Universities are punishing students for doing what journals like Nature and Science explicitly permit their authors to do. This isn’t confusion, it’s gatekeeping masquerading as pedagogy. And in the gap between what universities demand and what the professional academic world has already accepted, we can see the death throes of an entire model of knowledge production.
Having read several universities’ generative AI policies, my conclusion is clear: they are well-intentioned but fundamentally incoherent. They ask students to use a tool designed to generate content but only let it generate the scaffolding without influencing the building, a nearly impossible task to monitor or self-regulate.
The policies permit students to use AI for “ideation support” and to “create structure or outline,” but insist that “core ideas” and “core reasoning” must be the student’s own. This creates an invisible line. If a student uses AI to brainstorm ten potential essay angles and chooses one, is that idea theirs or the AI’s? If AI provides an outline, hasn’t it done significant analytical heavy lifting?
The university is saying: “As long as you do the assembly, it’s your house.” But most educators would argue that designing the blueprint is the most creative and critical part of the process.
What journals are already doing
Meanwhile, the professional institutions students are being trained to join have quietly resolved this confusion. This table summarises how the journals are resolving this issue:
Publisher policies on generative AI
| Publisher | Key points of policy | Disclosure requirements | Authorship rules | Implications for authors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taylor & Francis | Welcomes AI for idea generation, language support, and dissemination. Warns of risks (fabrication, bias). | Authors must disclose AI use in manuscripts. Editors/reviewers also guided. | AI tools cannot be authors; responsibility lies with humans. | Transparent but permissive: disclosure is mandatory, so authors should prepare a clear AI-use statement. |
| Elsevier | Allows AI for efficiency, readability, and language improvement. Prohibits AI from generating scientific content or conclusions. | Disclosure required if AI used in writing. Human oversight mandatory. | AI cannot be credited as author; authors retain full accountability. | Strictest stance: disclosure always required, and AI cannot generate substantive content. |
| Springer Nature | Permits AI-assisted copy editing without disclosure. Requires disclosure if AI used for substantive text generation, data analysis, or methods. | Must document AI use in methods (or equivalent). Copy-editing only does not require disclosure. | AI cannot meet authorship criteria; only humans accountable. | More permissive: minor copy-editing can be done without disclosure, but substantive use must be declared. |
| Wiley | Provides detailed guidelines for ethical AI use. Supports creativity and workflow efficiency but stresses originality and integrity. | Transparency required when AI used in manuscript preparation. | AI cannot be listed as author; human authorship must be preserved. | Balanced: disclosure required, but policy emphasizes ethical creativity rather than prohibition. |
| SAGE | Recognizes AI’s potential for idea generation, editing, and structuring. Emphasises limits: AI cannot replicate human creativity/critical thinking. | Authors must disclose AI use. Editors/reviewers guided on ethical use. | AI cannot be listed as author; responsibility remains with humans. | Similar to Taylor & Francis: disclosure is mandatory, but AI can be used for supportive tasks. |
The journals are saying: the “polish” is a technical skill that can be outsourced. What matters is the intellectual substance – the diamond – of the research.
This is a seismic shift. It validates what decolonial pedagogy has long argued: that the obsession with academic register is not about intellectual rigour but about gatekeeping a form of linguistic expression, what Pierre Bourdieu would call cultural capital.
The gatekeeping model
This confusion is not accidental. It is symptomatic of a deeper crisis in which the university can no longer coherently perform its dual function of credentialing the professional class while legitimating that process as meritocratic.
The traditional model fuses the what (idea) and the how (writing). Assessment unconsciously rewards code-fluency over intellectual originality. This systematically disadvantages anyone not already socialised into academic register: working-class students, first generation students, non-native speakers, those from non-Western educational traditions.
And here is where the class dimension becomes unavoidable: wealthier students have always had access to human “AI” – private tutors, professional editors, writing coaches. The university’s AI policy effectively punishes working-class students for accessing the free version of what wealth has always bought.
The defence of this model often claims that “writing and idea development are interconnected.” But this argument privileges a specific type of complexity, the kind that aligns with Western academic traditions. It dismisses other forms of knowledge as lesser. Bob Marley was not a great writer in the academic sense, but he demonstrated through song that he was capable of profound philosophical thought. No-one listens to Redemption Song and thinks it would be better as a peer-reviewed journal article.
The university’s insistence that writing and thinking are inseparable is not a pedagogical truth, it is epistemological imperialism that has mistaken the technology of one culture for universal human cognition.
Disobedience
The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. – Antonio Gramsci
What I am proposing (an idea-centric model that assesses intellectual substance separately from its expression in academic register) is not just an alternative assessment strategy. It is an act of epistemic disobedience.
Universities are preparing students for a world that no longer exists. They treat the achievement of “academic register” as a core learning outcome, the very “polish” that proves the “diamond” is real. Meanwhile, the journals students aspire to publish in are saying “we care about the diamond – you can use a machine to help with the polish.”
University AI policy, with all its confusions and contradictions, is a morbid symptom of this crisis. It is the institution desperately trying to maintain its gatekeeping function while the professional world it claims to prepare students for has already moved on.
The journals have accidentally revealed that the emperor has no clothes: academic register was always about exclusion, not excellence.
Universities must now choose. They can admit that “polish” was always just gatekeeping and redesign pedagogy around the substance of thought. Or they can maintain the fiction and continue punishing students (disproportionately working-class, non-native, and non-Western students) for seeing through it.
As the old world of easily policed, surface-level assessments dies, we must embrace the struggle of the new. For this new world to be born, we must stop gatekeeping altogether – and start building gateways.
Thank you Rex, this is a really exciting challenge. All feels very similar to the gradual acceptance of spell-checker!
I’m not finding any ‘ideas’ at all in the essays I’ve just marked that I suspect of being written by AI. What’s wrong with trying to teach communication skills through writing? Seriously, how is that sincere effort ‘gate-keeping’? We have committed to widening participation as an institution, why not extend to those the pleasure that learning to write well can bring? Not least, it’s clarifying impact on thought.
I think the point is very much outside of writing as a degree subject what has writing got to do with their subject. It should be the ideas, the true innovation and invention that matter. Frankly writing is just personal choice and something AI by it’s very capability to make an idea equally available in every language and every style simeltenously is frankly just better at.
Judge the ideas, that’s the important bit, writing is well just the window dressing to make the idea look pretty.
Writing IS the thinking. Intellectual work is interogated and scrutinized THROUGH writing. Students don’t think and then write. They write to think. And this is true for all degrees. It’s not just a language degree issue.
Students write to think?
You clearly haven’t leveraged a decent AI.
If you are not bouncing ideas off AI, iterating ideas through AI, navigating AI to organise your own ideas whilst drafting your thesis via AI today – in the professional world – you are obsolete.
That is simply a fact.
Cite: a guy who works in the professional world and has first hand seen many of his colleagues who failed to augment their work with AI lose their jobs.
The original secretary of the Philosophical Transactions performed many jobs, the most crucial of which was protecting originality in the form of first to publish. Printing, distributing and archiving publications was once very costly and so editorial control was a necessity. Yes, how we use language matter, but the purpose of a uniform register is not simply gatekeeping, it also about consistency in communication and control over a technical register. There is nothing to stop authors publishing without independent editorial quality control and peer review as independent technical quality control. Will the universities let academics publish AI slop? Students are… Read more »
Or are your destroying innovation by only acknowledging conformity and structure
Why does this article feel like it was mostly generated by AI? The abstract, the table…
I think your comment shows how badly you’ve missed the point…
You’re ignoring the substance because of the presentation.
This is the entire point of the article…
This article proceeds with an interesting claim but becomes muddled: A) working class and other disadvantaged students are marginalised by weaker grasp of formal academic presentation (a highly patronising premise, by the way) B) AI tools level the playing field offering services previously behind a paywall (though are themselves paywalled) C) let’s give up on academic integrity not only because it’s impossible to police, but also because it’s elitist (and therefore condemn working class intellectual ambition to cynical performance) D) let’s instead have an ‘idea-centric model’ where students develop and exercise their reasoning by… Well, not through writing themselves (‘epistemological… Read more »
Let me preface this with saying that class exclusion is still a massive issue at elite universities, as are quietly embedded plurality of racisms that flow back into the arc of colonial history. That said, I don’t think you’re being entirely fair to actual or institutions. You’re essentially saying that aesthetics are all that matter for their exclusionary function, that academic writing is intellectually vacuous performance based on a position of unearned privilege. You propose the gap could be bridged with AI, journals allow it – based on your separation of form and content – but universities are too interested… Read more »
Teaching students to write well is not just a way to exclude foreign students. It has been a goal since long before there were foreign students. Writing well is essential to communicating accurately and requires a mental effort that extends into the fine detail of the reasoning. If someone has a vague idea and lets a machine write about it then we have little confidence that what was written was what was in the mind of the human.
The author and readers alike, and not least the corner cutting academic publishers , really need to read Martin Rowson’s hilarious article in yesterday’s Guardian, and maybe try his experiments with AI for themselves.
You have articulated my underlying thoughts ver well. Why not give students access to tools that will help them? Because doing so undermines the paradigm that “writing is thinking.” Of course, there is some truth to that statement, but to demand linguistic purity/fluency shuts out students who do, in fact, have ideas. Let them use AI.
“Universities … treat the achievement of “academic register” as a core learning outcome, the very “polish” that proves the “diamond” is real.” What universities is the author talking about? In my university and also my entire profession (Writing and Rhetoric, of all disciplines, at least in the US), most professors have long stopped using the red pen; we teach genre and discourse, persuasion and engagement, research and intellectual positioning, analysis and critique, and many of us use a lot of substance to train students in communication skills. I haven’t seen scientists obsess over grammar or style or polish either; what… Read more »
This is exactly my experience too. I happen to be an academic who is a non-native speaker and no one cared about my English being perfect. I also tell my students that I don’t need that from them either.
I also want to know who’s insisting on aesthetics because I haven’t met them.
I think it’s interesting that many remain unaware that neither the university AI policies nor the journal AI policies are led by the academics.
That aside, we already see a lot of evidence that AI is killing the generation of decent work because the skills for doing so are being killed.
Also, novices and expert writers will experience very different effects and results from AI use. So, comparing AI policies for students and academics may not be the best way to explore the question at hand.
I agree that insisting on a particular level of linguistic accuracy and register can be a form of gatekeeping, but wonder which university GenAI policies the author read? Over a year ago, I scoped as many UK university proofreading policies as I could find, before updating that section of our Academic Integrity policy. Many (including my institution, now) permit the use of GenAI tools for language improvement or ‘polish’, except in cases where unassisted language production is a key learning outcome – for example, in a Modern Foreign Language assessment or pre-sessional English language course.