When the panic sets in: AI-proofing as pedagogical violence in social work education

Universities’ rushed responses to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) constitute pedagogical violence against students and educators in social work programs. Drawing on Matusov and Sullivan’s pedagogical violence framework and Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, we examine how institutional mandates to ‘AI-proof’ assessments contradict core social work values while inflicting systematic harm. AI-proofing policies impose time-limited assessments disadvantaging disabled students and those with caring responsibilities, deploy surveillance technologies that discriminate against non-native English speakers, demand unsustainable workload increases from burned-out educators, and dismantle scaffolded pedagogy aligned with how social workers learn to practise. Using collaborative autoethnography, we document our experiences across Australian universities and situate them within neoliberalism’s colonization of higher education. Neither AI detection software nor human educators can reliably distinguish AI-generated from human-written text, yet institutions continue implementing systems that produce false accusations and discriminate against marginalized students. We argue these responses serve institutional risk management rather than educational purposes, reproducing inequalities along lines of class, race, gender, disability, and colonial power. We conclude with a call for resistance, demanding social work educators reclaim professional voice in defense of pedagogically sound, socially just practice.