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Debates about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in higher education often stall on an impossibly broad question: Will AI be good or bad for educational institutions? This discussion starts with a different question: What does AI mean for how society creates knowledge and what does that imply for institutions built around it?

If AI is like many widely accessible technologies that have come before, then existing institutions remain the key drivers of change. In this scenario, those institutions can largely focus on adapting to AI’s emergence; the policy question becomes how to make AI work for higher education. But if AI fundamentally reshapes knowledge architecture—how knowledge is created, transmitted, validated, and accessed—then the institutions of higher education that have long shaped that architecture face a deeper strategic reckoning. 

Either way, higher education institutions don’t have the luxury of waiting. They must shape this transition or be shaped by it. This panel, co-hosted by the Open Technology Institute and Higher Education Program, will address what that means in practice—and what it will take to ensure that students, educators, and institutions retain real agency in the age of AI.