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The Society for Research into Higher Education

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Who gets to decide what counts as knowledge? Big tech, AI, and the future of epistemic agency in higher education

by Mehreen Ashraf, Eimear Nolan, Manuel F Ramirez, Gazi Islam and Dirk Lindebaum

Walk into almost any university today, and you can be sure to encounter the topic of AI and how it affects higher education (HE). AI applications, especially large language models (LLM), have become part of everyday academic life, being used for drafting outlines, summarising readings, and even helping students to ‘think’. For some, the emergence of LLMs is a revolution that makes learning more efficient and accessible. For others, it signals something far more unsettling: a shift in how and by whom knowledge is controlled. This latter point is the focus of our new article published in Organization Studies.

At the heart of our article is a shift in what is referred to epistemic (or knowledge) governance: the way in which knowledge is created, organised, and legitimised in HE. In plain terms, epistemic governance is about who gets to decide what counts as credible, whose voices are heard, and how the rules of knowing are set. Universities have historically been central to epistemic governance through peer review, academic freedom, teaching, and the public mission of scholarship. But as AI tools become deeply embedded in teaching and research, those rules are being rewritten not by educators or policymakers, but by the companies that own the technology.

From epistemic agents to epistemic consumers

Universities, academics, and students have traditionally been epistemic agents: active producers and interpreters of knowledge. They ask questions, test ideas, and challenge assumptions. But when we rely on AI systems to generate or validate content, we risk shifting from being agents of knowledge to consumers of knowledge. Technology takes on the heavy cognitive work: it finds sources, summarises arguments, and even produces prose that sounds academic. However, this efficiency comes at the cost of profound changes in the nature of intellectual work.

Students who rely on AI to tidy up their essays, or generate references, will learn less about the process of critically evaluating sources, connecting ideas and constructing arguments, which are essential for reasoning through complex problems. Academics who let AI draft research sections, or feed decision letters and reviewer reports into AI with the request that AI produces a ‘revision strategy’, might save time but lose the slow, reflective process that leads to original thought, while undercutting their own agency in the process. And institutions that embed AI into learning systems hand part of their epistemic governance – their authority to define what knowledge is and how it is judged – to private corporations.

This is not about individual laziness; it is structural. As Shoshana Zuboff argued in The age of surveillance capitalism, digital infrastructures do not just collect information, they reorganise how we value and act upon it. When universities become dependent on tools owned by big tech, they enter an ecosystem where the incentives are commercial, not educational.

Big tech and the politics of knowing

The idea that universities might lose control of knowledge sounds abstract, but it is already visible. Jisc’s 2024 framework on AI in tertiary education warns that institutions must not ‘outsource their intellectual labour to unaccountable systems,’ yet that outsourcing is happening quietly. Many UK universities, including the University of Oxford, have signed up to corporate AI platforms to be used by staff and students alike. This, in turn, facilitates the collection of data on learning behaviours that can be fed back into proprietary models.

This data loop gives big tech enormous influence over what is known and how it is known. A company’s algorithm can shape how research is accessed, which papers surface first, or which ‘learning outcomes’ appear most efficient to achieve. That’s epistemic governance in action: the invisible scaffolding that structures knowledge behind the scenes. At the same time, it is easy to see why AI technologies appeal to universities under pressure. AI tools promise speed, standardisation, lower costs, and measurable performance, all seductive in a sector struggling with staff shortages and audit culture. But those same features risk hollowing out the human side of scholarship: interpretation, dissent, and moral reasoning. The risk is not that AI will replace academics but that it will change them, turning universities from communities of inquiry into systems of verification.

The Humboldtian ideal and why it is still relevant

The modern research university was shaped by the 19th-century thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt, who imagined higher education as a public good, a space where teaching and research were united in the pursuit of understanding. The goal was not efficiency: it was freedom. Freedom to think, to question, to fail, and to imagine differently.

That ideal has never been perfectly achieved, but it remains a vital counterweight to market-driven logics that render AI a natural way forward in HE. When HE serves as a place of critical inquiry, it nourishes democracy itself. When it becomes a service industry optimised by algorithms, it risks producing what Žižek once called ‘humans who talk like chatbots’: fluent, but shallow.

The drift toward organised immaturity

Scholars like Andreas Scherer and colleagues describe this shift as organised immaturity: a condition where sociotechnical systems prompt us to stop thinking for ourselves. While AI tools appear to liberate us from labour, what is happening is that they are actually narrowing the space for judgment and doubt.

In HE, that immaturity shows up when students skip the reading because ‘ChatGPT can summarise it’, or when lecturers rely on AI slides rather than designing lessons for their own cohort. Each act seems harmless; but collectively, they erode our epistemic agency. The more we delegate cognition to systems optimised for efficiency, the less we cultivate the messy, reflective habits that sustain democratic thinking. Immanuel Kant once defined immaturity as ‘the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.’ In the age of AI, that ‘other’ may well be an algorithm trained on millions of data points, but answerable to no one.

Reclaiming epistemic agency

So how can higher education reclaim its epistemic agency? The answer lies not only in rejecting AI but also in rethinking our possible relationships with it. Universities need to treat generative tools as objects of inquiry, not an invisible infrastructure. That means embedding critical digital literacy across curricula: not simply training students to use AI responsibly, but teaching them to question how it works, whose knowledge it privileges, and whose it leaves out.

In classrooms, educators could experiment with comparative exercises: have students write an essay on their own, then analyse an AI version of the same task. What’s missing? What assumptions are built in? How were students changed when the AI wrote the essay for them and when they wrote them themselves? As the Russell Group’s 2024 AI principles note, ‘critical engagement must remain at the heart of learning.’

In research, academics too must realise that their unique perspectives, disciplinary judgement, and interpretive voices matter, perhaps now more than ever, in a system where AI’s homogenisation of knowledge looms. We need to understand that the more we subscribe to values of optimisation and efficiency as preferred ways of doing academic work, the more natural the penetration of AI into HE will unfold.

Institutionally, universities might consider building open, transparent AI systems through consortia, rather than depending entirely on proprietary tools. This isn’t just about ethics; it’s about governance and ensuring that epistemic authority remains a public, democratic responsibility.

Why this matters to you

Epistemic governance and epistemic agency may sound like abstract academic terms, but they refer to something fundamental: the ability of societies and citizens (not just ‘workers’) to think for themselves when/if universities lose control over how knowledge is created, validated and shared. When that happens, we risk not just changing education but weakening democracy. As journalist George Monbiot recently wrote, ‘you cannot speak truth to power if power controls your words.’ The same is true for HE. We cannot speak truth to power if power now writes our essays, marks our assignments, and curates our reading lists.

Mehreen Ashraf is an Assistant Professor at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, United Kingdom.

Eimear Nolan is an Associate Professor in International Business at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Manuel F Ramirez is Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Liverpool Management School, UK.

Gazi Islam is Professor of People, Organizations and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management, France.

Dirk Lindebaum is Professor of Management and Organisation at the School of Management, University of Bath.


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Teaching and research? Yes, but universities have another important job

by Paul Temple

The easy way to tell authoritarian (or worse) states from ones that are, broadly speaking, liberal democracies is that in the latter you will find a range of public institutions that are significantly independent of the central state: this is what creates a plural society. It is, when you consider it, pretty surprising that we can have institutions largely funded, one way or another, by taxation, yet not controlled by the state. Take the example of Britain’s national cultural institutions: these are mainly state-funded yet guard their independence fiercely. However, we have seen in recent years how government has tried to drag them – the BBC, several major museums – into ludicrous “culture wars” and seeking to appoint to their governing bodies individuals thought to be sympathetic to certain government agendas. It is a sign that we live in a functioning liberal democracy that government does not routinely get its own way in these struggles: under an authoritarian regime, it would not even be a matter for discussion. Liberal-minded people know, almost instinctively, that independent institutions matter.

Perhaps the most important non-state public institution, everywhere, is the judiciary. The outcomes of legal cases where the state is involved in Russia or China, say, are invariably foregone conclusions. A judge’s task in these situations requires presentational skills rather than forensic ones: to frame the predetermined outcome so that it seems as if legal norms were applied, thus allowing the government to claim that the decision was made by an independent judiciary. That show trials continue in Putin’s Russia and elsewhere (why not just throw dissidents into jail, or indeed execute them?) is an implicit recognition that the moral standing of liberal institutions is too high to be simply ignored.

But those of us fortunate enough to live in liberal societies – being, as the poet Douglas Dunn puts it, “on the pleasant side of history” – cannot be complacent: the institutional structures that we all-too-readily take for granted and which underpin pluralism and support our freedoms are, we have seen recently, desperately fragile. The “enemies of the people” assault on the judiciary by the tabloid press in November 2016 over, bizarrely, a legal determination that parliament needed to vote to trigger the process of leaving the EU, showed how a populist frenzy might be worked up. That the attack was not countered immediately and vigorously by the government, because it suited the government’s political purposes at the time, was deeply shameful and worrying.

In most authoritarian states, universities and colleges do not seem to carry the same weight as the judiciary: they are apparently mostly left to get on with their work in peace, providing, naturally, that they don’t cause trouble for the regime. Academics in the former Soviet bloc countries became expert in knowing how far they could push matters (normally, not very far) and still keep their jobs and privileges. The state was a constant – if to outsiders, hidden – presence in university affairs, and university rectors usually saw their jobs in terms of keeping their academics quiet and the secret police out. The Soviet academic observation that the most dangerous university subject was history – because while we could be certain that the future would be a socialist nirvana, the past was full of traps for the unwary – neatly delineated the scope of university work under authoritarian rule. A recent detailed account of governance in Chinese universities today (Liu, 2023) explains that each university has a Communist Party committee which is “the highest authority within the university”, a point not made, in my experience, when western visitors meet the university president. He or she is accountable to a political structure that outsiders do not usually see (and if they do, its role is glossed-over), and which determines how decisions made in Beijing will be applied within the university.

In Britain, by contrast, the state/university divide was once maintained with almost religious fervour. In the days of the University Grants Committee (UGC) – peak liberalism for higher education – I once found myself chatting over coffee in a conference break to an Education Department civil servant. When he learned that I worked in a university, he almost dropped his coffee cup in shock when he realised that he’d sinned against the arms-length principle that meant that the UGC was supposed to be the only means of contact between universities and government departments. Universities, like local authorities, were seen then as autonomous parts of the public realm, each with their own goals and methods, rather than as agencies delivering central government policies. “The department [for Education and Science] dispensed cheques to the University Grants Committee for the universities and to the local authorities for schools and polytechnics with guidelines sometimes attached but virtually nil powers of enforcement…In the 1980s [under the Thatcher government] all that changed” (Hennessey, 1989: 428).

That change meant that the sharp state/university divide has now largely vanished: the role of the OFS is of course utterly different to that of the UGC. The proposal put forward by the then government in the recent general election campaign (have we heard the last of it?), that there would be central direction on which degree courses universities would be allowed to offer – or, in the measured tones of the Department for Education press release, “Crackdown on rip-off university degrees” – would mean that universities should be considered for all practical purposes as central government agencies, just as in China.

Why does this matter? One not-insignificant reason is about effectiveness: largely autonomous institutions – self-governing universities, locally-elected councils, free trade unions, the Whitehaven Harbour Commissioners – responding variously to the needs of the groups they are aiming to serve will almost certainly lead to better outcomes than would be produced by a remote, centrally-directed operation. But the larger reason is that pluralism underpins the freedoms we value in liberal societies, creating the distributed decision-making which you and I might have a chance of influencing. When those decisions are not ones that central government finds to its taste, it is even more important that independent thinking might prevail. The regular attacks on universities by Ministers in the last government, as regularly chronicled in SRHE News, surely had the purpose of undermining autonomous institutions with a commitment to disinterested knowledge production, and so weakening a core element of a liberal society. If this isn’t a fight worth having, I don’t know what is.

Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.

References

Hennessy, P (1989) Whitehall London: Secker and Warburg

Liu, X (2023) The Development and Governance of Private Universities in China Singapore: Springer Nature

Paul Temple


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“Look, Viktor, what I meant was…”

by Paul Temple

Viktor Orban is the only autocratic national leader I’ve faced across a meeting table. In those days of course, back in the ‘90s, he wasn’t the Hungarian Prime Minister: he and his Fidesz party had barely emerged from post-communist student politics (the name is an abbreviation of Alliance of Young Democrats – now a deeply misleading title). But the British Council in Budapest had already marked him out as a coming man in Hungarian politics and wanted him to hear, amongst other things, our thoughts on university reform in the country.

Looking back, several things occur. One is to note the impressive talent-spotting abilities of the British Council’s Country Director, who correctly identified Orban’s leadership potential when there wasn’t much to go on. True, the expectation was that his future would be as a progressive politician in a liberal society, rather than as the populist boss of what is close to being a one-party state. Still, you can’t win them all. A second point is that perhaps Orban was paying more attention than we realised as we rabbited on about universities needing autonomy to support both academic effectiveness and their roles in a pluralist society (that kind of thing, anyway). A third point is to be careful what you wish for (or, in this case, propose).

A major restructuring of Hungarian universities is now being planned by the Orban government, with the supposed aim of removing them from direct state control by establishing foundations which will own each university’s resources, to be controlled by independent supervisory boards. This is clever: Hungarian government spokespeople present it as a move to make Hungarian universities resemble leading research universities elsewhere, with greater independence promoted through institutional self-government. In other words, more or less what we were suggesting in that British Council meeting all those years ago.

But in university governance, as in most of life, context is all. What many Hungarian academics expect is that these supervisory boards won’t be independent at all: they will, argues Professor Jozsef Palinkas, former President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, be agents for the “ideological control” of universities by the ruling party. Orban has already made it clear that those with what he calls “internationalist” or “globalist” views will not become board members: only those with “nationalist” views will be eligible, which I think we can take to mean views indistinguishable from Orban’s own. (If you want to know what Orban means by “internationalist”, look up his conspiracy theory-laden feud with George Soros.)

Once established, these boards will become self-perpetuating, appointing future members in the same mould, excluding any possible dissenting voices. This structure has been written into the Hungarian constitution (you can’t say that university governance isn’t taken seriously in Hungary) which means that a two-thirds parliamentary majority will be needed to change it. This is possible of course, but given Fidesz’s control of much of the economy, national media, and the judiciary, unlikely. Expect an outflow of independent-minded Hungarian academics.

Most governments claim to prize university autonomy – who knows, some may actually mean it – but, around the world, there are many recent examples of intervention when this autonomy doesn’t seem to be delivering what the politicians in power consider to be the right answers. Universities might perhaps take increased governmental pressures as a backhanded compliment: governments allowed universities to go their own ways when they thought they didn’t really matter, but now they think they do matter (or at least, can be targeted in a confected culture war), they seek to control them. I expect that Orban does think that Hungarian universities are too important to be left to operate outside his web of state/party control: another piece of civil society’s structure has to be destroyed.

I was going to end with a weak joke about wanting to take back what I said all those years ago about university autonomy – but, truly, there’s nothing amusing in seeing how democracies die.

Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, London. His new book on university space and place will appear next year. Possibly. His blog appears at https://srheblog.com/category/srhe-news-blog/