The Silent Gap: Generative AI Leadership in Higher Education

Notes from Harvard Management Development Program 2025

I spent last week at Harvard’s Management Development Program, an extraordinary gathering of 75 higher education leaders from across the US and the world. The cohort came from very different institutions - public and private, large and small, research-focused and teaching-oriented - but largely shared the same questions: how do we lead through a time of global change? How do we build institutions that are financially sustainable, educationally meaningful, and socially relevant in a turbulent world?

We discussed institutional leadership, finance, enrollment, diversity, strategy, and more. We talked about what it means to lead universities and colleges in a time of profound change.

But perhaps the most striking thing for me was that during the entire week, we barely talked about generative AI.

To be fair, there was a single group lunch on generative AI for those particularly interested in the topic - we were eight people around the table - but otherwise, generative AI was largely absent from the conversations throughout the week.

Isn’t that just astonishing?

The Conversation That Wasn’t Happening

The formal conversation about generative AI was largely missing, but not because of a lack of relevance or importance. In one-on-one water cooler conversations, almost everyone I spoke to was struggling to make sense of generative AI and its implications for higher education leadership. I did not talk to a single person who was disinterested or complacent, but uncertainty and competing priorities were revolving themes. Generative AI is moving fast, and its institutional implications are hard to grasp and balance with other institutional objectives.

These are all perfectly understandable and legitimate reactions. But if we let uncertainty breed inaction, we risk losing valuable strategic ground.

While many campus conversations about AI have focused on teaching and assessment, generative AI has already become a force that will reshape the deeper structures of higher education. Generative AI is not primarily an academic integrity issue or an IT issue. It is a topic that touches deeply on trust between faculty and students and the fundamentals of learning and going to college. Therefore, I would argue it is the strategic issue of this decade for many institutions worldwide.

Yet, in that room of 75 brilliant leaders, the relative silence around generative AI during the week was telling. Of course, some colleagues may well be working actively with these questions in their own institutions. But the relative absence of AI from the shared leadership conversation was telling. It reflected a broader pattern I see in my work across institutions, which is this: Generative AI is still treated as a peripheral concern, as something for a provost’s task force, an innovation group, or the IT office to handle. It is not yet significantly present at board discussions, on presidential agendas, or in core strategic initiatives, and in many instances, even small-scale actionable classroom experiments are still discouraged.

I am not suggesting that every leadership conversation should now revolve around generative AI. Nor do I believe that AI is the answer to every institutional challenge. But when it is entirely missing from the strategic conversation, we risk missing a critical opportunity.

Leading For Change

I believe this is a dangerous lag. I am not saying this because I think generative AI is the solution to all problems in higher education. It most certainly is not.

But when we talk about leadership and complex higher education agendas - personal and team development, transformation, mental health, financial resources and sustainable models, student success without deficit language, enrollment management, community and campus involvement - we are making things unnecessarily difficult for ourselves if we do not take generative AI seriously as a new way of moving the needle in these exceedingly difficult leadership areas.

Generative AI is not just about efficiency or personalization. Done well, it can help create more equitable pathways into higher education. And it can do so rather quickly. It can help build richer human learning experiences by freeing faculty and management time, and by enabling more adaptive support.

But this will not happen by accident. It requires leadership. And leadership starts with naming what is strategically important in order to be able to act on it.

I had a wonderful time at Harvard last week. I met so many brilliant leaders from whom I learned a great deal. But while higher education is facing an unprecedented range of complex problems, I remain surprised by how little strategic focus generative AI receives in most institutions.

I left the program more convinced than ever that higher education is filled with warm and smart people who will get this right. Once schools and colleges begin to work proactively and strategically with generative AI, I have no doubt the ball will be rolling fast.

For the sake of students, faculty, stakeholders, and society at large, I hope that moment arrives sooner rather than later.

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If you’re just getting ready to begin this movement at your institution as a leader, others have found good value in these previous posts:

→ The Synthetic Knowledge Crisis

→ The Silent Revolution: How AI is Slowly Rewiring Higher Education

→ Leadership & Generative AI: Hard-Earned Lessons That Matter