The Society for Creative Anachronisms is a university student organisation dedicated to recreating and experiencing medieval life, sword fights and all. Well, let’s be more accurate in our explanation. Yes, it is a serious multinational living history organisation. Their mission involves reliving medieval European history in all its complexity. The SCA engages in equestrian, archery competitions, fencing, recreating medieval arts. The student wing was a different story.

As a student organisation at the University of Sydney back in the late 1980s, the SCA branch recreated those parts of medieval European history as deemed important by them – hence the dressing up as knights and having sword fights.

This lighthearted excursion into campus life is intended to illustrate a serious point. Can universities continue without face-to-face lectures? Australian universities are heading in that direction. Geoff Davies, scientist and writer, reports that the upcoming renovated and enlarged Adelaide University will stop face-to-face lectures from 2026.

That university, made from an amalgamation of the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia, will only be the first in an expanding effort to cease direct student attendance on campuses, and move everything online.

Binoy Kampmark, writing in his article “The Campus Life Killers: Ending Face-to-Face Lectures”, explains that the goal of university management is the Adelaide Attainment Model. This involves not only ending lectures on campus, but also cutting courses, especially in the humanities. University life, such as it is, will be reduced to a simple financial transaction.

In defence of campus life

A portfolio of experiences is accumulated through campus life. Meeting friends, making new ones, navigating the social complexities of romantic life, socialising beyond one’s own narrow circle, interacting with students from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds – you cannot put a monetary value on these experiences.

Zoom meetings (or Microsoft Teams, if you prefer) are all well and good. They are no substitute for face-to-face learning. You have questions to ask the lecturer or tutor. You interact with other students and relate shared experiences. The acquisition of knowledge is never an isolated, anti-social experience. Yes, we all know the stereotype of the lone genius, the new Einstein labouring away in solitude, and coming up with a new theory.

Before we use the ‘but Einstein was a lone genius’ located outside the university, first, go through the education system and acquire the necessary social skills for learning in a collective environment. Only then can we understand why Einstein became Einstein – and even then, the much-reviled scientific establishment worked to confirm Einstein’s theories. The allegedly sclerotic, bureaucratic university system tested and verified Einstein’s ideas.

Verification by universities is not achieved by positioning yourself as the new Einstein or Galileo. Be a lone genius if you want to, but do not allow the myth of the lone genius to distort the history of scientific discoveries.

Digital provision of education

Artificial intelligence produces artificial cleverness. The papers submitted by university students are already being created by generative AI, in a form of commercialised cheating. If more than half of the essays and projects submitted by students involve the use of AI, that devalues the worth of a university education, and produces synthetic intelligence. Universities will soon become diploma mills, with education available for a price.

Let’s remember the first part of the acronym AI – artificial, meaning synthetic, not the real product.

Let’s also not pretend that it is only the social sciences that are impacted and white-anted by AI. Scientific papers can now be generated using AI. A new machine learning AI scientist system, Sakana AI Labs announced that its system can brainstorm ideas, select from competing hypotheses, code new algorithms, and generate a research paper based on the results.

This is the end result of producing synthetic simulacra. Algorithms which mimic human writing are taking over education. We are serving the AI machine, not the other way around.

Cultivate an educational praxis, which channels inimitable human creativity into productive pursuits. Relying on AI will only increase the synthetic element in our lives, at the expense of human interaction.

Student encampments

It is not all bad news; the campus is far from dead and buried. Why do I say that? The students have found their own way to revive life on campus. No, not by drinking, or gambling, or partying – but by protesting. The Israeli assault on Gaza, ongoing since October last year, prompted student groups to set up encampments on multiple university campuses.

What was the purpose of that? To highlight the complicity of university institutions in the Israeli war machine’s criminal actions. Universities make investment decisions, and involvement in military activities is not uncommon. Universities, converted into gigantic hedge funds due to decades of neoliberalism, are heavily complicit in armaments industries which directly supply the Israeli military.

Divesting funds from universities in the armaments industry is an important socioeconomic and political issue. It demonstrates that the student groups marching for Palestine are concerned not just with their own individual lives, but are applying their education to the real world. Israeli forces in Gaza have deliberately targeted universities and schools, depriving Palestinian students of an education.

What happens to the current generation of Palestinian children who are unable to attend school, let alone university? Israel’s military campaign has demolished the educational ecosystem in Gaza. The United Nations has called Israel’s targeting of universities and schools in Gaza scholasticide – the systematic obliteration of education in Palestine.

Surely the university students must speak out about the destruction of corresponding educational establishments in Palestine? The campus is the perfect place to express outrage, and mobilise the faculty against such crimes.

Universities are more than just places to seek out profits; privatising education does not lead to improved academic outcomes. Yes, I use online resources for educating myself. No, that is not a substitute for real life university experiences. The campus is the central and collective location for learning.