Much of the contemporary conversation about higher education has become heavily focused on the moral economy of artificial intelligence. Universities are rewriting assessment policies, introducing AI detection systems, issuing guidance on acceptable and unacceptable uses of generative AI, and worrying – quite understandably – about plagiarism, academic misconduct and the erosion of independent learning. These are certainly important concerns. Yet, in our intense preoccupation with AI, something more fundamental may be slipping from view: the ethics of studentship itself.
Being a responsible student has never been reducible to knowing the extent to which plagiarism is wrong, or to understanding when one is allowed to use ChatGPT and cognate tools. Academic integrity is certainly part of studentship, but it is only one component of a much broader ethical relationship to learning, to peers, to teachers and to knowledge itself. Over the last couple of years, I have been observing how, increasingly, universities seem to be abandoning the project of cultivating this broader ethical disposition.
Among pedagogists, it is quite a common belief that especially before the Covid-19 pandemic (Warnes et al., 2025), there was a more explicit understanding that becoming a student also meant learning how to inhabit an intellectual community. Students were expected not merely to acquire knowledge, but to develop certain dispositions, namely, intellectual curiosity, honesty, responsibility, humility, reciprocity and the ability to disagree constructively. They were expected to understand that education is largely relational. One learns with as well as from others, and one’s conduct can affect the learning environment of everyone else.
Without the intention of romanticising our academic past, where such values were often explicit but still aspirational, I find these elementary principles totally absent from today’s institutional conversations about student experience. The current emphasis on student satisfaction did not emerge overnight. Decades ago, student feedback was introduced as a progressive reform, made for learners to finally have their say within academic institutions and increase accountability and participation overall. What has changed is the framework in which that feedback presently operates. As higher education became progressively marketised (e.g., let’s think of the credit-debit logic that underlies the student’s pathway to completion), student feedback shifted from being an important factor of a collective and relational educational project to becoming “evidence” in the provider-consumer transaction (Naidoo and Whitty, 2013).
In this vein, I still firmly believe that students should be able to question marks, seek clarification and appeal decisions where appropriate. This has always been a structural – and welcomed – characteristic of the anglophone universities I have worked in. However, somewhere along the way, we have not worked enough on conveying to the students the ethos according to which the quality of teaching should not be judged primarily through the marks received. A disappointing grade nowadays is very likely to become evidence that the teacher has failed, rather than an opportunity for the student to reflect critically on their own work. Student evaluations can reinforce this logic, particularly when “satisfaction” – a concept inherited from the logic of the market – becomes a proxy for educational quality. The wider literature on the “student-as-consumer” has long identified this shift in the relationship between students, teachers and institutions (Naidoo and Whitty 2013; Bunce, Baird and Jones 2017).
This creates a peculiar inversion of responsibility. In the time of austerity, teachers are increasingly required to account for their performance, demonstrate their effectiveness, document their feedback and satisfy institutional metrics. At the same time, students can be encouraged to understand themselves principally as consumers of an educational service. The lecturer becomes accountable to the student, while the student is reminded that they, too, have responsibilities towards the educational community mostly when it is about plagiarism and AI related behaviours. This tension is not new: scholars working on the marketisation of anglophone higher education have shown how the “consumer model” can reshape students’ expectations while simultaneously altering the responsibilities attributed to institutions and learners (Morrison 2017).
This dynamic is especially tangible in group assessments. Learning how to work collectively is not an incidental skill that universities should outsource to the labour market at a later stage of life. It is part of education itself. Students will inevitably encounter colleagues who think differently, work differently, communicate differently and contribute unevenly. Learning to negotiate such human differences collegially is a fundamental form of intellectual and social education, which the academic system seems to abdicate nowadays. Collaboration requires responsibility. Being a good member of a group means showing up, doing your own share, communicating when difficulties arise, acknowledging other people’s contributions and accepting that collective work cannot always be organised around everyone’s convenience. Likewise, an activity such as peer-assessment should suggest that intellectual disagreement does not automatically constitute hostility and that criticism need not be interpreted as a personal attack.
These are all forms of ethical education. They cannot be detected by AI software. Indeed, our fixation on AI may be symptomatic of a wider problem. It is easier for institutions to formulate a policy about whether students can use a particular technology than to articulate what kind of people and intellectual citizens universities hope their students will become one day. It is easier to tell students not to plagiarise than to explain why intellectual honesty matters. It is easier to police misconduct than to cultivate responsibility. Recent work on generative AI and assessment has itself begun to move beyond questions of cheating and towards the cultivation of students’ evaluative judgement, that is the ability to assess the quality of their own and others’ work (Bearman et al. 2024). In other words, for students not to cheat, ethico-professional capital needs to be built first.
The responsabilization of studentship seems to be limited to the illicit use of AI, late assessment penalties, and similar forms of misconduct. At the same time, universities increasingly operate under austerity, financial pressure and relentless demands to demonstrate efficiency. As a result, academic staff are subject to growing surveillance of their performance, peer and students’ evaluations, workloads and over-structured administrative compliance. Institutions are often ready to identify individual academics’ errors, particularly when doing so demonstrates that “quality assurance” mechanisms are functioning. Yet, the same institutions adopt an increasingly lax approach to what students owe to one another and to the academic community.
Mine does not want to be an argument for making student life harsher or more punitive to better balance out the burden placed on UK-based academics, whose work is increasingly at risk. Nor is it an argument for returning to an imagined golden age of higher education. Students today face considerable financial, existential, and cultural pressures, and universities have genuine responsibilities towards them. But responsibility, at the core of the learning experience, cannot be a one-way relationship. This means forming students and staff to understand that a teacher is not a service provider whose quality is measured by the marks they award; that teamwork requires generosity and mutual accountability by definition; that academic disagreement is productive; that there should be no place for dishonesty, even when it is difficult to detect; and that education involves obligations and rights, equally.
AI has undoubtedly created one of the largest challenges about academic integrity. But perhaps the danger is that, in making AI the centre of our attention, we have forgotten a way deeper question. What kind of academic community are we trying to create? The answer cannot simply be “let’s forbid the use of ChatGPT”. It should be one in which students understand that being educated means becoming accountable to something beyond themselves: to the knowledge that will underlie their social, professional, material and moral life, to their peers, to their teachers and to collective intellectual life. If we stop believing in a form of education that cannot be but responsibly relational, perhaps the more uncomfortable question is not whether students are becoming less ethical because of AI. But rather, is it really AI generating an a priori sense of entitlement among later generations?
References
Bearman, Margaret, Joanna Tai, Phillip Dawson, David Boud, and Rola Ajjawi. 2024. “Developing Evaluative Judgement for a Time of Generative Artificial Intelligence”. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 49 (6): 893–905.
Bunce, Louise, Amy Baird, and Siân E. Jones. 2017. “The Student-as-Consumer Approach in Higher Education and Its Effects on Academic Performance”. Studies in Higher Education 42 (11): 1958–1978.
Morrison, Andrew. 2017. “The Responsibilised Consumer: Neoliberalism and English Higher Education Policy”. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 17 (3): 197–204.
Naidoo, Rajani, and Geoff Whitty. 2013. “Students as Consumers: Commodifying or Democratising Learning?” Journal of Education Policy / The International Journal of Higher Education Research.