The Wrong Conversation: AI, Inequality and Higher Education
I have written a new article for the University of Salford’s Centre for Research on Inclusive Society, exploring whether the current panic about artificial intelligence in universities is distracting us from a much older inequality.
I am dyslexic. Throughout much of my education, the challenge was not a lack of ideas or understanding. It was translating my thinking into the particular form academic institutions expected. I often thought in connections, patterns and several directions at once—but this was treated as a difficulty to be managed rather than a different way of thinking to be understood.
Universities are currently devoting considerable attention to preventing inappropriate uses of AI. Academic integrity matters, but we also need to ask what our assessments are genuinely designed to measure.
For some students, AI is not a way of avoiding thought. It can be a means of expressing their own thinking more clearly. Used transparently and responsibly, it may help reduce the gap between what someone understands and what they can demonstrate through conventional academic writing.
This matters particularly for dyslexic and neurodivergent students, students from non-traditional educational backgrounds, people using English as an additional language, and those managing mental health difficulties.
The answer is not to lower academic standards. It is to design authentic assessments that evaluate critical thinking, professional judgement and genuine understanding—rather than rewarding conformity to one narrow form of communication.
AI did not create inequality in higher education, but it may be making that inequality more difficult to ignore.
Read the full article on the University of Salford website:
First published by the University of Salford Centre for Research on Inclusive Society, 19 August 2026.