The Agentic Professor: Exploring GenAI-Supported Futures in Higher Education

Agentic AI may challenge the long-standing stability of universities by enabling a persistent, proactive instructional partner – the Agentic Professor (AP) – that can guide an undergraduate across years with adaptive pedagogy, cross-disciplinary synthesis, and longitudinal memory. Using a case study from a first-year interdisciplinary course, we highlight the persistent gap between the individualized support students benefit from and what faculty can provide at scale, echoing Bloom’s “2 sigma” framing of tutoring. We then examine the institutional implications of scalable, continuous AI-mediated instruction: shifts in assessment and credentialing, boundaries between delegation and governance, and the cultural resistance likely to emerge as faculty identity and notions of human uniqueness are challenged.