This is the sixth in a series of blog essays that reflect on the educational and organisational challenges facing universities as they navigate intersecting existential, epistemic crossroads. It is a two-part essay that interrogates crisis in higher education.

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 essay explores how universities are navigating overlapping crises. Two tipping points (generative AI and the primacy of learning) illustrate how crisis responses have reshaped higher education. AI dominates strategic discourse, often driven by hype and vendor influence, sidelining core values and disempowering those caught in liminal spaces of uncertainty. Meanwhile, the sector has lost the argument that learning itself matters. Metrics-driven approaches reduce education to grades and satisfaction scores, ignoring the complexity and subjectivity of authentic learning experiences.

The essay calls for reclaiming space for reflection, innovation, and social purpose, so universities can reassert their role as transformative institutions rather than reactive responders shaped by crisis.

 

Crisis? What Crisis?

The crises inflicting existential wounds on the higher education sector are multiple, concurrent and lasting. Their impact and consequences have long tails, leaving inequitable trails of damage on staff, students and in some cases, the viability of the institution itself (Sokol & Stephens, 2025). The flow of impacts that emerge from a crisis are rarely constructed from or experienced through the lens of singular snapshots of time, rather they are as Barnett posits ecosystems of cause and effect (Barnett, 2024). They are a gestalt of structural, experiential, attitudinal and managerial behaviours, expectations and acts (Crawford et al., 2024). They represent powerful and influential paradoxes of threat and opportunity for institutions and the people who work within them (Nathan, 2000). The impacts of crises cascade inwards and outwards in ways that are not experienced equally or fairly, often exacerbating the precariousness of the most at-risk, stressed or vulnerable workers (Stein, et al., 2025 and Wells, 2022).

When the spotlight of crisis is turned specifically on the higher education sector, the inadequacies, tensions and existential mission angst that define how institutions are led, resided within and interrogated by stakeholders (including the media) are exposed. This is not an entirely reactive process of crisis provoking responses from institutions. Barnett (2025) argues that universities are not neutral actors in the ecosystems of crisis impacting societies, contributing to the severity, duration and even the triggering of crisis. Universities (and their role in society and economies) have alternately benefited from, or been deeply wounded by, the recent waves of polycrises (see my first Mirror University post on the Cadence of Crisis). From the pivoting and snapping back of the pandemic(Bryant, 2021, 2022) , to the financial spasms wreaking havoc on organisational structure and staff morale (Macfarlane, 2024) to the all-consuming (sometimes) obsessive focus on generative AI (Monnett and Paquet, 2025), the crisis responses of institutions have created structures of uncertainty that have deeply impacted on the mission, purpose and motivations of the university (Kahn et al., 2024). As human institutions, they have not had the chance to recover, reflect and learn from the previous crises before the next wave comes crashing in over the rocks of curriculum, program design, teaching, learning, assessment and the student experience restarting the cycle of reaction and response.

This seemingly never-ending cycle of crisis leaves critical academic and professional staff feeling punch-drunk, never quite recovering from the last impact before having to crawl off the canvas and go again. Neser et al., (2023) in their critical work on stress and wellbeing in Australian universities, chronicled the consequential impacts of crisis on university staff, citing significant increases in burnout, bullying and impacts on life outside of work. Doulas et al., (2025) argue that fragility and impacts of poor wellbeing and workplace stress are not experienced equally, citing inequitable impacts on Black and Minority Ethnics colleagues. Cox et al., (2024) explore the impacts of stress and bullying on the university workforce evidencing the disproportionate impact felt by casual, precarious or sessional academic staff (who are often more junior, early career and in many instances predominantly female). In his provocative book on the death of universities entitled Dark Academia, Peter Fleming cites data from UK that points to the impacts of intersecting crises of leadership, strategy and performance:

According to a recent YouGov survey of UK lecturers [(see Wray and Kinman, 2021)], 55 per cent said they felt exceptionally stressed and mentally unwell. Causes were said to be mandatory changes by management without consultation, unrealistic workloads (affecting work/life balance) and lack of time for proper research. The report noted that academics are working longer hours, becoming increasing isolated and stuck on a ‘treadmill of justification’ where proving one’s worth to superiors is never-ending. The highly disorganised and obtuse nature of this managerialism compounds the problem. As one stressed-out lecturer remarked, ‘I felt whatever I put work into I would be blamed for what I wasn’t doing. The system feels chaotic and you don’t understand how you’re being judged.’

He goes onto argue that in a similar vein to Barnett, that universities are not neutral actors in how crises play out in their institutions, laying the blame for the consequential threat and opportunity impacts for staff and students at the feet of how universities are led, commenting that ‘the bureaucratic economism that has gradually colonised the university over the previous two decades was suddenly in full view during the crisis, warts and all’. Whatever the cause, the current states of staff and student engagement, participation, motivation and wellbeing have become a crisis in itself. This crisis is having demonstrable effects on the core business of teaching and research in countries like Australia and the UK, with declining research performance and spending on research and development against the OECD average (OECD, 2024) and declining participation and engagement in higher education by students who are increasingly arguing against the benefit of undertaking a higher education (Stahle, 2024 and Gafner, 2025). The crisis of values and collective wellbeing is redefining what a university believes in as its mission and purpose, exacting

Crisis is not consequenceless

In institutional environments that are experiencing managerial command and control, bureaucratic top down corporatised leadership or where the core functions of a university are at strategic odds with the marketised vision of the organisation, a stupefied and demotivated workforce (especially in times of job scarcity, precarious labour or diminished labour transferability) start to roll with the punches and initiate survival behaviours that struggle to push back against the counter-aspirational actions of management (see Blair et al., 2023, Rudolph et al., (2024) and Hodgins et al., (2024) on bullying in higher education). When the next crisis and its responses lands on their institutional doorstep, do they have the motivational capacity to respond again with the collective bonhomie and productivity they demonstrated for previous crises?

An existential tipping point

Everyone else is defining the future of higher education for us. Rather than defining our own destiny through success, rigorous evidence and demonstrable, longitudinal impact, we are often passive actors in the debate, playing the victim and the villain simultaneously. Government regulation and intervention (such as the Job Ready Graduates policy in Australia), the pervasive influence of consultants (see Ross, 2025 and Arrow et al., 2025), the expectations of graduate employability and industry engagement (Bouchonmet, 2025 and Psychogios, 2025) and the continued states of polycrisis undermining the core activities of transformational teaching and innovative research are defining the identity of what it means to be a university in these uncertain times. This is playing out in civic discourses in institutions around politics, ideology, economics and human rights. Universities in crisis are enacting various degrees of control over the debates within whilst they cede control and influence in the debates without, further undermining the collective motivation and purpose of the staff and student community.

When faced with the pressures created by these imposed futures, the scarce resources of the university are often distributed unevenly or pasted onto the most present or publicly visible crisis response, leaving the other critical activities of the university floundering in the borderlands. Even if the work staff do is critical to ensuring the core functions of the complex university stay on track, it can often by labelled as the wrong type of BAU and dismissed to the margins of already stretched and stressed workloads. The compression of university strategic attention onto a single, existential crisis ensures that the complexity of the ecosystems of the institutions can be focused on the crisis (crises) that represent tipping points for the future of the sector (university, higher education, society, etc) and are more important than anything else ‘we’ have collectively faced.  I will explore two of these crisis tipping points, AI and the primacy of learning and their relationships to crisis response and leadership.

1. The AI tipping point

The phenomenon of the single, existential crisis has never been more evident than with the ways in which the sector is responding to the overhyped and under-theorised and evaluated crisis of generative AI. Since 2023, it seems that the impacts, opportunities and acceptance/resistance behaviours of AI are all we can talk about in higher education institutions. It dominates every strategic decision about teaching and learning, research and organisational behaviour. The often-hyperbolic promises of AI supremacy, once in a lifetime transformations and sometimes research-informed hyping of the capacities of AI to mimic, enact and exceed human capability (see Felin and Holweg, 2024, Adam et al., 2025 and Le et al., 2025) are amplified by both an uncritical media informed by vendor press releases and commissioned academic research and the unevidenced assertions of early adopters and AI super-users often played out in social media.

Data is often weaponised in this context. Noisy, contradictory and poorly interpreted student satisfaction survey results are deployed to argue that students want universities to train them in the skills of using AI today because (again often through anecdotal evidence) it’s what employers are asking of them to gain that critical first job.  Critical studies on all sides of the debate are deployed to prove a case not otherwise tested in any longitudinal or rigorous fashion (the most famous example is the MIT study by Kosmyna, et al., 2025). The very precepts that define academic thought are pushed aside for mic drop moments in social media spats or public relations by press release.

The crises created by generative AI have been leveraged by some to galvanise action to reimagine a ‘failing’ system of assessment, teaching and student experience (see Overono and Ditta 2025 or Selwyn, 2025 amongst thousands of others). For many of those academics and professional staff who have had to redesign education activity and process for successive waves of concurrent crisis, there is a deep sense of exhaustion, cynicism (‘here we go again’) and an increasing fog of uncertainty, fear and precarity (Bryant, Lanclos and Phipps, 2025).

‘The temptation to resign ourselves to resignation is never stronger than at a time of overlapping crises. The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities. Yes?—?and every student gets their own personal chatbot’

Large Language Muddle, The Editors of N+1 magazine

All we can talk about these days in higher education is generative AI

Staff and student living through complex crises often seek certainty—either by anchoring themselves in safe, intermediary spaces where they can affirm their identity or by connecting with others who share their uncertainty. In both cases, cohabiting in liminal or transitional spaces offers brief moments of clarity and calm amid chaos and precarity. Eller (2024) describes this behaviour as seeking “abundant betweenness.” In the abundant between, members of the university community can find spaces to reflect, to experiment, to pause, to enact or simply to do the things that are important to them and the core business of the university (see my most recent Mirror University post on thrilling in third spaces). To be in the abundant between means that there are forces bounding the between spaces (it also means this is where the majority are residing). In terms of crisis responses in universities, those behemothic forces are the true believer and the resistor. The true believer advocates strongly for the importance and potency of the crisis and for their positionality and perspectives about the threat and opportunity. They believe that any position that argues for any form of criticality or reflection represents resistance to the primacy of theirs. The resistor advocates strongly for the present state (or even a longing for the past), arguing that change is an instrument of managerialism or the caving into uncritical fads. They believe that any form of experimentation, advocacy for change or innovation is hype.

Finding spaces in the abundant between

The reality of generative AI is that despite the assertions that its use and innovation is now a stable state of certainty or an equally stable upwards trajectory of exponential transformative impact, both the technology and its applications to higher education are in a state of flux. Systems and platforms are deployed as black boxes and deeply integrated tools are replacing human search and task activity without consent or knowledge. The impacts of AI on assessment design have been catastrophised, bureaucratised and put through a variety of policy sausage makers to spin out transient sequences of superficial change to protect integrity, quality and enable AI skills integration into all components of teaching, learning and assessment. In an institutional environment like higher education that craves and is defined by the desire for certainty (despite its assertions to the opposite claiming change is our new norm state), the flux of AI, caught in the flash of the screaming for immediate responses and epistemological hand wringing over the future of everything we do, is fanning the crisis and the chaos.

The abundant between is a creation of flux and does not exist naturally in institutions. It is defined by the culture and power structures that dictate the bounds of the borderland space, as well as the agency (of groups, and of individuals) available within those structures. Brunet-Jailly (2011) characterises the tension between structure and agency as a ‘tug of war’ and caught in that battle of wills and action are people, embedded and residing in structures, and struggling at times to find the necessary agency to make strategic choices. The AI crisis and higher education’s responses feed the polarised opposites through reward and punishment for entrenchment and advocacy of positions. Making AI the primary focus of every policy, every decision, every conversation and every action disempowers the majority who are in the abundant between. The ‘you are either with us or against us’ provocation identifies and labels the between as being the site of ditherers, of change resistance or those hiding in fear or denialism.

The rise of generative AI as only game in town for higher education means that institutions don’t have the resources to talk or engage in work that enables its social purpose. This work has been pushed into the borderlands of between, as the core functions of research and teaching outside of the blinding reactions to AI are argued to not being mission critical or what industry or government demand of the sector. Yet, social purpose is at the existential heart of what it means to be a university (a fact challenged by an increasing media attention on universities as businesses (see Schwartz, 2025 and counter-argument in the same newspaper by Davidson, 2025) and perceptual enmeshing of marketing rhetorics such students as customers, see Flaherty, 2025 and Ashwin et al., 2024). AI vendor practices such as campus ambassador schemes, deep integration into existing educational systems such as the LMS and the signing of corporate agreements to roll out LLMs with ‘guardrails’ to staff and students continue to privilege the crisis response and the ensuing claims of crisis leadership in the face of the storm over the capacity of the university to be a transformative, aspirational site of debate, innovation and social purpose.

2. The primacy of learning tipping point

Learning matters. Good teaching matters. Assessment matters. Education matters.

The critical question for the sector to interrogate is to whom do any of these things matter? The student experience has been deployed across the sector as a metric of success and the measurement of its paucity used to initiate a crisis of confidence in institutions (see Murray, 2025 on student experience data as ideological code and Dean and Gibbs, 2015 on student happiness). The student experience is an undefined, organic construction of experiences through the lens of heterogeneous individuals engaged in the complex process of higher education (see Winstone et al., 2022). Most student experience surveys treat teaching practices and activities as heterogeneous but the students (outside of simplistic program level demographics) as homogeneous, resulting in data that only enables action on one half of thew equation (Sabri, 2011). Innovation and experimentation come with risks and rewards, grade expectations are often countered by assessment realities, there are good and bad actors in higher education with even the basic tenant of doing good teaching a bridge too far for many overly focused on research performance. Life and work intervene in the education in unpredictable, subjective and sometimes inexplicable ways. Human interaction, engagement and reflection are often deeply subjective, both in the transmission and reception. As David Kernohan of WONKE writes about the United Kingdom Teaching Excellence Framework (a metricised attempt at creating objective comparability) and the crises driving its injection into higher education policy and strategy:

If we want to assess and control the risks of modular provision, transnational education, rapid expansion, and a growing number of innovations in delivery we need providers as active partners in the process. If we want to let universities try new things we need to start from a position that we can trust universities to have a focus on the quality of the student experience that is robust and transparent. We are reaching the limits of the current approach. Bad actors will continue to get away with poor quality provision – students won’t see timely regulatory action to prevent this – and eventually someone is going to get hurt. (Kernohan, 2025)

What is not present in these surveys, metrics and rankings is learning. The student experience is described through process lenses (feedback, resources, communications, support) that in themselves are not data points of learning. In the pursuit of year-on-year lifts in these process metrics, institutions have dispatched learning to a single grade issued on the completion of the summative assessment table. Grade allocation has become a regulated and accepted measure of the scale of learning. In the wider discourse of crisis that comes from the critical importance of improving these metrics, nothing else matters to the student. Grades equal graduate attractiveness to employers. Grades mean vindication of success. Grades mean comparative superiority over others in the cohort. Grades mean getting into the game for the graduate job you want. A 2017 report by the students union at the London School of Economics into the importance of the student experience was called ‘Get a 2:1 and Get a Good Job’ (the intention of which was celebrated nearly ten years later in 2025 as one of the reasons the university was declared ‘University of the Year for Student Success’ with 90% of students getting a 2:1 or higher).

Grades do not equal learning. This statement held true before the era of generative AI, and it holds an even starker truth today. We have lost the argument that learning matters.

The pervasive dominance of the customer/product orientation in higher education has meant we have lost the argument that connections matter for reasons other than self-promotion or employability enhancement. Connected learning is not business card farming (or its modern equivalent of LinkedIn lead generation and contact discovery). Connected learning creates patterns of engagement within and between the cohort, the disciplinary contexts, students own communities and networks, the academics and the university to create experiences that resonate past the immediate (see Bryant et al., 2025 and Bryant, 2022).

We have lost the argument that engaging in formative tutorial and workshop activities matters for anything other than an attendance requirement or if its directly assessed as part of the final grade. Learning happens when experiences are catalysed for processes like reflection, engagement, collaboration, challenge, application, theorisation and interrogation. This happens when a well-designed learning experience engages the students in active and authentic learning. Even before the pandemic, universities around the world were reporting student disengagement with lectures, with assessment and with the usually highly valued tutorial experience (Chipchase et al., 2017 and Williams, 2022). Larger institutions with marketised student recruitment strategies are finding increasing student engagement challenging, as scale makes personalisation and one-to-one learning difficult to deliver effectively (Bryant, 2023). According to Deloitte (2025) Millennials and Generation Z make up 70% of the workforce. They are generations wanting to find better work/life balances. They want to build and apply the skills of adaptability, flexibility, creativity and responsibility to their work and the ways in which they choose to live their lives. The rigid pedagogical and disciplinary boundaries of higher education are deeply out of alignment with the skills expectations and values of these generations (see Mahesh, et al., 2022).

We have lost the argument that assessment is more than of learning, it is for In a heavily quality assured system, reliant on structured and aligned learning outcomes, rubricised assessment and feedback frameworks and the demonstrable importance of a performance/grade relationship, the assessment of learning takes a dominant stance over learning through doing, experimentation and transitional learning by experience. With the absolute reliance by many institutions on high stakes invigilated summative assessment as the only form of ‘AI proofed quality assurance’, this nexus between performance and success has become more deeply embedded in the student experience. Gough (2013) argues that this form of rigid compliance with constructive alignment by both the institution and the student disenables agency and entrenches instrumentality to curriculum and assessment that:

…will function as a tool for perpetuating established norms and rules, a plan or path that leads, pushes or coaxes learners in one particular direction – with no choice. It usually implies that achieving specified intended learning outcomes (often couched in terms of acquiring some ideal representational knowledge) will produce an ideal kind of person who can contribute to an ideal kind of society – and will usually produce ideological clashes over whose ideas of a ‘good’ society are best. (p.1123)

Learning in and through the entire experience of a degree is critical for students to articulate and leverage the possibilities of higher education. It is a transition point and a traversing of the abundant between that enables students to make the journey between social states (such as from school to work) in safe and transformative ways. However, in the face of crisis, with generative AI, the corporatisation of metrics, rankings and university operations, the increasing costs associated with higher education in many countries and the generational misalignments that are potentially decreasing participation and positive engagement in higher education (see Bryant, 2024), learning is an indulgence when compared against the efficacy of exclusively focusing on grade achievement and on the final grading of the degree. It is a luxury when compared against the pervasive and overwhelming demands to insert the teaching of generative AI into every unit and every program. It is a secondary concern when compared with the calls to increase program-level assessment as a way of ensuring degree integrity (even if it means designing less learning-focused and pedagogically coherent programs to enable such a unicorn).

Institutions need rearticulate the arguments and expectations of higher education as primarily an experience of learning and benefiting from the processes of learning to current and potential students (and their parents who increasingly questioning the worth of the own degrees (see Gafner, 2025). The alternative is to accept that wanting learning to matter to the same cohort as anything other than customer satisfaction and industry job readiness is pointless liberal nostalgia.

However, I am not the right person to redefine the argument. My generation (according to Gafner) were 2.5 times more likely to have valued our degrees than the current generation going through undergraduate programs now (Generation Z). I am the grandfather telling their grandkids about how much better it was back in my day. I came from an era of minimal tuition fees ($1200 a year in the late 1980s) and more structured, dense programs across longer semesters to allow for knowledge and skills to breath and be absorbed (learning). I studied in a time of no internet, no social media, no AI and with physical textbooks and overheads transparencies. Whilst there are things from that experience that translate, there are also many things that don’t. The sequence of crises impacting learning and education for the current generations (Millennials in postgraduate and Generation Z in undergraduate) were not there ‘back in my day’. And the structure, ambitions and agendas of universities were fundamentally different when the sector was almost completely government funded in Australia (as opposed to less than 20% these days). I am definitely not the person who needs to or can make this argument. Our graduates, our current students, their parents, friends, networks and mentors, industry and societal leaders and our future students need to make and believe the argument that learning matters, especially in a time of concurrent and never-ending crisis. Learning matters whilst you are experiencing it, learning matters in success and failure and it matters from the day you graduate and your experience the highs and lows of life. It is part of growing old and living life.

And this is where I leave you at the end of part one of this essay. Part 2 will look at the critical importance of the generation about to enter higher education in 2030 and will revisit the notion of the post-transformative university that I articulated in the third Mirror University post.