Faculty Focus

Once upon a time, there was this brave professor, who opened a word processor app to develop one of their most important tools in life; the syllabus. When we design courses, we are focused on sharing knowledge that will be both informational and contextual. For this we integrate objectives, activities, and for the more technical part, assessments, rubrics, and references that make up the traditional sense of learning. Time after time we have understood that this document is a syllabus.

It happened on a Wednesday—the kind of Wednesday that arrives in the middle of a grading cycle and quietly steals your personality. I had been working through a stack of papers that all needed thoughtful, individualized feedback, yet somehow required me to repeat the same five clarifications about APA formatting, thesis coherence, and the difference between analysis and summary.

After attending a summer workshop on learning strategies led by Professor Andrew Cohen, I returned to my Spanish classrooms at Northwestern University with a simple question: What would happen if my students became aware of how they learned? To explore this, I introduced an anonymous learning strategies survey that I had adapted from one I had learned during the workshop (https://tinyurl.com/2j39ka6m).

In the late 1970s, America had a collective awakening. For decades, the food industry had flourished, offering convenience and endless variety, largely in the absence of robust public health oversight. It took the official declaration of the 1977 McGovern Report to crystallize and politically amplify the long-term cost of a diet built on processed foods. The food industry’s response prioritized marketability.

My first semester as a faculty member taught me something I wish I had understood on day one: most of the stress did not come from teaching itself. It came from the absence of systems. I was making constant small decisions—how to answer student emails, when to grant an extension, what to do when a student disappeared, how to keep course materials organized, and how to protect research time when the week kept getting fragmented.

Picture this: A colleague spends Sunday night feeding her lesson outline into an AI tool, gets back a polished set of discussion questions, and walks into class feeling prepared. When a student pushes back—“I’m not sure this question even fits the reading”—she has to respond in real time, drawing on fifteen years of watching students struggle with exactly that concept. No AI gave her that. That’s the point.

He was there to learn accounting, not comment on my course design. But midway through a Zoom call in the fall of 2025, one of my online adult learners paused and started talking about my Canvas homepage, how the buttons worked, how everything connected. He had taken screenshots and sent them to a former professor at another university. He wanted to show someone what a course could look like.

In a world of instant content, the value of learning lives in how students think, apply, and transform understanding over time. The recent attention around tools like the now-offline Einstein, an AI agent capable of completing coursework on a student’s behalf, has put academic integrity at the forefront of faculty conversations. But what matters less than the tool itself and more what it represents: a new category of AI that takes can remove the student from the learning process entirely.

Historically, higher education has been at the forefront of social change, not only in the United States but also in classrooms and cultures around the world. Considering the many challenges facing American universities and colleges as we navigate higher education’s relevancy and role in society and learning, how can institutions continue to promote innovation where it matters: in the trenches, with our instructors and students?

Historically, higher education has been at the forefront of social change, not only in the United States but also in classrooms and cultures around the world. Considering