IGWEBUIKE: African Journal of Arts and Humanities

Before asking how Nigerian universities should respond to artificial intelligence (AI), it is worth asking a more basic question: what is a university actually for? This article argues that the university has never been simply a place for transferring information from one generation to the next, but has always aimed at the formation of minds capable of independent judgement, the pursuit of truth through disciplined inquiry, and the development of persons who can contribute responsibly to society. Drawing on philosophical accounts of higher education and empirical research on cognitive offloading, the article traces how generative AI unsettles this traditional mission through five distinct challenges: the reliability of assessment, the erosion of productive intellectual struggle, the risk of a hollowed-out education, the reframing of creativity, and the thinning of academic mentorship. The article reads these challenges theologically through Ecclesiastes 4:9–12, on the strength of collaborative rather than solitary effort, and Proverbs 1:7, on the fear of the Lord as the beginning of knowledge, arguing that Nigerian universities require both a collaborative, coordinated institutional response and a renewed grounding of intellectual formation in a truth that precedes and exceeds fluent output. The article concludes that Nigerian universities must articulate their purposes explicitly enough to judge any specific use of AI by whether it strengthens or weakens the human capacities higher education exists to cultivate.

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