The Teaching Profession and the AI Challenge: Strategies for Symbolic Defense and Repositioning

The article focuses on the strategies that Russian university lecturers use to maintain their professional status amid the active implementation of artificial intelligence technologies, specifically large language models. The objective is to identify and reconstruct the key strategies of symbolic defense and repositioning of the higher education teaching profession in the context of Russian higher education. The research methodology is based on E. Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, analyzing the “frontstage” (public self-presentation) and the “backstage” (hidden practices). The study is comprehensive and qualitative, including content analysis of 47 public podcasts and video materials and 24 semi-structured interviews with university lecturers. The analysis shows that the boundaries between the “frontstage” and the “backstage” of the teaching profession are permeable and conditional. Public narratives are characterized by greater contrast in their descriptions of AI and more abstract reasoning. “Backstage” practices, conversely, tend to show concrete scenarios of AI use in teaching, research, and administrative work, as well as significant discrepancies in what lecturers consider “routine” versus “creative” and “substantive” cognitive work. Three main strategies for defending the profession were identified (“debunking myths” about AI, the rhetoric of labor intensification, and appealing to the value of human interaction), and three repositioning strategies (the lecturer as a mentor-psychologist, a guide to the world of AI, or a specialist with an AI assistant). These strategies of defense and repositioning can intersect in various configurations and overlap differently with lecturers’ attitudes toward AI. It is noted that in the Russian context, lecturers, unlike their foreign colleagues, rarely appeal to group solidarity for the symbolic defense of their profession.