Is AI uncovering the business charade run by universities?
An insightful analyst says yes, and urges universities to disclose their plans for the future
Amarda Shehu, Vice President and Chief AI Officer at George Mason University, has published an essay that is one of the more penetrating things I have read on AI and the university because she refuses the usual evasions.
Shehu’s core claim is that AI is not simply adding pressure to higher education. It is exposing a dishonesty the university has lived with for decades: the university has spoken the language of formation, citizenship, and the life of the mind to donors and leaders, while selling students and families a credential tied to economic security. AI now threatens the credentialed performance that justified that bargain, especially at the entry level, and so the institution can no longer hide behind its old ambiguity.
That is exactly why her essay matters. She argues that large language models are beginning to absorb the kinds of digitizable tasks universities have long prepared students to perform: drafting, summarizing, coding, legal analysis, and other forms of credentialed entry-level knowledge work.
At the same time, she notes that tuition remains high, the labor market value of the degree is under pressure, public funding is constrained, and universities are responding with a vocabulary of “adaptation” that is far too small for the scale of the problem. Her point is that the institution is not facing a mere tool upgrade. It is facing a crisis of self-understanding.
From a Catholic perspective, that diagnosis is powerful because the Church was not involved in the birth of the university in order to create a credentialing machine. The university emerged from a civilizational conviction that truth is worth seeking, that knowledge belongs within a moral and metaphysical order, and that education is a work of formation, not just of certification.
Shehu’s argument, stripped to its essence, is that AI is forcing universities to answer whether they really still believe that. If the institution exists mainly to sell access to tasks now being automated, it is in serious trouble. If it exists to form judgment, relational depth, intellectual humility, endurance under uncertainty, and the capacity for slow understanding, then its mission remains not only defensible but indispensable. But, is it?
What makes her analysis especially strong is that she does not romanticize the old “holistic education” language. She sees that much of it has become aesthetic cover for a system that quietly monetized labor-market signaling.
She insists that the real unit of value is not the discipline label on the diploma but the formation a student actually undergoes. That is a brutal but necessary point. Some programs in “safe” fields may form almost nothing that resists automation, while some programs in supposedly doomed disciplines may form precisely the habits of mind and habits of relation that make a human being viable across a lifetime of technological disruption.
This is where a Catholic review should press even harder. Shehu is right that the university must redesign around formation rather than cling to the hedge of prestige plus credential. But Catholics should say plainly that formation is not just the cultivation of adaptable skills. It is the shaping of the person toward truth, virtue, prudence, solidarity, and a rightly ordered freedom. If universities respond to AI merely by shifting from “job training” to “resilience training,” they will still have missed the deepest point. The crisis is not only economic. It is anthropological.
So I would put it this way: Shehu has identified the challenge with unusual clarity. AI is not simply the latest disruption to higher education. It is the most dramatic challenge because it reveals that universities can no longer pretend to be two things at once. They cannot indefinitely sell a credential while speaking as if they were offering formation.
The Catholic answer is not to abandon the university, but to recover it: as a community of truth, apprenticeship, judgment, and human maturation, where the person is formed for more than the labor market precisely because the labor market is no longer stable enough to justify making it the soul of education.
Her final warning is the right one. If this redesign does not happen, the slow surrender will be paid for above all by students who can least afford it. That should hit us hard, because once again the burden of institutional dishonesty would fall on those with the least margin for error. In that sense, the AI challenge to the university is not merely technological. It is a justice question.