This is the ninth in a series of essays 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 antithesis 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
The Mirror University maintains the structures, organisation, practices and mythologies of higher education but behaves in ways that are the antithesis of what universities aspire to be.
Across the sector, the clarion call of AI inevitability, combined with concurrent crises, is creating trauma, mistrust and an epistemic crisis that is damaging staff wellbeing, student experiences and confidence in higher education itself. I argue that higher education is facing two interconnected crises. The first is the crisis of obsolescence. Falling revenue, cost cutting, redundancies, casualisation and curriculum rationalisation have transformed students into avatars for revenue generation and reduced education to a transactional value proposition. Trust is breaking down between institutions, staff and students, creating fear, precarity and a sense that the university project is losing meaning.
The second is the crisis of AI. AI has become a polarising battleground in which debate is replaced by barricades, inevitability rhetoric, fearmongering and personal attacks. The abundant between (the space of purposeful, critical and evidence-based judgement) is denied by those defending extreme positions. The result is trauma, fractured relationships and growing distrust among students and staff.
Together these crises contribute to an epistemic crisis: the persistent questioning and undermining of the efficacy of teaching, learning and assessment. Students, staff, employers and governments are increasingly having different conversations about the purpose and value of university, weakening the foundations of trust on which higher education depends.
To what end? The answer is healing. Universities cannot recover through AI, managerialism, polarisation or consultant-driven rationalisation. Healing requires five commitments: respect, care, evidence, time and being human. We must rebuild trust, restore meaningful relationships, prioritise duty of care, engage in evidence-based debate, step back from the cadence of crisis and remember that higher education is fundamentally a human ecosystem. AI is not the enemy, but the boosterism, exceptionalism and ignoring of evidence surrounding it are deepening existing fractures.
Without healing, the university risks becoming obsolete; with it, the university can once again become a place of transformation, experimentation, growth and social good.
Introduction
The clarion call of AI inevitability across campuses and amplified through social media, and the visceral whiplash of concurrent crisis reactions are defining the discourses, the culture and the wellbeing of the higher education sector. The doom spiral targets the motivations and behaviours of students, academics and the very purposes of higher education with headlines like the ones below. The pile-on is coming from all sides and fuelled by contradictory motivations and endgames. The relationships that define the human endeavour and opportunity of higher education are thrown into dark rabbit holes of mistrust. The result is a sector in crisis, the lives and careers of people in ruins and the futures of young people wanting to be better and make a difference, in doubt.
The scars of crisis in higehr education are traumatic and lasting. We have seen the evidence from successive series of studies into the wellbeing of academic and professional staff. In an ecosystem defined by difference and debate, fluency and flow, expertise and growth, the fundamental and overwhelming focus of the sector (which for the moment is AI) is often experienced as polarised, demeaning, abusive and toxic. Overlay the significant and underdiscussed mental crises in both students and staff (see the critical work of Dollard et al, 2026 and Neser, 2023 on university staff wellbeing and the work of GTI CYBIL (2024) for students) and the effects are magnified and the impacts often silent. With toxicity comes corruption, micro-aggressions, cabals and cliques and precarity. This is the trauma we are experiencing, and it is writ large in how we are managing the concurrent crises caused by AI.
The trauma of crisis
Crisis generates trauma when the demands imposed by extreme events exceed an individuals or collective capacity to cope, disrupting core assumptions about safety, predictability, and control. This overloading alters our stress-response systems creating physiological and mental consequences. Crises also destabilise social and institutional trust, intensifying uncertainty and collective distress, especially in contexts of repeated or prolonged disruption such as pandemics or conflict (Goldmann & Galea, 2014). Trauma persists when individuals cannot process experiences into coherent meaning structures, undermining identity and worldviews. This effect worsens when crises become consecutive or concurrent. Trauma resides not just in the person but in artefacts and practices that act a signifier of traumatic memories. Each exposure to that artefact triggers the stress responses over again. In some cases, those stress responses became a cascade, so even the tiniest straw can trigger disproportionate the effects of stress. As evidenced in those earlier reports on wellbeing, the trauma of crisis impacts outside the workplace in often terrible and permeant ways.
I want to discuss two specific crises of wellbeing, productivity and staff and student satisfaction in higher education, the crisis of obsolescence and the crisis of AI.
The crisis of obsolescence
University budgeting models (in the UK and Australia at least) are based almost exclusively on the generation of student fee income and its cross-subsidisation of the research architecture (OECD, 2025). With fee revenue declining from both international students and increasingly domestic markets (UUK, 2026 & Australian Financial Review, 2026), the only financial survival mechanism available to many institutions is cost cutting (Searle, 2025, Williams, 2026 and Martin, 2026). This is deployed through mechanisms such as program rationalisation, curriculum sustainability, forced and voluntary redundancy, casualisation and magnification of scale. These are often (not always) necessary reactions to real financial crises. There is no avoiding the fact that the sector in many countries is in financial dire straits. Costs spiralling, revenue falling, policy decisions and compliance regimes undermining capacity and confidence (even in more heavily public funded countries such as France, see Asaf, 2026 and the consequences of a massive hike in non-EU student fees to manage a looming budget crisis).
And the focus of these cuts is almost exclusively on the costs of teaching. The student is an avatar for revenue generation. A homogenous group who engage with university in singular and predictable ways. As Shore (2024) notes in their research on consultancies and the higher education sector:
All [consultants] argue that universities should place the student (as a discerning consumer) at the centre of their operations and planning. Ironically, none of the reports themselves put students at the centre of their analyses or engage meaningfully with different student perspectives. Instead, ‘the student’ is typically constructed as a uniform and one-dimensional customer. Despite frequent references to diversity, inclusion and equity, the students that appear in these reports are passive, objectified individuals who seem to share a uniform and simplistic set of concerns that mostly involve obtaining ‘value for money’ and getting a good ‘return on investment’ from their chosen degrees.
The financial state of universities dis proportionately effects junior staff, humanities and social sciences and the processes of teaching, therefore students. Saddled with rising debt, large class sizes, AI teaching and assessment and poor classrooms, they are beginning to vote with their feet. The consumerist language and funding sovereignty rhetoric has undermined the holistic student support architecture critical for accessibility, inclusivity and equity. Recruitment and retention become the only games in town (see Peterie et al, 2024).
The value proposition of a higher education degree becomes transactional for all involved. Financial counterbalancing and value arguments are essentially reductionist and build a culture of entitlement over learning. This culture is reinforced with the deployment of AI to replace services, academic judgement and first-line support. A student leader I saw talk at a UK conference recently noted that whilst they assert their rights to use AI in their university studies, their academic cannot, because in the mind of the student, they were paying for the academic’s expertise. If the academic uses AI to provide summative feedback on assessment, why wouldn’t the student just use her ChatGPT and save the £9000 fees? Putting aside the marketisation argument here, and just assuming that by ‘pay’ she meant time taken out her life and career, the value proposition argument could not be starker. We offload and outsource basic educational functions to AI (cost cutting or not) and we risk tipping the scales of value the wrong way.
Put simply, if our pipeline breaks down, either in terms of learning value or economic value then there is no university. If the pipeline breaks down, the funding of research collapses and with it goes discovery. This is not a dystopian hyperreality. It is an economic and ontological consequence of less students choosing to study. Those of a certain age will remember the Yes Minister episode that valorised the most effective hospital in the NHS because it was one without patients. The same cannot be said of a campus empty of student seeking meaning or a future. The pipeline will (and is) breaking down because trust and faith are breaking down as well at a far more rapid rate than we have ever experienced before.
This is the t crisis of obsolescence. A state where feeling precarious, at-risk, or in fear disrupts your capability to teach and research. It puts pressure on performance and achievement. It drives workload because it is no secret that thousands of jobs have already been lost, with little reduction in the required work to be done. It internalises debate and dissent for fear of speaking up and retribution (real or imagined). Teaching students is the vital lifeblood of every university. Less students, empty campuses and less connection making is bad for the sector. It is also destructive to the emotional and physical wellbeing of staff (see Messioui, 2025), especially those that hold the ideals of transformation, aspiration and education close to the professional and personal identity (McKendrick-Calder et al, 2026).
The crisis of AI part un: Take to the barricades
I wasn’t going to write about this. I really wasn’t. I am tired of writing about AI in education. It has happened, a lot of people have spent a lot of energy convincing themselves it is more than it is, and once disappointed have turned their anger onto those who have argued for purposeful, critical evaluation. That anger has at times been visceral, personal and vindictive (See Reynoldson, 2025, D’Agostino, 2023, Palmer, 2026, Watters, 2026 and the counter from Rossmiller, 2026 who labels resistance as ‘intellectual closure’)
But the trauma of the crisis of AI is real. It is fracturing educational institutions, staff and students from schools through universities into dangerous, polarised cliques, where positions are defended at the barricades (‘Do you hear the people sing? Singing the songs of angry men’). It is enabling on-the-fly decision making and policy setting, once again not learning from the pervasive addictions of social media, but doubling down on the hyperbole, the inevitability and the end-of-days rhetoric. The debate demeans the use of words such as responsible, critical, purposeful and human, weaponising the extremes against the abundant between of the liminal middle (see Eller, 2024), supercharged by vendors, by government industry policies, by fear of obsolescence and/or missing out. This is represented in the diagram below that I have articulated in other essays in more detail. The simple version is that the middle is denied debate, choice, reflection and criticality in both public and private spaces by the rebels at the barricades of both sides. The threat and opportunity sides are not cleanly epistemic in nature either. The opportunity can be offloading, creativity, efficiency or the peace that comes from not rebelling. The threat can be replacement, techno-determinism, lack of responsible use, managerialism. The borders of these spaces are messy and often porous. And there is good and bad happening in both spaces.
(Bryant (2026)
Recently I saw a keynote speaker at a global edtech conference make unevidenced assertions about the invertibility of AI and how academics need to get on board or get off the bus. He dismissed concerns about AI credibility (AI used to lie, it doesn’t now) and that AI is not a tool, it’s a companion, collaborator and thought partner, of equal standing with you. It was one very specific and central claim that struck me:
Humans who use AI will replace humans who don’t.
Purposeful decision-making, concerns about ethics and sustainability, fear of replacement, are all cause to be replaced in the view of this academic. And the word replace comes with its own traumatic overtones, both historical and political. The crisis of obsolescence rent large. A few weeks later, announcing a university digital sovereignty initiative, a Vice-Chancellor of a large regional university asserted that the university must ‘enslave’ the technology of AI, bringing it into the University architecture for the good of the institituion. This was said without a modicum of irony. The same boosterism that brings us AI as thought partners and AI as collaborators also sees AI as something to enslave. We need to enslave our partners? The trauma of this is generational and raw. The messages are mixed, presumptuous and colonial. The trauma they generate is real and the trust they break, palpable.
The crisis of AI part deux: The end of everything?
There is a constant stream of fearmongering on social media about assessment in the era of ubiquitous AI access. The posts generally go:
‘You think what you’re doing is [AI proof, AI detectable, can’t be cheated] – well think again, everyone can cheat all the time now with [insert most recent techno babble product here].
These sages rarely offer a solution, just a critique of your practices with regards AI and assessment. There is punching down, tech bro backslapping, existential handwringing about the consequences of ‘doing nothing;’ and with us or against us barricading (again). Insults (actual insults) fly between those who have seen the light and those who even show a glimpse of questioning (Professor Headin TheSand was a sidesplitter from one advocate). It culminates in a pervasive and terrifying doom spiral.
Everything you know is dead. Assessment is dead! Exams are dead!! The University is dead!!! Your job is dead!!!!
There is no doubt AI is causing a crisis in assessment and there are students cheating or using AI in uncritical ways. There is no doubt that academics are accelerating their research output by using AI against the express guidelines of journals (see the pusback from the campaign for Ai free research). But there are also students and academics pushing back. There are students tired of slop and brainrot. This not a singular instance but a significant and generational shift. The tail end of Generation Z are enacting resistance against the techno-laddism and digital saturation of their youth. Adario (2026) noted that in recent surveys in the US that excitement about AI fell 14% since 2025 and the number of Gen Z feeling ‘outright anger’ about AI uncreased to 31%. In a different survey reported in the same article, 44% of Gen Z admitted to sabotaging their employers AI efforts as an act of rebellion. A Gallup survey cited in the article observed that 48% believed the risks of AI in work outweighed the benefits and 80% noted that using it made learning more difficult. This is in stark contrast to the argument that those who use AI will replace those who don’t. If we ignore this clear behaviour of some of our students we risk alienating the very reason we are teaching.
UPenn students in the United Staes argued in an editorial that:
Students develop an overreliance on AI, social interaction and communication are reduced, AI programs produce and reinforce biased and false information without any accountability, and critical thinking is inhibited. As Penn students, our purpose is to take advantage of our education, not give it away to an AI model while we sit by passively. (Garcia, 2026)
This is in part because, even if we assume we exist not to educate students but to create a pool of graduates, the job market is dire, underpaid and fractured by, would you believe, promises of AI. Goldman Sachs argue that 300 million jobs are at risk because of AI, mainly graduate jobs. The value proposition of higher education is getting messier. The same academic leader who championed replacement also showed a graphic of all the new jobs that will be created in the AI enabled world. Auditors, fact checkers, trust authenticators, training data compilers, servants to the newly sentient agentic AI. He was painting quite the dystopian future for our next generation of gradates! (see Capps, 2025) This is the future our students are arguing that they don’t want to be a part of. There is a pseudo-parental argument emerging here: We know what is best for you.
In the abundant between, there are teachers who are making purposeful, valid and pedagogically sound assessments and educational judgements that are working, both using and not using AI But for those trapped in the abundant between, the trauma they feel in this space is deeply impacting on their wellbeing.
Epistemic crisis
The university sector is facing the risk of a generational rupture of trust in the academic project, feeding from millennial parents and generation Z siblings into our future cohort of students. Millennial parents who do not believe that their education was worth the time and money invested in it (see Weale, 2026 and the British Social Attitudes survey, 2026) and Gen Z students who are rebelling against the inevitability rhetorics of the institutions educating them (see Lichtenberg, 2026 and Aishwini, 2025). The existential consequences of this rupture are playing out on campuses everywhere in the form of redundancies, mergers, risks of bankruptcy and wide-scale rationalisation. The risks are playing out in the form of declining participation in postgraduate and increasingly undergraduate programs and in the engagement patterns of students when they enrolled (Turner and Stephenson, 2026 and Norton, 2024).
The worst is yet to come. The undermining of trust in universities disrupts the foundations of credibility that our ‘brand’ is based on. It fractures the relationships necessary for knowledge creation, critique and sharing. As Rice (2006) notes in her essay on the philosophy of trust in education:
Education is facilitated not only when students trust teachers, but also when teachers trust students (assuming in both cases that the trust is well founded). Most fundamentally, trust enables teachers to teach. If teachers did not trust students to exert the effort needed to learn, “teaching” would be a rather pointless endeavor. Trust in their own knowledge supports teachers’ decision making about such things as pedagogy, curricula, discipline, and classroom organization. And, as noted earlier, trust is a condition for the open exchange of ideas, an exchange that, educationally speaking, is mutually beneficial for both teachers and students. (p.76)
An epistemic crisis undermines the fabric of a university education. Higher education is built on principles, practices and possibilities. It is the fine balance between the betterment of the self and the interrogation of society (Humboldt’s conceptualisation of Bildung and Wissenschaft). When our stakeholders no longer believe in those principles, or question the veracity of the messages about them, then the practices that are enabled by them, fracture and lose meaning. When we begin to question them (or have them questioned on our behalf within the polarisation microclimate), we fracture ourselves and the collective whole of the institution into disconnected quarters of defence and attack, second guessing what we know to be in the best interests of the community we serve. Polarisation becomes the toxic poison to the nurturing of a credible and connected learning experience. AI is the most effective manifestation of this assertion. Seeds of doubt, entrenched positioning and uncritical cognitive offloading to AI fuel the epistemic crisis and how it is experienced by those yet to enter higher education.
I define epistemic crisis as the persistent questioning undermining of the efficacy of the educational experience and the subsequent uncritical redesigning of practices related to effective teaching, learning and assessment. Epistemic crisis manifests as deficits of authentic dialogue about expectations of the epistemic experience. The crisis initiates a dissonance that results in students, staff and stakeholders having three different conversations amongst themselves about their experience and happiness with higher education.
In terms of curriculum and program design, it’s like three people sitting in a bar speaking three different languages and none of them able to understand a word of the other two. WONKHE recently wrote several pieces about student use of AI. In a post entitled ‘Student AI use is being driven by deteriorating student-staff relationships’ (WONKHE, 2026) the authors make the case that the fracturing of the personal relationships between staff and students (loss of individual engagement, workload and scale over engagement, fears of performance management) is turning students to use AI in assessment. The 2024 Deloitte global survey of Millennials and Generation Z found that one-third of these generations have opted out of higher education due to financial pressures, personal circumstances such as mental health, burnout or to pursue family and career choices that do not require a higher education. AI has magnified this effect, acting as an enabler of alternative seeking behaviours. This dissonance extends to workplaces, where Millennials and Generation Z students question the benefits of higher education to support work readiness and socialisation (Omilion-Hodges et al., 2022) and preparedness for identifying and shaping an balanced, safe, and non-toxic workplace culture (Alimmah et al., 2023). There are two people speaking in different tongues.
A report from HULT International Business School argues that HR leaders won’t hire graduates because they have not been properly prepared for the work, citing reasons such as no real-world experience (60%), lacking a global mindset (57%), not knowing how to work well on a team (55%), not having the right skill sets (51%), and possessing poor business etiquette (50%) (Brown, 2025). And there we have the next injection into the conversation of words with no listening.
The political environment is equally challenging and adds a fourth voice to the dissonant conversation. Governments and oppositions of all stripes are arguing for a reduction of international student numbers, reduction of post-study work rights and the weaponisation of compliance as a way of shaping the intellectual momentum of institutions (the ‘perfect storm’ is well-articulated in several recent books by Fleming (2025), Turner (2025) and Wesley (2023)). Recent proposed changes by the Australian Government argue for caps on domestic enrolments especially at Group of Eight universities enforcing this with financial penalties for over-enrolment (Duffy, 2026). Amongst several national and state level parliamentary enquiries, the NSW State Upper House enquiry, led by former academic Dr Sarah Kaine is focused on university governance, transparency, financial accountability, and academic freedom. It addresses widespread public concerns that universities are operating too much like ‘quasi-private enterprises’ rather than public institutions.
To what end? A state of healing to recover and grow
The University of Trust will remain a fantasy, unless we pause to heal. From a philosophical perspective, Aristotle argued that healing is a part of how we restore human flourishing (eudaimonia), positing that well-being depends on achieving balance in both character and life (sometimes expressed through the catharsis of passions of trauma) (Jackson, 1994). Jung artuclated healing as a process of integrating wounded or unconscious aspects of the self and the response to trauma, which leads to greater senses of wholeness and personal growth (Wilkinson, 2017).
We can only heal what we can control and herein lies the premise of this essay. There are, without doubt, fractures in our system; financial crises, the demographic pipeline and the decay of confidence all articulated earlier in this essay that are causing trauma. But the deliberative and purposeful actions, rhetoric and enculturation enacted by some institutions and individuals is exposing these fractures and making them impassible crevices. The continued undermining of the higher education project by those who seek to monetise it, managerial it or carve out a power enclave is breaking the very foundations of what makes us critical to society, industry and the community.
I believe in higher education. I wouldn’t be who I am without the experiences I was privileged to have at university. I believe we are a better society with people having access to higher education as a universal human right. I believe our research makes our planet a better place to live and I believe in the power of debate, argument and negotiation to expose and address conflicts. Higher education is not a nice to have, nor is it the domain of arcane and irrelevant intellectual wankery. An effective higher education system is a sign of development, achievement and the capability for a society to be self-sustaining. I want students to come to higher education and traverse the challenging liminal fields of growing and learning. I want them to value what comes out of that experience, whether it’s career achievement, personal growth, a passion and curiosity for learning or a lifelong group of friends.
Making a case for healing by exploring/exposing the traumatic impact of crisis can be a dangerous game, especially when played out on social media. To heal you must know what is causing you pain. Ignoring the symptoms and the pain rarely ends well. The symptoms and warning signs that emerge from the pain are clear and we cannot afford to wait to the last possible moment to react and treat them.
So how do we heal? The absolute first change is respect. The debates and rhetoric in higher education have become personal. Insults and accusation fly unchecked and responses ignored, evidence undermined and debate stifled. This is not a managerial act. This is happening between colleagues and often involves punching down. The consequences are stress and damaged wellbeing, careers ended early and the weaponisation of the activities of the university against dissent. We turn on our own sector declaring everything we did was wrong and broken. We criticise without an openness to solutions. We must respect each other and not give into the right-wing rhetoric of anti-intellectualism and corporate autocracy. Dissent is not damaging or undermining when it is offered with respect. Argument is not and should never be personal. People should not cry because of their work. Respect means taking responsibility for your actions, intended and unintended.
The second thing we must do is rebuild care. Let’s start with students. We have an unprecedented mental health crisis, which cuts to the core in terms of wellbeing, learning and thriving. Why are we in a position where nothing is the only alternative to harm? What was driven our society and institutions to consider that this potential danger of handing the keys to our students to a black box without guardrails, is better than nothing? Do we care so much about margins and throughput and survey results that we accept the AI trolley problem that having an AI bot solution (for example as first-line mental health care for students) saves eight lives out of ten cases the bot engages with, which is clearly better than losing ten? (see perspectives on the use of AI as a first-line mental health care for students by Gaur et al, 2024 and Kuhail et al., 2024). Of course, saving eight lives is better than losing ten. But saving 10 lives is better still. There is no compromise we should be making with our duty of care. NONE. This is the commercialization of vulnerability. And it’s not a culture of care.
This remains the most frightening recent development in HE. After years of stripping support and disability ecosystems the ‘miracle’ of AI appears to enable an even deeper hollowing out of student support. The ‘better than nothing’ argument is rolled out by advocates, and those same people won’t answer the questions about guardrails, safety protocols and jailbreaking, especially where these tools are not purpose procured but trained and deployed through the same university systems that run other AI applications. Care is what we lose when we replace any teaching interaction with AI. We will never know or predict the critical touch points of care, correction, criticality or communication that will leave the resonant marks on this and future generations of humans. AI cannot deploy the serendipity and expertise needed to cultivate this fertile rhizomatic human engagement.
Thirdly, we need to own the critical importance of evidence. Unevidenced assertions used to deride or gatekeep are damaging the relationships between universities, students and stakeholders. It might break in seconds and take a generation to rebuild. Academic culture is built on evidence-based debate and proof. Yet, we listen and react to research provided by consultants and vendors to further their own agendas. We hire people to tell us how to do the basic job of a university. We replace debate and governance with politics and power. We all recognise these behaviours and for better or worse they are present in some form in every university. And again, this is not an anti-management position. This happening at all levels of our institutions. My argument for healing here is that if these debates, discussions, arguments and crisis responses occurred within the frame of evidence then the momentum changes and the relationships strengthened. Add respect to evidence and you a significant proportion of the history of academia. It turns the perspective back to what matters, changing society for the better and helping students in the transitional journey. Things that shouldn’t be an aspiration but a functional baseline of our reason for being.
Fourthly, to heal we need time. We must take a break from the cadence of crisis (Bryant, 2024). We have been in crisis for over a decade continuously, concurrently and reactively. It hurts. It breaks and sadly it kills. No one should be killed or harmed by their work but the survey results on wellbeing sadly tell the opposite story (see Feltz-Cornelis, 2025). When in crisis we often accept otherwise unreasonable behaviours for the greater good (Kavalnes & Nordal, 2019). We need to stop, rethink and redesign, find spaces for the creation and evolution of new parts of the system and reflect on what is still great with our project. This is not on-the-clock navel gazing, it critical for the body to stop, sleep and then it can heal. We need to rest in between crises. Chronic exposure to crisis places significant physiological and psychological strain on people, activating prolonged stress responses that elevate cortisol levels, impair immune function, disrupt sleep, and increase the risk of burnout and chronic illness. Time to heal is essential, allowing the body’s regulatory systems to restore equilibrium, repair stress-related damage, rebuild resilience, and sustain long-term cognitive, emotional, and physical performance. Our bodies and minds need time, not just the next crisis.
Finally, healing takes humans. AI will not heal us. The language of humans who use AI replacing humans who don’t is dystopian fan-boying of the highest order. A sycophantic agent with cosplay algorithms and a coded desire to please the human enables such uncritical reinforcement of the norms to be dangerous in some cases. AI-mediated companionship may offer short-term emotional support and relief from loneliness ((Liu et al, 2025), but excessive reliance on AI partners can weaken human social engagement, increase isolation, and encourage emotional dependency (Malfacini, 2025). In her startling book ‘The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny’, Laura Bates (2025) compares AI companions (and other relationship-wellbeing products) to the Greek myth of Pygmalion. Pygmalion was a sculptor who became disillusioned with women, whom he viewed as morally flawed and unworthy. He therefore created an ivory statue embodying his idealised vision of female perfection and fell in love with it. Aphrodite brought the statue, later known as Galatea, to life. The myth is often interpreted as a story of idealisation, control, and the preference for a compliant, self-created partner over real human relationships. Bates argues that AI reinforces these misogynistic cultures.
That all said, AI is not the enemy here. We invented AI (through people learning at university and building on decades if research and ideation). AI can have clear and purposeful uses, but the constant boosterism and exceptionalism and ignoring of evidence undermines those uses. Higher education is a human ecosystem. It is complex, contradictory, challenging and beautiful. To heal we have to be human and understand how we are built and framed and how others are the same-same but different. Will being human, end all the politics, managerialism, crisis and pain? Of course not. Centuries of wars and government present a pretty strong evidence base. However, when we know what we are doing is right, and that others feel (whether they agree or not) that there is a sense of rightness in play and we respect, care, evidence and reflect, then we start healing. It is not perfect, but it is human.
There is a museum in Zagreb, Croatia called the Museum of Broken Relationships. Founded by Croatian artists Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubiši?, this is a unique museum dedicated to objects and stories from ended relationships from the spectre of death to infidelity and aspiration These donated items transform private experiences of love and loss into a shared public narrative, told through the object and personally written story next to it. The museum’s intent is to encourage reflection, empathy, and healing, demonstrating how seemingly ordinary objects can hold deep emotional significance. By relinquishing these possessions, contributors often find a sense of closure, making the act of donation an important part of the healing process. Sometimes healing was visceral and sudden, others time it crept up on the person. Donating, telling a story and publicly displaying it were cathartic long after the trauma healed.
Healing is a process of reconstructing meaning and identity in response to trauma. Ricoeur (1992) argues that individuals achieve a coherent sense of self through narrative identity, whereby disruptive experiences are interpreted and integrated into an ongoing life story. From this perspective, healing occurs when adversity is reconfigured in ways that restore agency and purpose. Dominguez-Escrig et al., 2022 in a landmark organisational leadership study on emotional healing argue that:
Some authors have found or suggested positive relationships between emotional capability or emotional intelligence and innovation. However, emotional healing goes beyond these concepts by attending to followers’ emotions and playing a proactive role by listening, supporting and providing guidance to those who suffer and have traumatic experiences at work. This is especially important in organisations that want to develop innovations. Innovation is a complicated process that is likely to fail, and this is particularly true when developing radical innovations, which have a high failure rate. Therefore, it is important to promote positive organisational contexts in which employees feel safe and confident to experiment, question things and take risks. (p.234)
Stopping crisis seems a challenging, idealistic or even impossible idea. On the other hand, being able to heal the people, the institutions and trust damaged by the trauma of crisis is not a ‘nice to have’, it is essential. We need to return the university to a safe place for experimentation, questioning and risk taking. It is in the space that we can begin prosecuting the case for trust, to rebuild its decaying foundations and demonstrate the value proposition of coming to university to equally learn the same skills and actions in a safe place and be able to tell that story as part of their own journey through trauma and triumph.
he debates around AI have not shown the sector at its best. If we approach our future, not through the lens of polarisation, command and control, consultant-driven rationalisation and empire building, but through a simple focus on the university as an organisation. Daft (2010) defines organisations as ‘(1) social entities that (2) are goal-directed, (3) are designed as deliberately structured and coordinated activity systems, and (4) are linked to the external environment’. They are not made up of buildings or technology systems; they are made up of people working together. If the sociality breaks down, they are no longer organisations. This is where you get the proliferation of toxic workplaces, narcissistic leadership, bullying and abusive cultures and collapsing expertise through high staff turnover. I believe the fundamental tenets of an effective and productive social entity are how people communicate and relate to each other. Universities are complex social entitles, especially when you add current and future students to the ecosystem. As I have argued in this essay, the relationships and communications within them have been scarred and traumatised by crisis, and more importantly, by the behaviours, actions and words of people responding, reacting or taking advantage of those crises.
Respect, care, evidence, time and being human are critical to enable healing from this downward spiral. The consequences of not doing so are destructive for a civil society, from the breaking of trust to the prioritisation of alternative seeking behaviours instead of going to university, to the outsourcing of human capital to AI (this is not a dystopian drama, see the London School of Innovation and their approval for degree awarding powers – Roswell, 2026). I believe in the project of higher education. I always will. But for it to survive and flourish, we are on the wrong pathway. Modern education needs to think about what it believes in and stands for, which is what we have always stood for. Being a part of the journey of young people, that go onto to change ours and their world, through work, through research and through ideas. Dangerous thinking, eh?