With 35 years of Higher Education Experience, Dr. Robert Clougherty is employed as a CIO by CampusWorks, Inc. Over the course of his career, he has served as a faculty member (tenured, full professor), Director, Dean, and Provost. He has also had his own consulting company and an app-based start-up. Over the course of his career, he has founded 2 colleges from scratch; he founded the Institute for Technological Scholarship; and served as Executive Director of the Tennessee Advanced Computing Technologies (TACT) Institute. He has published in multiple disciplines ranging from online learning and literature to chemistry and environmental science.
You wake up one morning to find a mushroom growing on your lawn. You grab a scythe from your shed to practice your golf swing on it. The next day another. Eventually, the mushrooms begin sprouting at a Fibonacci pace. Eventually, the whole lawn is overrun, you are exhausted, and you have sore arms. The danger here is that you reacted to individual entities instead of treating the environment. Welcome to the rise and embrasure of AI in Higher Education.
Across campuses, AI tools are sprouting at a similarly unsustainable rate. HR wants AI resume screeners. Admissions is piloting predictive models. Student affairs is playing with chatbots. Faculty are customizing GenAI tutors. Everyone has a mushroom, and almost no one is tending the soil. CIOs and provosts find themselves in one of two camps: overwhelmed gardeners chasing spontaneous growth or passive observers of a rapidly mutating ecosystem.
To be clear, AI isn’t the problem. The issue is unchecked proliferation without ecosystem thinking. The mushroom metaphor matters because it reminds us that governance isn’t about saying no. It’s about creating conditions for healthy, intentional growth. That’s where AI governance and ModelOps come in—not as compliance mechanisms but as tools of cultivation.
Most provosts and CIOs aren’t AI experts. Nor do they need to be. But like managing a digital infrastructure or leading an accreditation cycle, institutional leaders must understand the conditions that allow AI to thrive responsibly. Otherwise, they risk becoming reactive custodians of fragmentation instead of strategic architects of transformation.
So, what should a provost or CIO do to get out of the mushroom chase and into ecosystem stewardship?
- Acknowledge the Environment
AI is already here, much of it through shadow IT. Don’t start with enforcement. Start by inventorying what’s being used, by whom, and for what. Visibility is the first step to governance.
- Establish Participatory Governance
Skip the traditional committee. Instead, form a hybrid think tank and community of practice. AI governance must be interdisciplinary and participatory—blending academic, legal, technical, and student perspectives. This isn’t about control; it’s about alignment and strategy.
- Build Institutional Literacy
You can’t govern what you don’t understand. Offer foundational AI literacy workshops for leaders and campus stakeholders. Topics should include AI capabilities, data ethics, hallucination risks, and bias. Think of it as an AI bootcamp for decision-makers.
- Choose a Governance Framework
Use tools like RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) to clarify roles. Supplement with TRiSM (Trust, Risk, and Security Management) to assess ongoing risk. RACI helps you map decisions; TRiSM helps you monitor outcomes.
- Build ModelOps Capacity
ModelOps is the operational arm of governance. It includes:
- Model registries and version control
- Performance monitoring and bias detection
- Clear criteria for decommissioning or rollback
- CI/CD pipelines if you’re developing or fine-tuning models in-house
You don’t need to do it all at once. Start by registering and tracking existing tools. Expand from there.
- Shift from Efficiency to Augmentation
Most early use cases chase productivity. That’s fine, but the real opportunity is in intelligence augmentation and collective knowledge synthesis. Treat AI not just as a tool but as a method of inquiry and reflection. Encourage departments to pilot use cases that explore new ways of thinking, not just faster ways of working.
- Prioritize Culture Over Control
Governance depends on institutional culture. Make it human. Make it dialogic. If you have to vote, you don’t have consensus yet. Don’t aim to police behavior—aim to guide purpose.
Mushrooms aren’t inherently bad. In fact, in the right ecosystem, they’re signs of life. But when they appear unchecked, in random places, at random times, they signal imbalance. The CIO or provost who sees each tool as an isolated request will end up with sore arms and an unmanageable yard. But the leader who invests in soil health—who treats data, governance, literacy, and culture as the ecosystem—creates conditions for something far more powerful than productivity: sustainable, participatory, and institutionally aligned intelligence.