Food for Thought: Do We Still Need Universities in the Age of AI?

By Dr. Beatrice Jemaiyo, Head of Academics, CUEA Gaba Campus

I was walking across CUEA Gaba Campus one Tuesday, past the hall where our Masters students were defending their theses, and I found myself thinking about something one of my old professors used to say: “Anyone can find an answer. Not everyone can ask a good question.”

That line has stayed with me for years, and it feels more relevant now than ever. These days, you can type almost anything into a phone and get an answer in seconds. Therefore, I sometimes wonder, half-jokingly, whether we even still need universities. Why sit through years of lectures, readings and late nights when an app can summarise a whole book for you in thirty seconds?

Then I sat in on part of those thesis defenses, and I remembered the answer.

What I watched wasn't students reciting facts. It was young researchers being pushed, question after question, to defend how they thought, not just what they knew. One student was asked to justify a methodology choice she'd made months earlier and had to think on her feet, right there in front of the panel. Nobody's phone could have done that for her. That kind of thinking, the kind that holds up under pressure, is built slowly, over months of frustration, false starts and rewriting. It isn't downloaded. It's earned.

I think that's really what a place like CUEA is for. Not just handing over information, but shaping how a person thinks, argues and carries themselves when they don't have all the answers yet. And for us, being a Catholic university adds another layer to that. We've never treated faith and rigorous scholarship as being in tension. If anything, taking a question seriously enough to study it properly is itself a kind of respect for the truth, and that's something I'd like to think our tradition understands better than most.

None of this means I'm against the new tools. I use them myself, more than I probably admit. But a tool only takes you as far as your own judgment allows, and judgment isn't something you can prompt your way into. It's built in classrooms, in office hours, in the back-and-forth with a lecturer who's willing to tell you your argument doesn't hold up yet.

As we settle into this trimester, with lecture halls filling up again and our lecturers back in front of their classes, I keep coming back to that same thought from Gaba. Our job was never only to teach a syllabus. It's to help people become the kind of thinkers who ask better questions, long after they've left our classrooms. That's not something any shortcut can replace, and honestly, I don't think we'd want it to.