When faculty ask, ‘what’s the point of teaching?’: GenAI as identity crisis, not skills gap

Drawing on autoethnographic analysis of navigating GenAI integration governance and faculty development at a regional Australian university, I apply threshold concept theory to faculty development. GenAI integration represents troublesome, transformative change challenging core assumptions about teaching, assessment design, and professional identity. Faculty anxiety, resistance, and confusion are necessary components of threshold crossing, not deficits requiring correction. Current skills-based approaches fail because they address technical competence while faculty face existential questions about professional relevance and educational purpose. I argue that academic developers must shift from instrumental training to identitAssociate Professor Prue Laidlaw, MEd, PhD, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and is Academic Director of Education Strategy at Charles Sturt University, a regional Australian institution. Her work bridges educational leadership and scholarship, focusing on faculty development and GenAI integration in higher education. She examines how institutional change occurs in teaching and assessment contexts. Her research encompasses teaching and learning scholarship, GenAI literacy, academic integrity, and transformative learning, with sustained commitment to equity and questioning dominant higher education narratives by supporting practices that honour liminality and recursive learning. How we support faculty transformation now, whether we reduce ontological change to technical skills acquisition or honour the messy, recursive work of professional identity reconstruction, will fundamentally shape higher education’s GenAI-integrated future.