, the appropriate innovations for meeting the crisis, and the clarification of relevant values, or at the other extreme, it can lead to behaviour which is destructive to the organisation and seriously limits its viability’. Crisis in higher education often leads to ghettos of destructive, toxic cultures (or the opposite, where collegiality and collective responsibility brings everyone along).

The impacts and permutations of complexity are almost infinite, as the capacity of humans and human invention makes, recreates, idolises and demonises combinations and recombinations of the base ingredients of living and being. Complexity therefore often becomes overwhelming, structurally fluid and hybrid, all-encompassing and goes beyond liminality into what Eller (2025) refers to as ‘abundant betweenness’. Complexity forces and takes away choices, leaving individuals in-between states of certainty and uncertainty, in what De Luca Picione et al., (2025) characterise ‘as a two-faced Janus in the effort to hold together stability and change, suspension and transformation, subjectivity and collectivity’. Janis was the God of beginnings, transitions and endings (along with doorways, entrances and the like). The abundant between theoretically posits that in the context of the pace of sociological, political and ideological change (complexity, again) that has followed the second world war, the notion of fixed states of certainty or transient states of uncertainty is redundant. Eller argues that we cannot assume that ‘change is the exception, and stasis is the norm’ (p.169). Instead, he argues that (in a nod to Janus perhaps) ‘life on the threshold, life in the doorway or nothing but a series of doorways, still presumes that rooms exist and are the normal state of things.’ (p.170).

In complexity, we look for the life rafts of certainty, where we can be sure of our own identity or safety in intermediary spaces (not like we were before and not like we feel now), or we seek the associative commonality of others also experiencing the same uncertainty as we are (see Bryant, 2023). In either case, co-habitation in liminality allows us, even for a moment, to breathe and find slithers or margins of sense in the chaos, uncertainty and precarity. The extremes of the forces that create complexity, which are often located within a ‘you are either with us or against’ false dichotomy, forces those in the between spaces to make decisions, to take a side, or risk being ridiculed or dismissed. There is often scant space to engage in critical debate, challenge or develop a new or innovative new positions.

The capacity to engage in sensemaking is critical to do more than cope with or be ignored by complexity, but to navigate it and finds ways of leveraging it for good. Sensemaking is the process by which individuals interpret and give meaning to complex, novel, or unexpected events or crises. It involves creating plausible narratives to understand their experiences and to guide their actions. De Luca Picione & Lozzi (2021) argue that sensemaking acts like a guiding force to determine and shape the relationships critical to navigate and understand chaos, crisis and complexity. They note:

…when there is no frame of sense and everything appears chaotic, shapeless, unrepresentable and unpredictable, the semiotic activity of sensemaking begins the effort to find stable forms of relations, relational invariants and regulatory systems endowed with a certain predictability. This is not a mere illusion or imaginative creation of fanciful links; rather, this is a test of the construction of sensemaking processes in agentive and decisional terms, of evaluation of effects and results… The sensemaking activity therefore not only ensures the search for stability and order in the face of uncertainty, it is the evolving result of the relationship between order and disorder, identity and otherness, knowledge and ignorance, predictability and unpredictability, certainty and uncertainty. (p.46)

The relationships in between knowledge and ignorance alluded to be De Luca Picione and Lozzi are both a pejorative distinction (knowing is superior to not knowing, as in those ‘in the know’ are often constructed as insiders or possessing power) and a transitional distinction (where the journey from ignorance to knowledge is one solely enabled by learning and education). There is little merit afforded to the betweenness other than a transitional space between asleep and awake. There is also a permeability between knowledge and ignorance for those who reside in the position of exerting the authority of knowing. Ignorance can become as much knowledge as is necessary to navigate oneself and others through complexity. Knowing can also be seen as a threat to those who lead through ignorance (the use of slurs of knowing such fake news, the death of expertise and woke intellectualism clear evidence of this phenomena) (see Nixon & Gunter, 2024) and this provocative and challenging blog post by Michael Shermer, 2024)

With the bots or against them? Complexity in the modern university

One complex higher education crisis that catalyses this permeability between knowledge and ignorance within universities is generative AI (GAI). GAI as a conceptual, policy and strategic influence on the practices of higher education has accelerated the complexity of assessment design and the technological reactivity of the information architecture that underpins both how and what we teach. The influences of that complexity extend past the academy and into the commercial interests of the vendors driving AI adoption and AI fear responses. The social media (and increasingly in academic literature) discourses often seek to oversimplify the complexity of AI and compress the spaces between knowing and ignorance (with any form of uncertainty or betweenness portrayed as resistance, idiocy, ludditeism or stupidity) (see Agnew et al, 2023 and Wiggins, 2025 on the era of the AI Idiot and Hudson & Plate, 2024 on the ‘inevitability’  of AI acceptance in higher education).

There is an abundant betweenness created by responses and reactions to AI in higher education. However, it is not a safe space, as regulators make AI response and compliance a mandatory condition of an assured and accredited institution (see TEQSA advice written by Lodge, Howard and Bearman, 2023 and this report on academic integrity and AI prepared for TEQSA by Lodge, 2024). It is not a safe space as many AI advocates, often with varying degrees of actual knowledge and expertise, expound their certainties about AI and deride the expertise of others reflecting, analysing, processing uncertainty. You either walk through the doorway into the new AI inspired future room or you walk out the door never to be heard from again. The permeability between knowledge and ignorance and the demonisation of the between creates a polarised entrenchment of positions and a weaponisation of AI as the instrument that ends authentic and co-designed education and assessment practices as we knew them and returns us to invigilation, academic control and security (for several counter positions to this, see Fawns et al, 2024, this excellent reflection on exams by Compton, 2023 and a summary of the University of Sydney approach by Bridgeman, 2024).

It is not a safe space to take a position within what is an abundant betweenness. The battle lines mark out territory that defines everything outside the borders of absolute certainty to be behaviours of denial, resistance, ignorance or something to be demeaned or mocked. The walls of knowing are reinforced by vendor-led or vendor-fed research (see the Anthropic report on AI usage in HE, 2025 and the AI 2027 research by the AI Futures Project) that is shared (often uncritically) on social media and across institutions as rationales for immediate, existential change in assessment, curriculum and the practices of academics. Being in any space outside these walled gardens of knowing, in any behavioural betweenness from criticality to scepticism to ignorance exposes the ‘you are either with or against us’ rhetoric as an exhortation to get on board. The abundance of betweenness, whilst a safe space for sensemaking, for compromise or safety becomes walled around howling predications of AI triumphalism. Any movement towards this third space is often derided as ignorance, dismissed as resistance or demeaned as stupidity or naivety. Practices, policies and approaches that ‘reimagine’ assessment within these walled spaces of knowing now claim to be the true heroes of learners, as they put out the fire that they set themselves burning.

Being in state of betweenness is not a form of resistance. Betweenness is where new ideas, processes and innovations emerge from in states of not-certainty. It is a safe space for sensemaking to help navigate complexity and discover certainty. Coming back to the work of Eller on abundant betweenness, he argues that ‘everything—including what we call “stable states”—[are] in constant flux, betweenness, reciprocity, mutuality, and becoming’. He goes onto cite the work of the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus who observes the importance of betweenness, flux, uncertainty and complexity in what he calls panta rhei (everything flows):

Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but a continuing flow; the sun is not a thing, but an enduring fire. Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change. Not stable things, but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities they manifest constitute the world.

The future of higher education, whether it is in a post AI world or in response to the next existential crisis we will certainly face, is in these third spaces of abundant betweenness. It is where the process flows that define those in flux refuse to rust on the expectations that criticality marks resistance.  Deleuze and Guattari, 1987 articulate this as a middle space, one that is in itself dynamic, transitional and full of infinite possibility:

The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. (p.25).

It is where everything flows and where the world can be reconstituted in the storms of complexity. It is here where processes are reborn and reimagined for the next generations of learners. Those who reside in the walled gardens of knowing do not have solutions for the problems they so defensively posit. It is easy to rejoinder to the claim that AI generates inferior replications of human knowledge with a trite… ‘don’t worry, if AI doesn’t know the answer today, it will tomorrow’. It is easy to cast all students as cheats and all academics as the only ones capable of measuring learning, with the truism that… ‘don’t worry, as long as we assess everyone in a secure, face-to-face mode, like an exam, then we are compliant’. It is easy to throw around assertions of the death of modes of learning and teaching you don’t like in the face of the disruption and opportunity (in equal and counter measures) of AI with the unevidenced claim that…. ‘AI can do every task you set and achieve at least a distinction, I know, I have tested it’. It is easy to proclaim that academic work can be done by an agent, quicker, better, faster and more effectively, backed by the promise that… ‘Why not get it to help with feedback, to design questions, to provide advice to those students in mental health distress?’ (see Maples et al., 2024 on the use agents to prevent suicide in college students and Watermeyer, Phipps and Lanclos, 2024 on AI and academic work)

AI uses and applications are complex. They are not plug and play and they do not work every time. Debates about AI and its impacts on the future of HE are equally complex. Anyone who argues for brute force integration of AI into every thread of the student educational experience is ignoring the complexity and the variability that is real and present across a wide range of AI tools (see this excellent analysis on the limitations and capabilities of  AI from Carnegie Mellon by Xu, et al.,  2025). There are responsible uses for AI in higher education. Bringing criticality, responsibility and debate is not resistance and it’s not ignorance. I do not want to be derided for being critical anymore. I do not want to read breathless prediction’s that AI will make the knowledge or information economy obsolete. I don’t want to accept the dystopian visions of the future of work being shaped by AI as your collaborator and your plastic pal who is fun to be with (copyright Douglas Adams). I want to be able to engage in debate over the efficacy of online learning and assessment and the epistemological capabilities of authentic assessment to create a culture of both assessment for and of learning, simultaneously. The state of betweenness will be where the next explosion of better assessment, different modes of connected and engaged learning and the unimagined journeys for future learners will emerge. It will not be in the false states of knowing and the defence of the same by assertion and diminution. It will come from the middle out (I wrote about affecting change in a complex, messy world using the middle out in 2016 and this premise and the practice still holds true today).

Coming back to Heraclitus, everything flows. Heraclitus was a dialetheist, in that he believed that things could be both right and wrong at the same. The actions, attitudes and proclamations of the techno-solutionists and those of everyone else who resides and journeys all the way through the abundant between can and must co-exist. Even though defending either walled garden (and yes, there are walled gardens of knowing that both deify and demonise things like AI, I am not pollyanna here) requires some degree of ‘with us or against us’, it cannot be a permanent state of contradiction. Third spaces thrill in the opportunity of the opposite. Third spaces come alive with the tension of these contradictions. If we aim to shut either side down with our dominant argument, we both lose.  As Heraclitus observes ‘the unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony’. It is time for those in their spaces of knowing, those feeling liminal through residing and transitioning through uncertainty in crisis and those seeking criticality and humanity in the face of complexity, to meet in the middle, in the third spaces abundant with betweenness and thrill, to collectively co-design the future of higher education, not simply accept that it has been predetermined by a tech vendor or by PR driven media hype. We can have debates, arguments, critical interchanges and competing theorisation about the future of higher education. We can reimagine assessment, the student experience, our pedagogy and our curriculum and not give into the inevitability of AI slop, desensitisation and the dumbing down of society. We are better than that. We can continue to make sense of crisis and enable the transformative potential of higher education to invent, ideate and inspire the new and the novel.