Why dismissing artificial intelligence is not critical thinking

https://universitybusiness.com/dismissing-ai-is-not-critical-thinking-its-intellectual-closure/

Publish Date: 2026-06-01 08:47:00

As a chief information officer, I have the privilege of interacting with students in many different settings, and conversations about artificial intelligence have become increasingly common.

Recently, I read several student reflections explaining why they refuse to use generative AI in their coursework. Some described it as environmentally destructive, pointing to water and energy consumption that disproportionately harms vulnerable communities.

Others called it a form of cheating, no different than passing off someone else’s work as your own. Several argued that the entire point of education is the struggle itself, and that outsourcing that struggle to a language model defeats the purpose of being in school.

A few expressed something closer to moral revulsion, framing AI not as a tool but as a threat to creativity, originality, and human dignity.

These reactions are worth paying attention to, not because they are right or wrong, but because they reveal a deeper challenge for higher education: how we help students engage critically with powerful new tools without turning learning into either compliance or avoidance.

The problem is not that students are critical of AI. Skepticism is healthy. Ethical concern is essential. In fact, those instincts are exactly what we want students to develop.

The problem arises when critique hardens into refusal; when a student decides in advance that a tool, an idea, or an emerging reality is not worth examining, not worth engaging, not even worth understanding.

That posture is not principled resistance. It is intellectual closure.

Engagement does not mean endorsement

Too often, the debate around AI in education collapses into a false binary: use it uncritically or reject it entirely. But learning has never worked that way.

We do not teach students to accept technologies as neutral or benevolent. We teach them to interrogate them; to understand tradeoffs; to ask who benefits, who bears the cost, and under what conditions value…

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