Higher Ed Is Still Muddling Through AI

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | October 5, 2026 | Mark McNeilly

[karpov]

It has been nearly four years since OpenAI announced ChatGPT in November of 2022, and most universities continue to muddle along with their AI efforts. Many are treating it as a tactical academic integrity issue when it really is about strategic organizational transformation. If done right, AI can fundamentally change how students learn, faculty teach and conduct research, and universities operate.

Based on our 2025 internal survey of UNC professors, 95% of our faculty agree that our students must leave Carolina ready to use AI intelligently and ethically. Overall, while 90% of college students are using AI, 58% of them believe they do not possess sufficient AI knowledge or skills. Roughly half of students say their institution bans or discourages AI use, and a little less than half say their university encourages it.

Many higher education institutions don’t have a roadmap for AI or, if they do, it’s not being implemented effectively. Having led the Provost’s AI Committee for UNC for 3 years, I will sketch one out below, based on what we have done at UNC and what I recommend doing.

The Roadmap – Getting Started

Before getting too far down the path, you need a philosophy, approach, and framework.

At UNC, our philosophy is, “AI should help you think. Not think for you.” That’s a useful shorthand for faculty, staff, and students working with AI—a quick check for whether a given use of the tool is helping you reason or replacing your reasoning.

The approach I found most useful was intentional adoption—approaching AI thoughtfully. Putting this into the context of an institution’s mission, I’d describe it as, “Performing innovative research and preparing the workforce to shape a better future through the intelligent, ethical, and focused adoption of AI.”

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TOPICS: Education
KEYWORDS: ai; college; dumbingdown

[econjack]

If used correctly, AI can be very beneficial. The important thing is to use AI ethically as a tool to improve yourself. This is shown clearly in the book Better Grades Using AI (Amazon, B0FKML7WVT). The book was written by a retired university professor with over 40 years of teaching experience.

[bigbob]

Academia didn’t invent AI thus it can’t be any good.

[Opinionated Blowhard]

At UNC, our philosophy is, “AI should help you think. Not think for you.”

That's funny. Because the philosophy at most major universities is "Think the liberal slop that we tell you to think without questioning it."

[rbg81]

Totally agree that, if used correctly, AI can be very beneficial. But that is a Big IF.

The problem is that the vast majority of students who use AI use it to do their assignments for them. Many flat out do not understand what they are handing in.

Which begs the questions:
— What are they really learning?
— What value will they offer an employer after graduation?

[Flaming Conservative]

I would think that it would be very difficult to sift the wheat from the chaff. Using the internet to research a paper is not much different than using AI to do the same, from the student’s point of view, but using AI, of course, puts everything in a neat bundle and practically writes the paper for the student, including a bibliography. How colleges are going to differentiate whether a student does one or the other is, as far as I can see, a huge difficulty. I know at the college my son works, at least one of his friends has said that to prevent students from using AI, he plans to refuse to allow students to use the internet, and confine their research to using the school’s library. But forbidding internet use is never going to work. For one thing, he’d have to believe the student’s pledge to not use the internet, and for another thing, the internet will always be more up to date than any library. It’s a Christian college, and they could extract pledges from students, but verifying their pledges would be practically impossible.