Imagine a DVC who asks their Academic Board, Quality Committee, and Senate to address the impact of AI on the curriculum. Months later, the result is just more process: deferred reviews, voluntary CPD, and working groups.
This earnest but inadequate response isn’t a lack of ambition; it’s the “Governance Gap.”
In my latest Substack piece, I explore why our traditional academic governance is failing to meet the moment. There are three compounding systemic failures keeping institutions paralysed:
- Slow Review Cycles: Standard 4-5 year periodic reviews are structurally incompatible with AI’s rapid pace. A program approved today won’t be updated until the professional landscape it serves has been completely transformed.
- No Clear Ownership: Shared governance can cause the AI agenda to fall through the cracks. It circulates endlessly among committees, with no single body taking ownership of the curriculum’s overall response to AI.
- Compliance Over Transformation: Our oversight committees are built to assure regulatory compliance against existing standards, not to apply the strategic imagination needed for an unpredictable future.
These failures compound, producing a system that delays and dilutes transformation.
This is not a problem for quality teams or faculty committees to solve; it is exclusively a mandate for senior leadership. Only PVCs and DVCs have the authority to bypass the usual committee pacing and commission agile, transformational mechanisms that sit alongside traditional compliance structures.
If you are looking to lead this structural redesign and ensure your institution is genuinely responding to the AI era rather than merely managing it, read the full, free Substack post available here.