Digital Scholasticism: Academic Ritualism in the Context of Algorithmic Control

This paper presents a philosophical and pedagogical analysis of the immanent logic governing the evolution of academic control systems within the context of the digital transformation of higher education. The authors propose and substantiate a hypothesis regarding the sequential shift of three paradigms in managing intellectual labour: from product control (the era of anti-plagiarism and formal text uniqueness) to impact control (the era of scientometrics and the scholar’s digital double), and finally, to the emerging process control in the age of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). The central object of investigation is the concept of the “academic autonomy index” – an algorithmic metric designed to assess the legitimacy of a creative act through the total audit of a digital behavioural footprint (query history, metadata, patterns of interaction with AI). The study demonstrates that this evolution leads not to quality enhancement but to systemic risks: digital vulnerability and self-censorship among scholars, a community split into “optimizers” and “dissidents”, the opacity of algorithmic administration, and, prospectively, the formation of conditions under which intellectual labour becomes a source of training data for algorithmic systems. In opposition to this logic, the authors propose a strategy for defending academic sovereignty, based on principles of transparency in AI use, the revival of an oral assessment culture, a shift in pedagogical task paradigms, and the legal self-defence of the scholarly-pedagogical community. The paper is interdisciplinary in nature, located at the intersection of the philosophy of education, digital didactics, and the sociology of science.