Monday, June 22, 2026

The race to reimagine higher education: How Canadian universities can lead the AI transformation. - Joël Blit, University Affairs

Universities are among the most durable institutions human beings have ever created. While a scholar from the Middle Ages might have found parts of the modern campus bewildering, they would still recognize the basic form: experts at the front of rooms, students organized into courses, knowledge divided into disciplines, credentials awarded after examinations. For all the technological change around them, universities have remained remarkably stable because their core product has always depended on something difficult to capture and mechanise: expert tacit knowledge. For that same reason, they are now about to be transformed.  The real significance of artificial intelligence is not that it can write essays, summarize documents, or answer emails. It is that, for the first time in history, machines can capture tacit knowledge: the practical, experience-based know-how that experts possess but cannot fully explain. It is this tacit knowledge that has made doctors, lawyers, professors, and other experts so valuable in the current economy. Machines could not do what we ourselves could not write down. Machine learning changed that.