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When faculty ask, 'what's the point of teaching?': GenAI as identity crisis, not skills gap

● high · 2026-08-15 · faculty-development, ai-literacy, teacher-role, generative-ai, higher-ed, teacher-ai-competency, transformative-learning, professional-identity, academic-integrity, educational-policy-ai

Synthesis: Laidlaw (2026), an autoethnographic "Reflections on Practice" piece from a regional Australian university, argues that GenAI integration in higher education is a professional identity crisis and ontological transformation, not a skills gap. Applying threshold concept theory (Meyer & Land), she shows that GenAI exhibits all five threshold characteristics (transformative, troublesome, irreversible, integrative, bounded) and that faculty anxiety, resistance, and confusion are necessary components of threshold crossing, not deficits to be corrected. She argues skills-based training fails because faculty face existential questions about purpose and relevance, and that academic developers must shift from instrumental training to identity-supporting, liminality-honoring practices.

Key Findings

  1. Skills-based training fails for GenAI. Technical training works for software adoption but not for GenAI, because faculty are not asking "how do I use this tool safely?" but "what is the point of teaching in a GenAI world? Have I been made redundant?" The gap is ontological, not technical.
  2. GenAI is a threshold concept. It exhibits all five of Meyer and Land's threshold characteristics: transformative (reconstructs assumptions about assessment validity, pedagogy, professional role), troublesome (violates beliefs about originality, human agency, and the effort–achievement relationship), irreversible (once grasped, no return to naive assumptions), integrative (connects technology, pedagogy, epistemology, assessment, identity), and bounded (creates new academic communities/hierarchies around GenAI fluency).
  3. Faculty resistance is productive, not a deficit. Anxiety, resistance, and confusion are necessary parts of liminal threshold crossing. Principled non-adoption reflecting legitimate disciplinary values should be respected, distinct from fear-based hesitation that warrants support.
  4. Identity support beats instrumental training. Academic developers should create spaces for identity questions, facilitate discipline-specific cohorts, and honor different transformation timelines — opening sessions with identity questions rather than technical demonstrations.

Implications

This article reframes Faculty Development for GenAI from a technical upskilling problem to an identity and ontological-transformation problem. It connects directly to Teacher Role (how AI changes what educators are for), AI Literacy (which must encompass the existential dimension, not just tool competence), and Teacher AI Competency. It challenges skills-first PD models (cf. GenAI Pd AI Pck Learning Gain 2026, which measures competence gains) by arguing that such gains may not address the underlying identity disruption that determines whether faculty actually integrate GenAI.

For academic developers and institutional policy, the article argues that governance frameworks and assessment-reform efforts can lapse into an "enforcement illusion" (Corbin et al., 2025) — communicating rules rather than supporting transformation. This connects to Academic Integrity and Assessment reform debates in the wiki, and to the broader question of whether AI integration is treated as compliance or as professional transformation.

Connected Concepts

Connected Articles

Citation

Laidlaw, P. (2026). When faculty ask, "what's the point of teaching?": GenAI as identity crisis, not skills gap. International Journal for Academic Development. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2026.2680432