After the University: A Manifesto on the End of the Old Educational Contract

This manifesto records the structural crisis of the university in the age of widespread artificial intelligence deployment. The author argues that the debate on the ethics of AI in education ended before it began: once the cost of an "artificial" lecturer falls below two to three annual professorial salaries, the decision to deploy it will be taken neither by educators nor by ministries, but by those who sign the budgets. The text traces the disappearance of the diploma as a social document, the collapse of accreditation structures, the splitting of the university into two incompatible systems — mass-automated and tiny-elite — and the devaluation of intellectual labour as a market category. The central thesis: the new class boundary will run not through access to knowledge, but through the capacity to hold one's consciousness apart from the machine. This is not a call to resistance, but a stocktaking of the horizon and a positioning of professorial dignity once the old contract between the individual, the university, and the market has been broken. Keywords: philosophy of education, artificial intelligence, future of universities, intellectual labour, epistemic stratification, post-credential society, digital inequality.