The Space Between Panic and Purpose

What tends not to appear anywhere in the output, though, is the question that all of it is, in a roundabout way, circling. The real question, as I understand it, is not how universities manage AI. It is what universities think they are for — and whether that question is actually being asked anywhere with any seriousness.

It surfaces at symposia, features in keynote addresses, and appears in the opening paragraphs of strategic plans. What it rarely does is stay in the room long enough to be answered, or even seriously held.

When the individual carries the institutional

A recent EDUCAUSE analysis of faculty concerns about generative AI makes for instructive reading, not because the concerns themselves are surprising, but because of what the pattern reveals (Burnside et al., 2026). Educators navigating AI in their teaching are largely doing so alone: adjusting individual courses, drafting personal policies, making judgment calls in a context where the institution has not yet made its own position clear. The ambiguity is real, and it is perhaps being absorbed at the wrong level.

There is something telling about that dynamic. When institutions cannot or do not resolve structural questions — about purpose, about what a degree is meant to produce, about the relationship between efficiency and education — those questions do not disappear. They get redistributed downward, arriving on the desks of people who have neither the mandate nor the bandwidth to resolve them. Faculty skepticism about AI, in this reading, is not primarily a technology problem. It is a symptom of institutions deferring decisions that are properly theirs to make.

Simon Biggs captured something adjacent to this recently: that the habit of waiting (for consensus, for a clearer picture, for someone else to go firstà is at least as significant a threat to universities as the disruption they are waiting on (Biggs, 2026). I think that is right, and it is worth being honest about how comfortable that waiting can feel from the inside. It can look a lot like prudence.

A more interesting version of this moment

A challenge conversation hosted at Monash earlier this month posed the question directly to a panel of educators and researchers: is higher education being brave enough? (Lazarus et al., 2026). What struck me about that framing is that it is not asking whether universities are moving fast enough. Speed is not the point. It is asking whether there is genuine willingness to sit with the harder questions — about who universities serve, what they uniquely offer, what it would mean to design around those answers rather than around inherited structures that predate this moment by decades.

Ben Williamson has suggested in a post, somewhat provocatively, that AI in education might end up neither transformative nor catastrophic: simply absorbed into routine practice while deeper structural problems remain untouched (Williamson, 2026). That is not a comfortable thought. But it is perhaps the most useful one available right now, because it names what is actually at stake in the choice between genuine institutional rethinking and the path of least resistance.

That kind of rethinking does not produce a clean action plan. It is slow, and it surfaces more tensions than it resolves, at least in the early stages. But it is also, I think, the more interesting path through this. Institutions that treat the current disruption as an invitation to clarify their purpose rather than as a threat to be weathered until things settle, are the ones more likely to come out of it with something worth having. The space between panic and purpose is not comfortable. But it is not empty either.

References and further reading:

Biggs, S. (2026, April). On inertia as a threat to universities [LinkedIn post]. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/simon-biggs-81309216_i-have-been-reading-a-lot-recently-and-i-activity-7453971024032817153-NMcD

Burnside, O., et al. (2026). Listening to skepticism: What faculty concerns about generative AI reveal. EDUCAUSE Review. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2026/4/listening-to-skepticism-what-faculty-concerns-about-generative-ai-reveal

Lazarus, M., Liu, D., & Fawns, T. (2026, April). PAAIR challenge conversation: Is higher education being brave enough? Monash Teaching Community. https://teaching-community.monash.edu/is-higher-education-being-brave-enough/

Williamson, B. (2026, April). On AI futures in education [LinkedIn post]. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-williamson-7a501b329_are-we-all-imagining-the-wrong-ai-futures-share-7453483348360065024-LiF3