I seem to be spending a lot of time at universities at the moment. Not for learning purposes, and not for paid work opportunities, either. Mostly, it’s me using their communal spaces as my mobile office, getting my 10,000 steps in by walking there and back from home, and availing myself of their power sockets and chiller/boiler taps and microwaves to save myself some money. For all their pleadings of poverty, I figure their business model won’t be derailed by my tiny bit of utilities consumption.
Universities, so we keep being told, are in crisis. Ostensibly, the difficulty is financial, but more likely it’s a chicken and egg situation. Rising or falling demand for certain courses impacts the income/expenditure cost basis for delivering those courses, meaning some are nourished and invested in, while others are scaled back or eventually “paused”. That’s a piece of classic university Newspeak which translates into “quietly euthanised”; like an old horse trundled off to the knacker’s yard, a paused course never gets un-paused and is rarely spoken about again except with vague nostalgia.
But the rising or falling demand for courses is itself influenced by the extent or lack of nourishment and investment given to those courses, and to the extent or lack of respect shown to the subjects of those courses. On a wider scale, this demand is influenced by the value (in every sense of the word) attributed to those subjects, not just within academia but within the world at large. That world is marked by an increasingly stark separation between people who believe there’s an inherent worth in thinking, learning and knowing, and people who are content not to think, not to learn and not to know.
Obviously, the rapid advances in AI are a massive driver of this separation; they definitely make it easier than ever for people not to think, learn, or know anything for themselves if they choose not to. AI also enables the so-inclined to justify not thinking, learning, or knowing anything for themselves on the basis that AI is there to do all that for us; their assumption is that we should just let it. And while AI certainly does bear a huge responsibility, it’s a symptom rather than a cause, an indicator of some much further-ranging tendencies and forces that have been undermining the perceived worth of knowledge for a very long time.
I keep being drawn back to the short videos posted on Instagram by the Nexus Instituut, a Dutch-founded organisation which “creates space for critical thinking [and] offer[s] a counterpoint to the smallness of mind by challenging the cultural-philosophical debate.”
The bold type in that quote is my doing, not theirs; it captures something that feels very important to acknowledge in all this. Nothing grows or maintains its size or strength without being fed. Muscles wither; plants wilt; rivers dry up. Minds are exactly the same. More so than at any time I can remember, though, people are actively allowing their minds to become small.
The worst part is their gleeful, glassy-eyed enthusiasm for this process, their rationalising of the rightness of it all, the inevitability of it all. I could not disagree with them more.
I live in a profoundly class-conscious country, which has long been a peculiar crucible of shame, anxiety, pressure and emotion around people’s education trajectories, especially insofar as how one person’s trajectory might compare with another’s. Our society continues to equate work with dignity, but also seems perversely unable to stop considering some kinds of work as being more dignified than others. Within this moral equation, the worth of the work also seems to constitute the worth of the worker.
After decades — centuries, even — of this as the prevailing status quo, something has shifted. Anti-intellectualism is rife again, at the very least across America and Europe, but probably elsewhere too. I dug out an old screenshot on my phone, from a Guardian article by Emma Brockes from October 2022, which — and I apologise for this in advance — mentions two people whose names I would prefer not to mention, except it’s helpful to illustrate a point:
“Ye setting up a private school while saying he’s never read a book – as he did in September – would appear like a piece of satirical performance art if we hadn’t already seen it in Trump’s “university”. The theatrical philistinism, of a piece with Trump’s, draws down into deep chambers of inferiority that, apparently, money never mends.”
On the streets where we live, we see a version of how this plays out on a micro-level rather than a macro one. Education is increasingly conflated with elitism, and anyone with a whiff of the elite about them is likely to be viewed as an enemy, or even a class traitor. Minds nourished by thinking, learning and knowing — large minds, hungry minds — are now often regarded with suspicion or contempt; they’re seen as expressions of a desire to be different, to feel superior. When faced with a tall poppy, many people’s first instinct is often to want to tear it down or pull it up by the roots.
Back when I was at Oxford around the turn of the millennium, there was an alleged powerful tension between locals and uni types, often alluded to as “town versus gown”; in practice, I think this only manifested itself in the occasional fight at kebab vans after chucking-out time at Park End, the nightclub that used to live inside the shopping centre. At the end of July 2026, our new Prime Minister reconfigured this tension within the scope of a different metaphor: Andy Burnham promised “a fundamental change to the education system” which would ensure Britain will “value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap”.
The images play into a deeply ingrained British habit of binarising all nuance out of anything which occupies the crossover zone on the Venn diagram of class, work and education. It’s so deeply ingrained, in fact, as to be effectively ineradicable. It runs through my DNA, too — I agonised over naming the university I went to when writing that previous paragraph; for the last 25 years, I’ve found it much easier telling people I was gay than I ever have telling them I went to Oxford.
One of the recent Nexus Instituut videos I saw featured Zena Hitz, a Tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, as well as the founder and president of the Catherine Project which builds communities of learning based on conversation and hospitality. Speaking about universities and their failure of the mission of education, she said:
“The part of it that’s nearest my heart is the emphasis on job training. So everyone thinks nowadays, all the young people, and they’re told this by adults, that education is for job training. And if you think that through, and you think about our world, which is increasingly run by a smaller and smaller group of very wealthy people, what that means is that the jobs are designed by fewer and fewer people. And so to pursue job training is really to learn how to work for someone else. It’s the antithesis of freedom, which, from my point of view, is the purpose of education. It’s to make free people, to make free human beings.”
This has really stayed with me since I watched that video, and it’s resonated with a recurring problem that I keep reading about online and hearing about from people who work in academia: simply put, it’s the tendency to outsource thinking which seems to characterise the majority of students currently within the education system. There’s a dominant attitude amongst many students (and often, amongst the parents coughing up some or all of the cash for them) that the years spent at uni — the sunk costs of time and money — are simply a gateway to a well-paying job: it is not necessary, and is often actively troublesome, to be expected to think, learn or know anything along the way.
The first symptom of this attitude is a dogged resistance to trying anything. There is virtually no appetite for risk; there is virtually no curiosity; there is virtually no interest in what lies beyond someone’s immediate experience and immediate terms of reference. Any attempt to steer someone outside their comfort zone tends to trigger anxiety or animosity; somewhere along the line, it seems to have become exclusionary to do anything which confronts someone with their own limitations and invites them to step into a place of uncertainty.
From the ground zero of not trying, the consequences are straightforward and inevitable.
By not trying, you end up not doing.
By not doing, you end up not thinking.
By not thinking, you end up not learning.
By not learning, you end up not knowing.
By not knowing, you end up relying on someone or something else to know for you.
By relying on someone or something else to know things for you, you end up not being free.
I recently stumbled across an interesting article by Nicole Hemenway on the Humanity++ strand of The Turning Mind, an article provocatively titled “Children Who Read Are Harder To Control”. You may find much in there to agree and disagree with, but it’s not long, and is well worth a read.
Another thing that’s definitely well worth a read is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I’ve just read for the first time in my adult life, having convinced myself that I had read it when I was in my teens, but having subsequently dismissed that memory as an invention, or a pretension. (Might it even have been an act of doublethink? It certainly might constitute a thinkcrime.)
With all of these inputs sloshing around in my head, the ramifications of not thinking, not learning, not knowing, and above all of not being free, are understandably very much on my mind at the moment.
Hemenway speaks about “the AI oligarchy” in remarkably similar ways to how Orwell speaks about The Party; an algorithm, it seems, may well be just as capable of totalitarian behaviour as a human being. These paragraphs from Hemenway’s essay are only the merest remove from the atmosphere of Orwell’s novel:
“Children who love to entertain and inform themselves away from devices managed and watched by the AI oligarchy are harder to surveil and they are harder to control.
If we live in a society where all of our worldviews are formed and informed by algorithmically-driven content on platforms owned and operated by the oligarchy, then we are defenseless against the oligarchy’s propaganda. Any narratives, ideas, or dreams with teeth to transform the world into one that is antithetical to the oligarchy’s interests has no soil in which to take root.
Where would those conversations happen at a societal level? How could those ideas spread, take hold, set the old world on fire, and inspire the new?
The infrastructure of the most technologically sophisticated surveillance state the world has ever seen is being built out around us, and rapidly. We need to get very real about what it means to live under an AI-powered surveillance state. And we need to equip our children with the skills to resist it and to organize outside of the watchful eyes of the powers that be.
To raise children who read is to build the counter-infrastructure.”
Hemenway’s devices closely mirror Orwell’s tele-screens; the oligarchy’s propaganda clearly echoes the output of the Ministry of Truth; Hemenway grounds resistance in the act of reading, whereas Orwell nudges Winston down the path of rebellion through the process of writing in a diary.
The Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four remains in power by steadily removing the means of establishing or even conceiving of an alternative to its power — namely, it pursues a mission to eradicate those systems and structures which might support thinking, learning and knowing. Key to their project, of course, is Newspeak, a blunt and brutally streamlined language which literally destroys the ability to formulate words with which to express a contrary opinion.
I imagine Orwell would be dismayed to see how readily millions of people in 2026 are embracing the abandonment of those systems and structures. To pick up on Hemenway’s metaphor, people now seem hellbent on clearing out their mental gardens of that soil in which “narratives, ideas, or dreams … antithetical to the oligarchy’s interests” might take root, and instead are rushing to pave over the fertile grounds of their mind with thick layers of impenetrable “algorithmically-driven” concrete.
