In a recent article in El Mundo, British historian Niall Ferguson advances a deliberately stark proposal for the future of higher education. He suggests that the university of tomorrow may need to be divided into two complementary spaces.
The first he calls the “cloister”: a technology-free environment inspired by medieval monasteries, where reading, writing, debate and sustained problem-solving occur without digital mediation. The second is the “spaceship”: a space where artificial intelligence is used intensively and students learn to interact fluently with advanced technologies.
The proposal is architectural, but its core is pedagogical.
Ferguson’s central insight is that asking good questions requires prior formation. Intellectual depth does not arise from immediate access to answers. It is cultivated in silence, through effort, and through the disciplined confrontation with difficulty.
The cloister, in this sense, is not a nostalgic retreat. It is a preparatory space. It recognises that judgement precedes automation.
Artificial intelligence can expand inquiry. It cannot replace the habits that make inquiry meaningful. Without prior immersion in texts, arguments and conceptual struggle, AI risks becoming not a tool of amplification but a mechanism of shortcuts.
The distinction recalls the classical idea of paideia: education as the formation of the whole person through rigorous engagement with language, logic and moral reasoning. In a culture increasingly structured by algorithmic immediacy, defending such formative spaces becomes countercultural.
The spaceship, by contrast, acknowledges reality. Students must learn to navigate and shape technological systems. Fluency in AI interaction will be indispensable, but it must rest on intellectual foundations laid elsewhere.
The deeper question concerns sequencing.
Do we expose students first to optimisation or to formation?
Do we train them to generate or to think?
Ferguson’s proposal suggests that universities must resist the temptation to collapse these stages. If everything becomes a spaceship, the cloister disappears — and with it, the conditions for meaningful questioning.
In that sense, the debate is not about technology versus tradition. It is about safeguarding the formative conditions that make technological mastery responsible rather than reactive.
The future university may indeed require both spaces.
But without the cloister, the spaceship has no pilot.