Imagine your entire faculty has just completed a mandatory First Aid certification. They can all define “aneurysm,” apply a tourniquet, and perform CPR on a dummy. They are, in a word, literate in emergency medical care.
Now, ask one of them to perform open-heart surgery.
The absurdity of that request is the exact situation facing higher education today. We are in the midst of “Peak AI Literacy.” The landscape is saturated with awareness-level initiatives:
- The 90-minute “Intro to ChatGPT” workshop hosted by the Center for Teaching and Learning.
- The faculty panel where three professors share their “thoughts and concerns” about AI.
- The keynote speaker who shows a few parlor tricks with Midjourney and declares a revolution is upon us.
These efforts aren’t useless. Like First Aid, they establish a baseline and can prevent immediate harm. They make administrators feel like they are moving the conversation from “What is AI?” to “AI is here.” But the diffusion of GenAI is unlike anything we’ve seen. Adoption is broader and faster than any major technology in modern history. Awareness is already here.
But awareness is not a strategy. And literacy is not fluency. Acknowledging a challenge is not the same as being equipped to solve it. The bigger point here is that our piecemeal efforts are developing a campus full of first-aiders with a few survival trick while the moment demands a generation of skilled surgeons.
The Glossary-and-a-Prayer Approach to Faculty Development
Let’s be honest about what most “AI Literacy” training entails. It’s a glossary of terms (LLM, generative, prompt), a list of popular tools, and a well-meaning but vague discussion about ethics and cheating. It’s a “Glossary-and-a-Prayer” approach. We give faculty a few new words and pray they can figure out the rest.
This is insufficient because it fails to address the three deep, structural gaps that exist between knowing about AI and knowing what to do with it.
1. The Pedagogical Gap: From “What is it?” to “How do I use it?”
Literacy tells a professor that their favorite take-home essay assignment is now vulnerable. Fluency empowers that professor to redesign it from the ground up.
A literate faculty member might try to “AI-proof” the old assignment by requiring it to be handwritten or making the prompt confusing. This is the First-Aider trying to stop internal bleeding with a band-aid.
A fluent faculty member asks a different set of questions: “How can I redesign this entire assessment to make the AI a part of the process, forcing the student to engage in higher-order thinking?” They might scrap the essay entirely and replace it with a multi-stage project where students must critique AI outputs, synthesize conflicting AI-generated sources, and reflect on their process. (We detail several of these models in our post, The Assignment is Dead. Long Live the Assignment.)
This is exactly what the Faculty AI Fluency Index (FAFI) describes: the difference between a Novice who is aware of the tools, an Exploring faculty member who experiments, and an Adapting faculty member who is redesigning assignments with AI as sparring partner rather than shortcut. Pedagogical imagination, not prohibition, is the hallmark of fluency. Right now, we are creating an entire faculty of AI tool-knowers (to use in case of emergency), not AI tool-users (who are skilled at doing assignment redesign & curriculum innovation).
2. The Curricular Gap: From My Course to Our Program
The conversation, when it happens, is almost always confined to the silo of a single course. But AI doesn’t just disrupt an assignment; it calls into question the value proposition of an entire degree.
Literacy is a history professor worrying about an essay on the Civil War. Fluency is that professor’s department asking, “When AI can synthesize historical documents instantly, what is the core purpose of a history degree in the 21st century? How must our curriculum evolve to focus on historical interpretation, ethical reasoning, and narrative construction—skills the AI lacks?”
Literacy is a business school adjunct showing students how to use AI to write marketing copy. Fluency is the entire business school redesigning a marketing curriculum around strategy, client management, and creative direction, reframing AI as a powerful but subordinate tool.
The Faculty AI Fluency Index (FAFI) captures this progression too. A Novice might demonstrate tool use in isolation. An Adapting faculty member begins weaving it into assignments. But only at the Fluent level do faculty lead program-level conversations that ask, “How must our degree outcomes evolve in light of AI?”
Closing the curricular gap requires a strategic, collective conversation that most universities are completely unprepared for. It requires moving from individual “acts of AI” to a coherent, program-level philosophy, which both FAFI and the AI Fluency Map seek to address.
3. The Leadership Gap: From Informed Followers to Empowered Champions
Who is leading the AI charge on your campus? Chances are, it’s a small, overworked team from the teaching center, the “online” unit, or some group in the school of education. They may or may not have been tasked with the impossible job of providing top-down guidance to thousands of faculty across dozens of disciplines.
This model is not scalable. A literacy-based approach creates a campus of informed followers who wait for guidance from the “experts.” With the unique, rapid diffusion of this innnovaiton, that’s the wrong game. There is no playbook and experts are just those experimenting like everyone else. In short: This approach is a recipe for institutional stagnation.
A fluency-based approach flips the script. It aims to cultivate a distributed network of leaders. It pulls together faculty champions, department chairs, and curriculum committee members who have moved beyond basic awareness and into deep competence. These are the people who can lead meaningful, discipline-specific conversations, pilot innovative teaching methods, and mentor their peers. But here’s the caveat. In higher education, this distributed network of leaders – the intentional brining of people together for a purpose – does require someone in leadership to act, to pull together, and sometimes to incentivize.
You cannot build a culture of innovation with a handful of designated experts. You build it by raising the capacity of the entire community (oddly enough, through intentional leadership). This is exactly what FAFI’s upper levels describe. Adapting faculty model responsible use for students. Fluent faculty mentor colleagues, lead initiatives, and help shape campus-wide policy. Literacy creates dependents; fluency fosters innovation.
Beyond Literacy: A Roadmap to Genuine Fluency
If literacy is First Aid, fluency is surgical practice. It’s deliberate, repeatable, and tied to measurable skill. This is where the Faculty AI Fluency Index (FAFI) comes in.
FAFI doesn’t just define “what faculty should know.” It creates a structured way to assess and build capacity across six domains of practice: tool awareness, prompting and task design, teaching integration, student guidance and policy, ethics and fair use, and curricular visioning. Within each domain, it charts four developmental levels — Novice, Exploring, Adapting, and Fluent — that describe the real progression faculty go through.
Instead of a glossary-and-a-prayer, FAFI offers a diagnostic and a compass. It helps individual faculty see where they stand, departments understand their collective capacity, and leaders plan professional development that’s actually responsive to reality. Paired with frameworks like TEACH and the AI Fluency Map (really the entire Navigate AI Teaching with AI Ecosystem), it creates not just awareness, but momentum. It creates a way to move from “we know AI exists” to “we are redesigning curriculum and policy with confidence.”
The choice isn’t literacy or nothing. The choice is whether we stop at first aid or equip our faculty to be the surgeons this moment demands. FAFI gives higher education the structure to make that leap.
The Choice: A Checkbox or a Compass?
The allure of “AI literacy” is that it feels like a solvable problem. Run a workshop. Check a box. Declare victory. That’s the illusion of progress.
But literacy doesn’t tell you if your faculty are stuck in Novice mode, cautiously experimenting, or if they’ve reached Fluent practice, mentoring peers and redesigning curriculum. It doesn’t show whether your institution is surviving or strategically thriving.
That’s the difference between a checkbox and a compass.
The institutions that thrive will resist the easy answer. They will use tools like FAFI to measure, develop, and lead with intention. They will recognize that AI is not an IT problem to be managed, but a pedagogical and strategic opportunity to be seized.
They will stop treating faculty like they only need First Aid and start equipping them to be the surgeons this moment demands.
The real choice isn’t literacy or nothing. It’s whether we’ll keep mistaking awareness for readiness — or take up the harder, measurable work of building true fluency.
Want to benchmark your college or campus capacity?
Explore the Faculty AI Fluency Index (FAFI), a research-grounded diagnostic designed to move faculty from Novice to Fluent in their use of AI.
