This is a sample post included at launch to demonstrate the format. It is not representative of what I intend to publish here.
Most universities responded to generative artificial intelligence by asking faculty to state a position in the syllabus. The instruction looked reasonable. Faculty own their courses, the technology affects courses differently, and a blanket rule would have been wrong for somebody. Delegation looked like respect for academic judgment.
It was also the one choice that guaranteed the rules could not hold.
A student in a fifteen-credit semester now reads five policies written by five people who never spoke to each other. One prohibits the tools. One permits them for brainstorming but not drafting, a line no one has defined. One requires disclosure without saying what counts as use. One says nothing, which the student correctly reads as permission. The fifth requires the tool and grades the prompt.
There is nothing a conscientious student can do with that. The policies do not describe a coherent standard, so the student substitutes the only rule that reconciles them: do what each instructor appears to want, and do not ask questions that would force a specification. That is the appearance of compliance, which is the failure the institution was trying to prevent.
Enforcement compounds it. A course-level rule must be enforced by its author, using detection methods that do not work, against a standard no one else approved. When cases escalate, the institution finds itself adjudicating a violation of a rule it never adopted.
None of this argues for prohibition. It argues that a question of academic standards has been treated as a question of classroom management. What constitutes original work, what disclosure attaches to machine assistance, and what a degree certifies about the person holding it are not fifteen questions belonging to fifteen instructors. They are one question belonging to the faculty as a body, and shared governance exists to answer exactly that kind of question.