Dean's Brief 4 · Monday, September 28, 2026
How Your Campus Buys AI
The decision: Set a 30-day review path for low-risk AI tools and five contract terms you will not sign without. Procurement that takes a semester is a ban with extra steps.
What is happening
Faculty ask for a tool in September. Legal, IT security, and accessibility each review it in sequence. The answer arrives in March, after the course is over, and the faculty member has been using the free consumer version with student data the whole time. The slow path did not protect anyone. It moved the risk off the books and onto a personal account.
I serve on the CSU Academic Senate's GenAI subcommittee on privacy, security, and procurement, and this is the pattern across campuses: the problem is not that reviews are strict, it is that they are serial and have no clock. A one-page version of the fix went to a congressional office this month as baseline terms for colleges that receive federal aid. You do not need to wait for Congress.
Three moves
- Two lanes, one clock. Low-risk tools (no student records, no grades, no identifiable data) get a 30-day parallel review by IT, legal, and accessibility, with silence counting as approval. Anything touching student records goes in the full lane, with a 90-day clock and a named owner.
- Five terms, no exceptions. No training on institutional data. Deletion on request. Breach notice within 72 hours. Accessibility conformance (a current VPAT). Data stays in the United States, or wherever your system requires. If a vendor will not sign, the answer is no, however good the demo.
- Publish the list. One page with every approved tool, its lane, and what it may be used for. Faculty use what they can find. If the page is empty, they will find ChatGPT.
What to say
To IT and legal: "Review in parallel, with a clock, and tell faculty where to look." To faculty: "If it is on the list, use it. If it is not, ask, and you will have an answer in 30 days."
Monday step
Count the AI tools approved on your campus and the days the last one took. Two numbers, one slide, your next cabinet meeting.