What Tech Leaders Need to Know About Federal Policy and Higher Ed

Sophie White: Welcome to our live recording of EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. EDUCAUSE Shop Talk is an EDUCAUSE Review podcast where we talk about big issues in higher education technology. I'm Sophie White. I'm a content marketing and program manager here at EDUCAUSE, and I'm one of the hosts for today's discussion.

Jenay Robert: I'm Jenay Robert. I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE and I'll be your other host.

Sophie White: Great. We're so excited today to have two special guests from EDUCAUSE with us, we have Jarret Cummings and John O'Brien. John is probably one of the busiest people at this conference and we got him for forty-five minutes. So we are very excited to have both of you. We're going to be talking about federal policy technology and what it means for higher education. So I'll introduce John and Jarret and then we'll dive into it. So first off, John O'Brien serves as the president and CEO of EDUCAUSE. He speaks and writes on a variety of topics related to higher education, technology, and the crucial point at which these two passions meet throughout his career in higher ed, John has served as an academic, technology, and institutional leader. Among other past positions, John's the former president of North Hennepin Community College, a minority serving institution in his home state of Minnesota, and he serves as chair of the Board of Regents at Augsburg University, a four year university MSI in Minneapolis.

He was recently appointed to the board of the American Council on Education and the board of Achieving the Dream and organization committed to championing community colleges. So thanks so much for being with us, John. We also have Jarret Cummings. Jarret serves as senior advisor for policy and government relations at EDUCAUSE, where he oversees the association's federal policy efforts. These include issue identification and analysis, coordination with EDUCAUSE members and other organizations on developing responses, and representing member interest to other associations, federal agencies, and policymakers. This year's annual conference represents Jarret's 21st on staff. Congratulations, Jarret. Over the years he's been the program administrator for the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, a special assistant to the president and a federal policy specialist in addition to his current role. Prior to EDUCAUSE cause he worked as an IT and institutional strategic planning consultant as well as in staff roles at the University of North Carolina and California State University Systems. Thanks, Jarret.

Jarret Cummings: Thank you.

Sophie White: Great. So to kick us off today, just to frame the conversation, there is a lot that we could talk about related to federal policy and higher ed, what we're going to do today is really try to keep the conversation on what, as EDUCAUSE members, we can tell you about the role of technology in higher education. Jarret will share some of his expertise based on his work in DC and what we're seeing at the federal policy level, but just know that we don't have multiple days to talk about all of the federal policy things related to higher ed. So we're going to keep it as close to technology discussions as we can. With that caveat, I am going to start with a slightly broader question to start though. We are in October 2025 right now. We're in the middle of a government shutdown. Jarret, can you tell us a little bit about what the shutdown means for higher education and what you're seeing in your role?

Jarret Cummings: Sure. Thank you. Well, as of today, there are little glimmers that senators from both sides of the aisle are once again talking to each other. Unfortunately, they're not talking to each other about the the Affordable Care Act subsidy issue, which is actually the primary issue around the shutdown. They're talking to each other about fiscal year 2026 appropriations bills, full year appropriations bills. So the good news is that they're talking about something. The bad news is they're still not talking about what they need to talk about to reopen the government. With that, we're seeing from an institutional perspective that the effects of the shutdown are starting to build, and that's what's ultimately going to resolve the issue as the effects of the shutdown start to impact real things in the real world, we'll start to see both sides of this issue recalibrating, trying to decide where their interests and the interests of their voters lie and ultimately resolve the issue one way or the other. But at this juncture, the shutdown is impacting institutions significantly around research funding primarily, which is one of the areas that institutions have been most impacted by the disagreements in Washington over the course of this year. In this case, it's simply that there's no one there to process the drawdowns on research grants, and as that starts to build, there will be more pressure from institutions on their policy makers.

Jenay Robert: To dovetail on that, we've had kind of a chaotic policy here already. John, I'm wondering if you can comment a little bit on what you see as some of the most serious challenges happening in, we have this chaos happening now, but the last sort of year of challenging policy environment.

John O'Brien: Yeah, no comment. Yeah, I've been in meetings since 6:00 AM and I have a hot mic in front of me and we're talking about policy. So what could go wrong? Well I'll just be honest and say, I mean, it's discouraging. I mean, the endless headlines that have sort of taken the air out of us more times than we'd like, I think that is just, I mean, we have been going into this story over the last 10 years of the erosion of confidence in higher education and the belief that higher education is maybe being questioned and that on top of policy actions that are very difficult for us on top of then a shutdown. Institutions are struggling, but the other part of it is institutions have the advantage of remembering every single day why you're there and you're seeing students come and go and you're seeing the students' families, they're working to change their lives and to better their communities.

And I think so I think it's both discouraging, but I think it's also leading toward, I mean, I think in the end we might some distant time from now say that really turns some things into focus. I think maybe we'll have a resurgence of why are we doing what we're doing and how we're changing lives and because we're going to have to figure out how to keep our focus on the student life-changing work we do, and on the research that literally saves and changes lives. And so I think we're seeing as IT folks, we talk about agility as sometimes we feel like we invented agility from a development standpoint, and we're seeing the need for agility in a time of not only difficulty but uncertainty. And I think actually some of what we've learned in the IT world about being every day, what are the challenges, what's changed and how can we address it? Sort of rolling up our shirt sleeves and figuring out how to get the job done. I mean, I think I am seeing a turn toward that mentality as maybe just as kind of a survival mechanism at this point. That's maybe enough for me.

Sophie White: Great. No, I think I love the hopeful message of that in spite of the chaos, and I'm a big fan of the phrase, don't let a good crisis go to waste. So maybe it's a moment for us to transform as a community and come together.

John O'Brien: Well, I did say today, today, yesterday at the general session, some of the most recent data we have about confidence in higher ed is actually positive. The Gallup Poll recent a couple months ago, six points up from the last poll and the Vanderbilt poll just a few weeks ago, showing improved confidence in the belief to, I forget the exact data, two thirds believe that college is somewhat of a great value and that education, who would've thought this was in debate, but that a degree and education is a positive social good. I mean, I think once the sort of provocative nature of that has faded, I think people are settling back in recognize, well, yeah, this is a really good thing that education is a public good and a social good. And so I think maybe that tide is also turning as well. And I think I'll just say we have more people at this conference this year. We just tracked it at 7,600, which is if you had told me six months ago, I would not have believed you. And the reason is not because everybody loves EDUCAUSE, but they do. But the reason is because people want to come together and we're doing what we do as a community under stress. We're coming together, we're sharing ideas, what's working, what's not working. And it's literally the best we are is when we work together. And so I think that is sort of where we're turning.

Jarret Cummings: May I add a point because I think John hit on something very important in talking about the shift that we're seeing in more recent public surveys. It's a truism of American politics that voters hate Congress, but they love their Congress person. There's where there is a sense of abstraction, voters tend to be more critical of institutions, but when they see something that's tied to their local experience, it changes things. And I think at least some of the erosion that we saw in the standing of higher education in public surveys over the last several years may have been part of a sense of abstraction. We're asking people about higher education in general, which brings in a variety of public criticisms of higher education in general. But they love their local community college. They love their local state university or private institution. And the current challenges, I think are bringing home to the public that these things that are happening in Washington are impacting their institution that they still appreciate and it's helping them to reframe the value of higher education overall.

Sophie White: Yeah, I think that's such an important point to think about how when we narrow the aperture and look at the local communities, we actually talked to Mark McCormack and Crista Copp about the Top 10 earlier, and they were talking about almost an honorable mention related to the Top 10 was local communities and how those are involved in institutions. So I think we're seeing that even in our research, if that's fair to say.

Jenay Robert: No. Yeah, I think so. It was a fun little, since Mark did the research behind the Top 10, he was able to talk about some of the data that didn't make it into the final report, and we forced him some of the

Sophie White: Disclose it.

Jenay Robert: Oh, yeah. But yeah, that was a really fun little aspect to get from him and really heartening, I think, and positive. Yeah.

Sophie White: I think so too. So another question, as we've been thinking about what's in the news related to higher education, this Nine Universities Compact keeps coming up. So essentially in which universities can follow a certain prescribed list that is put out by the current administration in exchange for preferential funding. Can you talk a little bit about where we are with that university compact and what the implications for higher ed might be?

John O'Brien: I'm so glad you're looking at Jarret right now.

Sophie White: I am. But we might

Jarret Cummings: Are you sure?

John O'Brien: Yes.

Jarret Cummings: Okay. Well, and technically it, it's not nine, it's twelve because shortly after the nine, three other institutions were given the opportunity to be early feedback providers and or signers, Arizona State, Washington University of St. Louis. Oh, and I'm going to blank on the last one. I was almost there. It was so close. I want to say University of Kansas. Think it was the University of Kansas. We'll save that for the trivia contest later. See if I got it right. And to be fair, I am not going to attempt to list all of the other institutions because no doubt I would miss somebody. But it's an interesting situation in which I would, by my analysis, your mileage may vary, but roughly half of that twelve have said simply no, we're not signing this. And another handful have said, well, we're not signing this right now, but we want to provide feedback.

We're engaged in conversation. They didn't necessarily close the door, but they haven't signed.

John O'Brien: Was there a deadline?

Jarret Cummings: Well, it is not unusual for policy deadlines to have goalposts, that kind of slide. So initially when this was presented, well, to be fair, in the text itself, the ultimate signing deadline was supposed to be November 21st. But the administration heavily implied that its feedback deadline of October 20th was a deadline of sorts. And then when that deadline wasn't met, it's like, oh, well no, we always said November 21st was the signing deadline. So this is still an ongoing process. And in the midst of this, the administration, well, the president on his Truth Social account opened the ability to sign to any college or university in the country. And so we have, as I said, about six that have said, no, we're not signing. We have about four more that are somewhere in that we're not signing this document on which we are providing feedback, but we're not necessarily taking ourselves completely out of the discussion.

And then you have the University of Texas and University of Kansas, which have made no public comment at this time one way or the other. And in the meantime, because of the president's open invitation, you've had Grand Canyon University and New College of Florida say that they're interested in signing. But what that means at this juncture, whether there's actually going to be some sort of signing process as with the compact, generally, the process around how this is supposed to ultimately bring in institutions and how the benefits of it are supposed to be to accrue to institutions is all very confusing as compared to the requirements which are much, much more specific.

John O'Brien: Yeah, the five-year tuition freeze, for example, would be a tough pill for a lot of institutions to swallow, I think.

Jarret Cummings: Exactly. In fact, I appreciate John raising that because I think what's flown under the radar a bit in terms of why at least some institutions that might be feeling some pressure from their states to consider the compact and have either not responded or in some process of not signing the financial implications of the compact haven't really, I think been fully unpacked such that people have really processed them. But in addition to accepting a five-year tuition freeze, there's also a provision that would require institutions to refund the tuition of any student who doesn't complete their first semester.

In addition, you have the proposed 15 percent cap on the portion of your student population that can be international, which that actually from statistical analysis isn't a major problem for a large number of institutions. But within that is the further provision that no more than 5 percent of your student body could come from any single country, which would be a huge problem for a lot of institutions given that Chinese and Indian students are the predominant international student population in the United States. So you put all of those things together and what the implications are for institutional finances seems to turn pretty negative pretty quickly. And thus, my speculation is that in states where you saw some legislators initially rush out saying, our institutions should this compact, we want them to sign this compact as analysis of what the compact would require, caught up with them, particularly at the state legislative level, if that money evaporates because of those provisions, is the state going to make that revenue up? And if so, how is the state going to make that revenue up? That puts a certain pause on consideration, I think, of this document.

John O'Brien: Yeah. And so there's deep concerns about that, that part. And then the general fuzziness of the benefits haven't exactly been articulated. It's worth mentioning that one of the ways we weigh in on policy matters several different ways. Jarret is key to that. And when there's proposed rulemaking, we oftentimes will provide comments. We will sometimes participate with ACE, the Presidential Association to put together statements on topics of importance to our members. By and large, those are technology related. But we did recently sign on to a statement, I guess a letter from ACE raising concerns about the compact and what it would mean for higher education and several of the things that Jarret mentioned. And so EDUCAUSE was one of, I think 28 associations, higher ed associations that signed on to that to express concerns.

Jarret Cummings: And I think the statement really focused on many of the themes you raised earlier in terms of the values and principles of the academy, the importance of preserving freedom of speech, academic freedom, and I think also leaving the door open for higher education as a community to work with the administration to address problems in higher education and constructive fashion. So it wasn't remotely all negative. It was basically saying, given the context of what these proposals would require, it's extremely difficult to see higher education continuing to function as higher education if institutions accept this compact as written. But the community as always, remains open to trying to work with our federal representatives on ways to advance our shared concerns about student access, affordability, and so forth.

Jenay Robert: Well, we could take a bit of a turn to think about cybersecurity. It's always one of the hottest topics, and 2025 is no different. What's going on in policy related to cybersecurity?

Jarret Cummings: Well, it's very interesting, the critical, excuse me, Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act regulations were supposed

John O'Brien: CIRCIA.

Jarret Cummings: Exactly.

John O'Brien: I'll be the acronym translator.

Jarret Cummings: It's a nice juxtaposition. Usually I have to do that. So this is great. I appreciate it. But that was legislation that was passed a few years ago to establish a cyber incident reporting requirements for the critical infrastructure sectors, which historically would not have been an issue for higher education because higher education writ large was not considered a critical infrastructure sector. There was actually an executive order that defined initially what those sectors are, and the Department of Homeland Security and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA built their processes and requirements around those critical infrastructure sectors. However, with the development of this legislation, the Biden administration's CISA was charged with producing the regulations to implement this act. And their proposed rule would suddenly reclassify higher education institutions in general as critical infrastructure entities that would therefore have to comply with the eventual cyber incident reporting regulations at the federal level. Now, the basis on which they were advancing this position from our perspective was extremely thin. And we shared that with them in our public comments. We reiterated it with the current administration's leadership of CISA based upon executive orders that the administration has put forward, which we think similarly illustrate the points that we tried to make in our comments.

So it's a very mixed bag at this juncture. However, the current administration was not able to meet the statutory deadline for producing those regulations, which was early October of this year. And so in the current unified federal regulatory agenda, say that five times real fast, they instead said, well, we are now predicting, projecting, estimating, use whatever word you like that the regulations will be released in May of next year. However, during the last several months, CISA has experienced roughly a 30 percent decline in its staffing. Most of its career senior administration ranks have been vacated, and the agency still doesn't have a Senate-confirmed director. So that combination of effects makes one wonder whether or not May 2026 is a reasonable or likely a target that they're going to be,

John O'Brien: And the shutdown slow any of that as well?

Jarret Cummings: Absolutely. Yep. There right now is a CISA, like most agencies, only a handful relative, handful of staff are on board to just keep the basic functions of the agency going. And so that just further adds to the delay. Unfortunately, that means, well, I guess the good news is the longer it's delayed, the longer it is until we have to find out whether or not higher education is still going to be pulled into this. The downside is we still don't know if higher education is going to be pulled into this and what that means for us.

Sophie White: That's helpful. So the advice right now is kind of wait and see as we understand what the government will do as a result of this, or do you have any advice for schools at this point? No.

Jarret Cummings: There's literally no way to know.

Sophie White: Okay. Fair enough. That's helpful. John, can you talk a little bit about EDUCAUSE and some of the cybersecurity work we are doing to schools in this time?

Jarret Cummings: Yeah. Meanwhile, the rulemaking and the regulatory agenda and the legislative agenda does what it does, and we can comment on that all we want, but meanwhile, college and university cybersecurity staff understand this is a top priority. This is something keeping presidents up at night. And when we're not reading headlines about what's happening in higher ed, we're reading headlines about breaches all over the world. And so this remains a top priority. The cybersecurity and privacy community at EDUCAUSE I frequently describe as our fastest growing, although AI is giving it a run for its money, but we have so much going on. We have an active cybersecurity program. We have our cybersecurity and privacy conference, we have community groups. Those are communication platform groups that form around topics of interest. And the privacy groups and the cybersecurity groups are highly active sharing, as I said earlier, what's working and what's not working. If you went to the Top 10 presentation this morning, you saw yet again cybersecurity and privacy at the very top of the Top 10 list.

Sophie White: I thought it was printer jams.

John O'Brien: Yes. Not printer jams, although there was a close finish. I mean, at one point we used to have a webpage where you could click a year and it would show you the Top 10 graphically. And it was like they changed up and down, up and down. Cybersecurity is number one. Kim's laughing cuz she knows this quite well, that cybersecurity has just been a perennial top priority for us. And so we invest heavily. We have a person leading that initiative. We have a conference, we have tons of resources. And I would point anybody to the Horizon Report, reports related to this topic and of certainly many, many other reports that we track. Not to mention the important overlap. And I'm looking at Jenay with AI, which leads to a whole new level of concerns around data privacy and security. So this is a big priority for us in lots of resources you can use to catch up and learn more.

Jenay Robert: And we are going to talk about AI in just a minute. I do want to,

John O'Brien: You made it this far though. That's pretty,

Jenay Robert: I know. I was going to look at my watch. I didn't want to be rude. Twenty-five minutes we made it. So I don't know what the over under was or what the betting pool looked like, but I did just want to second something about this. Our cybersecurity and privacy community as a researcher, I came into EDUCAUSE really with a focus on my graduate degrees in education. I was focused on teaching and learning. I knew almost nothing about cybersecurity and privacy. And through engagement with our community have learned that cybersecurity and privacy is everybody's job. And I should have really been thinking about it in a more foundational way all along. And so, I don't know, maybe it's weird, but we like weird at EDUCAUSE so I tell people, even if you're not a cybersecurity or privacy professional, it's a great, great conference to go to and just learn and get up to speed and get connected with the folks or other things that come along with that community. So I just wanted to make that collaborative part is key, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And they have game night, you guys. It's really funny. Okay, great. But let's get to AI because that's one of my favorite topics. You and I talk about this all the time. It's one of our favorite topics to discuss. What are your latest AI related thoughts, John?

John O'Brien: Well, I would say the conference is a good example of it. We have, I think you could pretty much make this an AI conference if you wanted to, but there's so many sessions and that is expressing the focus of our community. I think we've kind of maybe moved on from the FOMO sense, fear of missing out. Oh, thank you. But now we're

Jarret Cummings: Sorry can you repeat that? I'm sorry.

John O'Brien: No, no, no. Once is all you get. And although it feels really kind of creepy for me to be sharing with you data that comes from Jenay's study, I'm going to go ahead and do it anyway. This is the 2025 AI landscape study. 77 percent of respondents said their institution has an AI strategy. Boy isn't that different from the first AI landscape study where people were still grasping for guidelines and policies. 75 percent said they have policies and guidelines that have been impacted by AI. Sixty-five percent are preparing or planning to prepare institutional data to be AI ready. I mean, we're seeing people settling in that this is not a passing fad and settling into figuring out the policies, and I'm hearing more and more lately around AI governance and figuring that out is going to be crucial. But meanwhile, I don't know. I think that's kind of almost like a standard distribution of innovation. I think I would read into this 33 percent sort of leading the pack. Most people in that have an AI strategy and then some are waiting or trailing. So it feels like that's sort of, if I were doing a state of AI, I mean I kind of wonder if that wouldn't be the contours of it. I mean, the other thing that you recognize, at least I think a lot about try to remind myself is Gartner's hype cycle lists. I mean, all the AI tools, or most of them I'll say are clumped around the peak of the hype cycle, the peak of inflated expectations and two to five years from where they are now to the sort of productivity point if they last that long. And so we do have time to figure this out, and I think institutions have an opportunity to figure out what pace and what focus area is right for them. In our very first AI summit branding, Nonnecke, I think UCLA or Berkeley, I can't,

Jenay Robert: Berkeley, although the CITRIS policy lab at Berkeley. But I think she might have gone to a different place now, but I don't

John O'Brien: Well at the time she was at Berkeley and she said something that I've never forgotten. She said campuses should figure out a direction to go with AI that's based on what their campus goals and priority and mission and values are. And I just think that is one of the smartest things. So if your campus is focused on sustainability, then focus your early AI efforts on that. And I remember her saying, you could never be wrong. Well true if you're following your mission and vision. So one of my favorite stories is Elizabethtown College. And it was an article in some newspaper, maybe it was the campus newspaper, but it showed a camera over a trash bin in a cafeteria. And it was tracking what students threw away so that it could start to use AI to analyze food waste and find ways to reduce food waste.

And I thought, now that's an AI app. Who's going to argue with that as an AI app? And if we follow what is the mission and vision and values of your institution and then focus on AI that supports that, really feels like a smart way to start, if that's sort of here at the starting point. Meanwhile, I'll just put in my plug—I hope that as colleges and universities are figuring out their AI policy, they're really focused on ethics and creating an ethical framework to protect privacy, to ensure cybersecurity is attended to avoid bias and discrimination. I hope you were there for the first day when Joy Buolamwini talked about unmasking AI and bias and discrimination opportunity. So I just really wish and hope that folks are figuring out some kind of framework as they make decisions about where to invest in AI.

Sophie White: Absolutely. I loved her whole discussion, but just the distinctions of all the great opportunities we have with the pitfalls we need to keep in mind. And speaking of those pitfalls, Jarret, I want to turn to you to talk about you are not a pitfall,

John O'Brien: Pitfall consultant.

Jarret Cummings: Yeah.

Sophie White: That was not how I meant to frame that.

John O'Brien: We'll edit that out. No, we won't, actually.

Jarret Cummings: Everybody calls me Mr. Sunshine now.

Sophie White: More federal policy doom and gloom. No, at the federal policy level, I know we're starting to see AI regulations, the reconciliation bill had an element of discussing the AI regulations as well. We're seeing states govern their restrictions or opportunities around AI. Can you talk about the federal policy landscape as it relates to AI and any state policies that we should keep in mind just as an indicator of where this space might be going?

John O'Brien: And you have three minutes. No, I made that up.

Jarret Cummings: I am using my imaginary watch. Sure. And actually, I think this is another space where we get the opportunity to highlight janae's work and the work of our research team to help inform what we're doing in terms of policy response. Because early in the Trump administration, one of the executive orders concerned AI and called for the development of a national AI action plan with the idea that that would essentially replace what the previous administration had put forward in its executive order on AI. And so the American Council on Education led a group of associations in developing a response to that RFI, where we were able to highlight the AI landscape survey research to help reinforce some of the key points, which concerned the desire by students, faculty, and staff for AI development and implementation that respects their privacy and ensures the security of their data, any data that's used in the AI process.

And then similarly, there's very strong interest among those audiences around workforce development in the case of students or professional developments in the case of faculty and staff, because everyone's hearing about AI, but they don't necessarily know what they should be doing about it in their life and their career or how to do whatever they might necessarily be interested in. So that was a big part of what we shared with the Trump administration, along with a key point in highlighting that public investment might be a dirty word in some circles or dirty term, I guess technically it's two words.

I'm really good at Scrabble. But we're clearly in a situation where small, rural and or less resourced institutions are wondering where are they going to get the resources to be able to participate in this AI revolution, bring platforms in, experiment with them, help understand how they might work at their institution. And so this is a very important role for the federal government to play. And that was another central part of the overall higher education comments to the administration around the development of its AI action plan. Unfortunately, the AI action plan really doesn't address those types of considerations. It is primarily an AI deregulation plan. The idea being that at least in the view of this administration, what the federal government can do the most to help with advancing AI in the United States is to stay out of the way. The action plan does call for various federal agencies to do various things that would advance AI development in a variety of ways.

But unfortunately, it doesn't address the fact that many of those agencies have seen significant staff losses, that they don't have a lot of, shall we say, budget dust with which to pursue new initiatives. And it doesn't really speak to how this administration would work with Congress to identify ways of funding new federal government initiatives and AI. So at the end of the day, the AI action plan really boils down to keep the federal government out of regulating AI. Meanwhile, as you mentioned with the reconciliation bill, there was a push for the federal government to try to keep states from regulating AI as well, but that provision didn't make it into the Budget Reconciliation Bill and the states have responded by embracing their role of being the laboratories of democracy. And thus far, in 2025, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, there has been AI or legislation introduced in all 50 states as well as Puerto Rico, DC, and the Virgin Islands.

I forgot DC when I did my presentation previously, so I wanted to make sure I picked that one too. Yeah, exactly. Well, I picked up the spare, and then I think even more interestingly, a hundred of those bills have become law across 38 states. So that's a tremendous amount of diversity, a tremendous amount of activity at the state level. But then I think it reinforces what you were saying, John, about the need for institutions to focus on their first principles in trying to decide how they're going to approach AI. Because with that level of diversity come many challenges in trying to decide how do I address these various provisions across all these various states at the same time knowing that there's no overarching federal standard or direction that's going to help me determine what to do. I think it's very important in that context for institutions to refocus on their values, their principles, their mission, and build an approach to AI that reflects that while allowing the institution to adapt to changing circumstances because they're certainly going to change.

John O'Brien: And meanwhile, we're part of a global community, and I'm going to keep saying until somebody tells me to stop that I think for those who believe that regulation is needed, I believe we can continue to look to Europe, the EU AI Act at literally the same weeks as the headline was that the previous administration's AI executive order was set aside. The headlines were that the EU passed an AI act. And I think we can look to Europe to lead the way on this topic. And if you remember that other acronym, GDPR, and how much time we spent figuring out how we were going to comply with GDPR, I think we potentially have a view of what could be with AI as well. While there may be some confusion in the US regulatory landscape, there will be a clear beacon of what's expected of us in the next as that takes traction and starts to be enforced. So that's worth keeping an eye on.

Jarret Cummings: Well, and I would add closer to home, although some would still say perhaps it's a foreign country, our friends in California are actively pursuing legislation related to AI that could have broad national implications given the extent to which the AI industry is based in California. So the governor of California recently signed into a law legislation that puts specific transparency requirements on leading edge or frontier AI developers to ensure that there is some public awareness and information about what they're doing to address security and privacy and other key considerations. Similarly, there is now a California law that was just signed that is intended to regulate chatbots in relation to minors. And it requires AI chatbots to acknowledge upfront that they are not people, and it requires them also to every three hours encourage minors who are using them to take a break to step away, which are modest steps, but they're beginning steps to try to address some of the concerns around minor use of AI. So we could see both internal as well as external pressures on AI regulation with the federal government being the wild card in the middle.

Jenay Robert: Great. I'd like underscore this idea that in the wild, wild west of policy around AI, institutions can find the way by coming back to their core values, their core mission. And I think that that's true within and across institutions. I think that's why the work that you all do when you come to this conference and when you sign into your community groups and all of that is so important because as Jarret was talking about just one small example, differences between institutions of different sizes. Our data in the 2025 AI landscape study are already showing this difference emerging that institutions of different sizes, though they have the same interest and excitement around AI, don't have the same experiences in terms of implementation and bringing in the talent necessary to support AI programming. So we are seeing those differences come about, and the only way that as always, we can combat this is as a community. So I just really want to really give you all a hand for the work that you're doing together when you're here.

Sophie White: Yeah, great point. Thanks so much. And yeah, I appreciate the discussion of the digital divide and what that looks like as it relates to AI too. I think that's so important as we think about the future. We don't have too much time yet, but Jarret, could you just run through maybe a quick overview of what the regulatory horizon for 2026 might look for our members? So specific things they should be keeping in mind as it relates to regulatory issues in federal policy?

Jarret Cummings: Sure. Well, as I mentioned earlier, there's the mystery of whether or not we will see CIRCIA regulations in spring of 2026, also with the recently released spring unified regulatory agenda, which was released in September. So that's actually, strangely, fairly normal. There is a proposed long-term action around having another rulemaking regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act, title two web and mobile app accessibility regulations, where the regulatory item basically says this administration wants to see if they can find ways to address that issue while lowering the cost of compliance with the regulations. Unfortunately, that's all they say. So there's no timetable provided, there's no real content provided about what ideas they may have or be interested in exploring. But that's something that could emerge in 2026, particularly given that the current regulations will take effect for most institutions on April 24th, 2026. So that provides something of an interesting timeframe in which to consider that issue. And then finally, 2026 will be the first full year that Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification or CMMC requirements will appear over the course of the Department of Defense's contracts. Now, it's not going to be on all of them by any stretch of the imagination, but this is the first full year of implementation of that program at the contract level. And so that's going to present some interest for institutions that do defense contracts around how they meet the various requirements.

Jenay Robert: Great. Thanks so much. So I just want to get a time check. We gotta wrap it up. Should I ask one more question or should we, let's wrap it up.

Sophie White: Great. All right. To wrap it up then, can you just let us know where we can find EDUCAUSE resources related to federal policy and stay up to date on this kind of conversation?

John O'Brien: Well, if you're going to twist my arm, okay. I really don't want anybody to read my stuff, honestly. But if you are interested, we have the Policy channel and our EDUCAUSE Review online magazine, and that's where we tend to publish our more long-form articles. We also now have the policy team corner in our Connect space where you can join your peers in seeing various posts about policy issues, either IT specific or higher education in general that I and my policy team colleagues try to push out into the ether. And then finally, we do member QuickTalks at various points throughout the year. I'm looking for dates in November, so I'm just trying to decide if we're looking at before or after Thanksgiving. So I'll keep you in suspense, but that should be published soon.