In summary, we find that the current contraction and further stratification of higher education across the world evolves in tandem with the inexorable proliferation of AI tools in universities. Under the pretence of technological saviourism, the mobilisation of AI as compensation for the collateral damage of systemic job and funding cuts occurs not as a tonic for mass higher education or defibrillation for research.
Instead, it confirms the exploitation (and what will surely be the exhaustion) of higher education by techno-oligarchs and its volte-face to a playground of social elites. In the long view, the contribution of AI may be far less to the recovery than to escalated jeopardy of higher education as a sector struggling to defend its value as a public good.