What is a University?

(return to The School of Co-creation)

Unmixed Messaging

What we might recognise as a 'mainstream' university has its roots in Ancient Greece and elsewhere. It was only after the Coldstream Reports of the 1960s that British Art Schools were formally absorbed into the University system. While the two systems may appear to have coalesced at the organisational level (e.g. when ratifying grades in joint Examination Boards) their ideologies have yet to be reconciled. This is a missed opportunity for learners and society as a whole. One obvious cultural difference is how creativity is understood and applied. For example, whereas scientists traditionally tend to seek predictable ‘laws’ of Nature, artists are more likely to look for exceptions rather than norms and rules (Ljubec 2022).

The University's 'DNA'

The traditional University evolved from the mediaeval monastic culture of books. As this still remains the dominant paradigm for higher education it may be hard for many of us to imagine The University without the primacy of alphanumeric writing. Ironically, although the Latin word 'universitas' implies a fully comprehensive syllabus, the first European University (1088) was a cloistered environment designed for priests to study the written and oral arts of theology, grammar, rhetoric, logic and the law. At this time, books were revered for their rarity. It was before the advent of printing, and the need to copy texts painstakingly by hand may explain some of the idiosyncracies of scholarly writing practice that linger on in the modern classroom. Some stylistic conceits, such as consistency, comprehensiveness, detachment, explicitness and completeness, remain, even though their purpose may be inappropriate for many contexts. (c.f. Panofsky, 1968).

The Art School

Today's Art School system owes less to the book-oriented traditions and more to the mediaeval crafts guilds. Loosely speaking, scholarship was part of a 'truth-centred' and contemplative culture. By contrast, the Art School offered a more hands-on, situated and co-creative culture of being, doing and making. The hegemonic status of the book explains a long-held disdain for Art Schools as an inferior mode of education. It was therefore widely assumed that the Coldstream Reports (Ministry of Education, 1960; Department of Education and Science, 1970) insisted on granting honours degrees to art and design students on condition that a written component be included in the syllabus. Art school heads therefore began to recruit ‘complementary studies’ lecturers who were au fait with the arcane conceits of 'scholarly' writing (Raein, 2004). Ironically, the word ‘writing’ was not mentioned in the Coldstream report. So, despite assumptions to the contrary, writing has never been a mandatory component of an honours degree in art and design (Lockheart, 2018; Lockheart, 2016). This oversight reveals the lack of attention given to the Art School legacy. As Sir Ken Robinson said, we have learned nothing from the last few hundred years of University education.

• "Conformity continues to triumph over individuality. Curriculums are still arranged in tiers, with mathematics at the top and the arts at the bottom." (Robinson, 2026).

What is the Purpose of Universities?

What began as a lofty Socratic pursuit of self-awareness, altruism and moral development has descended into expedient concerns for institutional brand value, attainment targets and assessment procedures. After 1945, education in the UK was made free for all. This gave less privileged learners a greater chance to reach their full potential. Affordable tuition fees were introduced in 1998, but increased to £9K over the following decade or so. With it came a Quality Assurance culture in which concerns for accessibility and fairness risked eclipsing the idea of learning for its own sake. As students could now regard themselves as paying customers, exam grades acquired an inflated importance . Unfortunately, this is likely to create anxiety and unlikely to encourage better learning outcomes. (Chamberlin et al., 2023).

• "If the purpose of education is to score well on a test, we've lost sight of the real reason for learning."
  • (Richard Feynman)

A recent report★ predicts that, over the next 5 years, one in six 16-24 year olds are likely to become 'NEETS' (neither in training, further education or job-seeking). It attributes this partly to the way we educate young people. Some believe that universities lost touch with their primary purpose long ago (Hitz, 2019) and that the financial causes are recent.

100% Human Creativity

Until recently, most of our political leaders were products of a classical education. They were steeped in the fact-based logic of history, philosophy and in the ancient arts of rhetoric and debate. Many had been taught the dogmas of macroeconomic theory but had not acquired the creative skills to reinvent them. The system seemed viable when politics was characterised by codes of decency, ballot boxes and the rules of law. Today, however, a few authoritarian leaders and tech oligarchs are 'gaming the system' with the aid of digital toolkits. Some believe that their tools are influencing, or even contaminating the human values that underpin social relationships, how we learn, and what we mean by 'learning', 'education', 'qualifications' and 'learning'. Meanwhile, revolutions in cognitive science and digital engineering had begun to challenge traditional distinctions between 'education' and 'training'; 'knowledge' and 'information'; 'information' and 'data'. As generative AI systems became freely available to all, universities had an opportunity to reconsider their long-term purpose and to reinvent their modus operandi accordingly. Instead, they chose to embrace AI on a 'wait and see' basis. As a result they have become impotent bystanders in an arms race between the artificial simulators of learning and the gadgets designed to detect them (c.f. Wood, 2024, AI v. Ecological Wisdom).
We now know that computer-aided learning has reduced the

FURTHER READING

Hendren, Alanna. “The Reverse Flynn Effect” Developmental Disabilities Association, https://www.develop.bc.ca/the-reverse-flynn-effect
UNICEF. How is Artificial Intelligence Reshaping Early Childhood Development? October 2024, United Nations Children’s Fund, https://www.unicef.org/media/163786/file/2024-10_Blog%20ECD%20and%20AI_cw_zj_am.pdf.pdf
Kosmyna, Nataliya, et al. “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.” MIT Media Lab, 10 June 2025, https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/overview/
Dworak, Elizabeth M., William Revelle, and David M. Condon. “Looking for Flynn Effects in a Recent Online U.S. Adult Sample: Examining Shifts within the SAPA Project.” Intelligence, vol. 98, May–June 2023, article 101734. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2023.101734
OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The State of Learning and Equity in Education. OECD Publishing, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1787/53f23881-en
World Economic Forum (1). The Future of Jobs Report 2025. World Economic Forum, 2025, https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_Report_2025.pdf
KPMG Canada. “Students Using Gen AI Confess They Are Not Learning...” KPMG Canada, 21 Oct. 2024, https://kpmg.com/ca/en/home/media/press-releases/2024/10/students-using-gen-ai-say-they-are-not-learning-as-much.html
Hymel, Cory. “Are We Getting Dumber? How AI Affects Critical Thinking.” Fortune, 20 Mar. 2025, https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/ai-affects-critical-thinking/
World Economic Forum (2). “Why We Must Take Urgent Action on Youth Brain Health for the Sake of the Global Economy”, 18 Mar. 2025, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/03/youth-brain-health-crisis-global-economy/
Vlad, Val; Popa, Christina Elena. “Secular Stagnation: A Long-Run Phenomenon, Short-Run Policies. The Case of the US Economy”. Research Gate. January 2026, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/399904324_Secular_Stagnation_A_Long-Run_Phenomenon_Short-Run_Policies_The_Case_of_the_US_Economy
World Economic Forum (3). “AI will drive growth. But Only Authentic Intelligence Can Empower the World” World Economic Forum, 20 Mar. 2025, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/03/ai-authentic-intelligence/ Kosmyna, Nataliya, et al. “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.” MIT Media Lab, 10 June 2025