Chapter 5The New Role of Faculty

Few questions provoke more anxiety in higher education today than the future of the professor.

Will artificial intelligence replace faculty? Will students learn primarily from intelligent systems? Will lectures disappear? Will universities eventually require fewer educators because machines can increasingly perform many of the tasks traditionally associated with teaching?

These questions dominate public discussion, yet they rest on a mistaken assumption. They assume that the central purpose of a professor is to transmit information. If that were true, universities would have become obsolete long before artificial intelligence appeared. The invention of the printing press, the widespread availability of libraries, the internet, and the countless digital resources now available to every student would each have rendered faculty unnecessary. They did not, because a professor's work has never been limited to delivering information.

Knowledge is only the beginning of education.

A university exists not simply to help students acquire facts, but to help them develop judgment. It introduces them to disciplines that teach them to think rigorously, evaluate competing ideas, construct persuasive arguments, recognize weak evidence, and approach uncertainty with intellectual humility. These habits cannot be downloaded. They emerge through sustained engagement with scholars who have devoted their lives to a field of study and who invite students into that community of inquiry.

Artificial intelligence does not diminish the importance of that work.

For much of modern higher education, professors have divided their time between two very different kinds of responsibilities. Some require uniquely human capabilities: mentoring students, leading discussions, supervising research, designing meaningful learning experiences, exercising academic judgment, and contributing original scholarship. Others, while necessary, are largely administrative or repetitive: preparing routine instructional materials, organizing content, responding to frequently asked questions, formatting assessments, documenting outcomes, or summarizing information.

These responsibilities have gradually accumulated over decades. Each new expectation has been introduced with good intentions. Faculty are asked to document learning outcomes, demonstrate assessment practices, maintain digital course sites, respond to expanding communication demands, learn new instructional technologies, meet accreditation requirements, and navigate an increasingly complex institutional environment. These responsibilities do make sense. Together, however, they consume time that might otherwise be devoted to the activities that define the academic profession.

Artificial intelligence creates an opportunity to reconsider this balance.

The question is not whether AI can perform certain academic tasks. Increasingly, it can. The more important question is what faculty should do with the time and intellectual energy that intelligent systems make available.

That question shifts the conversation away from replacement and toward renewal. Rather than asking whether professors remain necessary, we begin asking what aspects of professorial work deserve greater attention precisely because they cannot be delegated to machines.

The first of these responsibilities is mentorship.

Universities often celebrate mentoring as one of the defining characteristics of higher education, yet meaningful mentorship has always been constrained by time. A faculty member responsible for teaching, research, committee service, advising, and institutional responsibilities cannot realistically maintain deep relationships with every student. As enrollment has grown, many professors have found themselves responsible for increasingly larger classes while still attempting to provide the personal guidance that first drew them into academic life.

Artificial intelligence does not become the mentor. It creates the conditions that allow faculty to mentor more effectively. Students arrive at office hours having already worked through foundational questions with their personal learning assistants. Routine misunderstandings have often been identified before the meeting begins. Administrative questions have already been answered. The conversation therefore moves quickly beyond logistics and toward intellectual development.

Instead of explaining where an assignment can be found, a professor asks why a student reached a particular conclusion. Instead of repeating material already covered in class, they explore competing interpretations, encourage independent reasoning, or recommend new directions for inquiry. Office hours become conversations rather than troubleshooting sessions.

In many respects, this resembles the ideal that universities have always pursued. The difference is that technology now makes it possible to devote more of the professor's limited time to those interactions.

The second responsibility is design.

Teaching has never consisted merely of presenting information. Every course represents a series of deliberate decisions about what students should learn, in what sequence they should encounter ideas, which questions deserve sustained attention, and what kinds of experiences are most likely to deepen understanding. Faculty are not simply experts in subject matter. They are architects of learning.

Artificial intelligence expands the possibilities available to these educational architects. It can assist in generating examples, developing simulations, organizing instructional resources, creating multiple versions of practice activities, or adapting materials for different levels of preparation. Yet these capabilities do not eliminate the need for faculty judgment. On the contrary, they make it even more important.

Educational design requires decisions about purpose, coherence, intellectual rigor, and disciplinary values. These are not technical decisions. They are scholarly ones. Technology may offer possibilities; professors determine which of those possibilities deserve a place in the curriculum.

A third responsibility becomes increasingly important as information grows more abundant: coaching.

Excellent coaches do not perform on behalf of those they lead. They cultivate habits that enable others to perform well themselves. They observe carefully, identify weaknesses, encourage strengths, and know when to challenge, when to support, and when to step aside.

The same is true of great teachers.

Students frequently arrive believing that education consists of obtaining correct answers. Faculty understand that genuine education involves learning how to formulate better questions, tolerate ambiguity, revise assumptions, and persist through intellectual difficulty. Artificial intelligence can explain concepts repeatedly without fatigue. Faculty help students develop the resilience necessary to engage with difficult ideas long after a single course has ended.

The distinction matters because higher education is not preparing students merely for their first profession. It is preparing them for lives in which learning itself becomes a permanent responsibility. The professor therefore serves not simply as an instructor but as a coach in the practice of lifelong intellectual growth.

Research likewise enters a new phase.

Universities have long expected faculty to balance teaching with the creation of new knowledge. This expectation has produced extraordinary advances across nearly every field of human inquiry. Yet modern scholarship also requires navigating an ever-expanding body of literature, increasingly sophisticated analytical methods, complex funding requirements, interdisciplinary collaboration, and significant administrative responsibilities.

Artificial intelligence changes the mechanics of research without changing its purpose.

Researchers gain assistants capable of organizing literature, identifying patterns across large collections of publications, supporting data analysis, preparing preliminary drafts of routine documents, and managing many of the repetitive tasks associated with scholarly work. None of these activities replaces intellectual discovery. Instead, they create more space for the activities that have always distinguished great scholarship: asking significant questions, designing thoughtful investigations, interpreting evidence responsibly, and contributing original insight to the broader academic community.

If teaching becomes more relational and research becomes more exploratory, another dimension of faculty work grows in importance: community building.

Universities are communities before they are organizations. They bring together individuals from different disciplines, cultures, generations, and experiences in pursuit of shared intellectual goals. Faculty occupy a unique position within those communities. They welcome students into disciplines, model scholarly conversation, establish norms of respectful disagreement, and create environments in which ideas can be explored openly and rigorously.

These responsibilities become more valuable—not less—in an age of AI.

Students will increasingly have access to information wherever they are. What they cannot access independently is a genuine intellectual community. They cannot recreate the experience of participating in a seminar where disagreement is thoughtful rather than hostile, where evidence matters more than opinion, and where experienced scholars demonstrate what responsible inquiry looks like in practice.

That community remains one of the university's greatest contributions to society.

Artificial intelligence cannot build it. But faculty can.

Seen from this perspective, the future professor is neither diminished nor displaced. The role becomes more focused. Activities that require routine cognitive effort increasingly receive intelligent support. Activities that require wisdom, creativity, ethical judgment, scholarly leadership, and human relationships become even more central to the profession.

This shift may initially feel uncomfortable because universities have organized faculty work in much the same way for generations. Yet history reminds us that the academic profession has never been static. Professors once lectured because books were scarce. They later became researchers because society required new knowledge. They embraced digital technologies because students inhabited an increasingly connected world.

Now they are called to something different once again. Not to compete with artificial intelligence. Not to surrender authority to it. But to reclaim those dimensions of the academic vocation that have always distinguished higher education at its best.

The AI-native university asks professors to become more fully what they have always been: mentors who cultivate people, designers who shape learning, coaches who develop independent thinkers, researchers who expand human understanding, and community builders who sustain the intellectual life of the university.

Artificial intelligence may well transform many aspects of higher education.

The professor, however, remains its defining presence—not because no technology can explain ideas, but because no technology can inspire another human being to devote a lifetime to pursuing them.