The arrival of powerful AI systems in higher education has triggered a familiar cycle of excitement and anxiety. Students can now generate essays, solve problem sets, write code, and even summarise entire bodies of literature in minutes. Predictably, concerns about plagiarism, assessment integrity, declining efforts, and even the value of education have followed. But this framing misses the deeper point. AI does not fundamentally threaten higher education. Rather, it exposes a more uncomfortable truth: Much of what we have been measuring and rewarding in education was never central to it. At its core, higher education has never been about producing answers or imparting skills necessary for jobs. It has been about cultivating judgement — about learning how to reason, how to justify claims, how to recognise the limits of one’s knowledge, and how to decide what can be trusted.…