ACADEMIC scholarship has become a horse race, and universities have become horses. We often read universities announce to the world their stellar places in world university rankings. Following closely are academics who proudly post their publications to announce their achievements.

I plead guilty on this count since I also do this occasionally, but less to gloat and more to respond to those who think that I am a mere paid political hack who pretends to be a scholar.

As an insider in the academic enterprise, I stand witness to some of the inner workings of how the endeavor of teaching has become less of the number of minds taught, or how the nation is served by touching and transforming lives. It has become a business of producing articles, and the number of citations they generate. Faculty members used to be weighed by the power of their pedagogy. Now, they are valued for the numerical heaviness of their Scopus and Google H-indices which measure the n number of their articles that have been cited by at least n other articles. Scholars are no longer valued for their contribution to serving humanity and making a difference in the world, but by the affirmation they get from their peers.

In this new environment, we are transposed into a world where to be a good teacher is not enough. We now have norms in the profession where you can even plagiarize yourself. Plagiarism is supposed to be committed when you claim an idea that is not your own, and thus it is simply odd to the unfamiliar to be accused of stealing your own ideas. But in a world governed by citation rules, failing to cite yourself is considered academic malpractice.

And then there is Turnitin, this conveniently helpful artificial intelligence (AI) tool that tells you the percentage overlap with other published materials that is contained in any particular manuscript. While it is useful in detecting plagiarism, it is not intelligent enough to discriminate between similarities of ideas and with factual statements that have been repeated several times such as definitions of technical terms or descriptions of places and events. What is interesting is that it even flags your own ideas that you expressed in a piece that was uploaded in a non-academic web page, like in social media.

Since almost all journals impose a maximum percentage in another text which should overlap with any given manuscript, authors are now forced to go into verbal contortions of rephrasing, using synonyms, pluralizing and turning active sentences of their own works and expressions into passive ones, even if the ideas are the same. The thing is, when ideas of others are the ones being rephrased, Turnitin would never flag this as an overlap, and even when the original author is not cited, the algorithm will not flag this as plagiarism. Thus, it is no longer the stealing of ideas that matter, but using the exact words to present them. We now witness evidence of the gradual mechanization of scholarship.

The race for supremacy in university rankings is largely determined by publication citations. Thus, rules on promotion, tenure and hiring no longer rest mainly on pedagogical skills, but on the capability of academics to produce research articles in peer-reviewed and indexed publications that generate citations and high H-indices. This is enabled by an ethos where performance of universities is no longer measured in terms of their impacts to humanity, but on their research citations and grants, the number of international students and faculty they have, and the subjective manner they are perceived not by society at large, but by their peers in the academic industry. Indeed, academia has become an industry where brands compete, and where products are rated and ranked.

There is an enormous risk being faced by this academic culture, and this is emanating from the structural outcome of a kind of scholarship that defines value according to peer review and citations, and not in terms of the actual impact on society. Universities now exist as large echo chambers, and academics like me are now forced to validate our work with one another, in a form of cluster or circular self-gratification. Meanwhile, we are unable to communicate properly with the general public, and we fail to connect with them. We tell our stories in academic jargon, and in journals read and conferences attended by people like us, venues that are inaccessible to the people whose lives we want to touch, transform and serve.

The risk to traditional academic culture is amplified with the increasing accessibility of AI now descending into everyday people’s lives, promising instant knowledge to anyone who asks. Unlike Google where you need to input keywords, and you will be given a list of websites to open, read and navigate, chat algorithms like ChatGPT respond more directly to questions, and generate ready answers and perform tasks that you command them to do. This ranges from writing a term paper, to solving a mathematical problem, to writing a poem, to designing a dress or a building. They even have the capacity to invent new recipes for some imaginary cuisine.

The system is not yet perfect. But there is no doubt that the limits of AI will continue to be pushed by creators to achieve a level that would be in a position to threaten pedigreed academics. AI will revolutionize the teaching-learning process and will decouple it from formal degree-granting institutions with their tenured faculties and academic departments. And the edge of AI is that it communicates directly to people, and would inhabit the world of social media and new communication platforms.

If academics continue to communicate in journal articles and conferences, and be more concerned with H-indices, then AI will soon displace us from our ivory perches. We cannot fight back by burying our heads in the sand. We need to imagine academia beyond citations and academic rankings, and begin talking directly more to people. We have to begin measuring impacts not on the basis of citations, but on actual people’s lives.