Afterword: None of this is new

08 September 2026

Arriving where the experts already stood, by a different road.

Something to consider, to close.

I am not a scholar of higher education. I have never been employed by a university, set a curriculum, or read the field’s literature front to back. Everything in the five pieces before this I reached the slow way — by hiring students, teaching them, watching what an education produced, and thinking about it until it made sense. Observation, not research.

So after I had written it, I went and checked. The field was already there, and had been for a long time.

The argument that the university’s product is the credential, not the learning, is Bryan Caplan’s, made at book length in 2018. That education is for forming a person rather than serving the market is Humboldt’s, and Newman’s, and Martha Nussbaum’s — some of it two hundred years old. That the AI age asks the university to defend the human part is, right now, a crowded field: manifestos, councils, a paper in Nature. Even the skills I arrived at — judgement, resilience, the habit of asking why — are the ones the World Economic Forum and Australia’s own regulator already name. I did not find one conclusion that someone had not reached before me, usually better.

There are two ways to take that. One is that I wasted my time reinventing wheels. The other is that the wheels are real. I take the second. When you arrive somewhere by watching, and find the people who arrived by studying already standing there, what you have in common is probably true. Two roads, arriving at the same place. That is worth more to me than being first (although I would have loved that, not a world first this time).

What is mine is small, and I don’t want to oversell it. Not the conclusions — the road to them, maybe, and one or two ways of putting it. There is a single idea I have not seen elsewhere, and I am not sure enough of it to build on: that the parts of the university most protected by law — the credential, the professional gate, for medicine and the like — are, in essence, the trade-school part, the parts a machine could most easily replace; while the part nothing can replace, the forming of a person, has no protection at all. I leave it here as a loose thread, not a claim.

So take the five pieces for what they are: not new, one outsider’s road to a place better-read people already knew, and — I still think — the right place. I could not see it and do nothing about it. This was the doing.

And maybe the biggest value in putting it out there is that an outsider came to the conclusions held by experts in the field. Maybe a sign that those experts should be listened to and taken seriously.

This post is part of The Third Nexus Series — What a university is for when the content is free.