What's gone, and what's gone with it

08 September 2026

When the content is free, the obvious thing goes first: the university’s oldest job, passing on knowledge, can be done outside it, faster and cheaper. Reduce a university to delivering content, or to making people job-ready, and you have built a trade school with worse economics.

A second thing has gone, more quietly. Forming a person — independent, resilient, willing to ask why — used to be part of what school, and growing up, did. In Australia, twenty years of standardised testing have pulled the other way. The research on NAPLAN describes teaching to the test and a narrowing of what gets taught; the national framework does not mention formative assessment at all. What is measured is literacy and numeracy. What is not — curiosity, judgement, the habit of asking why — gets the time left over. And with childhoods now booked solid with managed activity, there is often none left. School, and growing up in general, now rewards conformity over formation.

Two vacancies, then. The content is free, and the forming is undone. That is the opening for the university, and a real one: the students are finally adults, and the university is the last structured place where forming can still happen on purpose. It cannot do it by being more school.

So what does it form? Teaching someone to ask why, down to the root, is what we call critical thinking, and what we call research. One capacity, three names. In a world where a machine will answer anything, that capacity is the check on the machine. Two of those checks we already know: reading and numeracy, as judgement rather than as tasks. Is this summary sound? Is this number real, or a confident-sounding lie? There is a third, and it is the university’s own: method. Knowing how to use a tool correctly, and how to ask whether someone else did. That is what a literature review has always been — the scrutiny of a claim before you trust it. When the machine makes the claims, the scrutiny is the work.

Next: Part 4 — How you could build the modern university

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