Recently launched Open AI chatbot ChatGPT can rapidly assimilate materials from across the internet and produce written pieces that, according to various academics, “would result in full marks if submitted by an undergraduate”.

We believe that this is excellent news for the future of higher education and not, as many have suggested, an indication that professors could all be out of a job in just a few years.

As society has come to understand knowledge as a product and a qualification as a commodity to be bought and sold, so higher education has increasingly situated itself as a market which offers training and credentials. The value proposition is entirely in the certificate rather than in the process of learning.

Increasingly, this status quo has had to be shored up with surveillance technology to protect the legitimacy of the product. Students are monitored by machinery as they write their exams and software programs check that their words are their own.

The successful student is the one who “cracks the code” and can produce evidence of engagement with the material in the language and format deemed valuable in the academy. The student who masters this skill is then deemed to be educated.  

But now a computer can do all of this in a matter of seconds. This should stop us in our tracks.

We must ask two questions — what is higher education actually for? And how might we meaningfully assess its attainment?  

There are multiple understandings of what a university education is. Institutions can offer workplace training, though quite frankly workplaces are far better positioned to undertake such activities. We can also teach young people to draw on multiple texts in response to assessment tasks, though it increasingly seems that machines can do this just as well.

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So, what is left for higher education to do?

We would argue that in this age of supercomputing, higher education would be well placed to foreground the human. What does it mean for knowledge to be embodied? The question is not “what do you know?” — ChatGPT will always “know” more — but rather, what is the relationship between the knowledge, the one who knows, and the world?

If university teaching and learning is primarily concerned with the humans involved in knowledge creation and dissemination, the focus becomes enabling students to enjoy a transformative relationship to knowledge. If the individuals who study in our institutions enjoyed such a transformative relationship with knowledge, it should change their sense of who they are and what they can achieve in the world.

If our assessments are only concerned with awarding marks to students to exchange for a qualification, we are rightly concerned about the impact of technological advances. We need to think instead about the ways we can nurture human transformation and encourage students to value the hard work entailed in this process.

At a social level, such a focus would enable the university to position itself more explicitly as a public good. If a university education was focused on instilling a sense of responsibility and ethics alongside high-level, powerful knowledge, it would better contribute to social justice and environmental sustainability.

It is the quality of relationships with others, with nature, with the environment, and with the world that will make such a transformation visible and yet we currently pay scant attention to these elements in the academy.

Robots can do the heavy lifting of information processing, but they cannot build the quality of community we need as we face the precarity of climate change.

The existential crisis brought on by ChatGPT and the like is a wonderful opportunity for higher education — and we hope it steps up to make the most of it. DM

Professor Sioux McKenna is Director of the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University.

Margaret Blackie is associate professor in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University. She holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Cape Town and a PhD in Education from Stellenbosch University.