The rapid integration of AI tools in higher education has fundamentally affected established teaching practices, forcing educators to reevaluate and renegotiate their professional roles. While the response to AI from institutions and industries has been widely discussed, the discourse around the struggles faced by educators and around the ways in which they try to make sense of these disruptions could benefit from more exploration. This paper examines how professors frame the challenges raised by student AI use, aiming to reveal, through online community discourse, deeper tensions at the intersection of professional identity, ethics and mediatized educational practice.

This study is based on three communicating theoretical perspectives. Entman’s framing theory represents the main analytical lens, understanding framing as selecting and emphasizing aspects of perceived reality to focus on certain problem definitions, causal interpretations and moral evaluations. The mediatization of education, understood through Hjarvard’s framework and Couldry & Hepp’s elaboration of deep mediatization, clarifies how digital platforms shape the conditions under which professional discourse emerges and travels. Professional identity theory, mainly relying on Beijaard’s approach, connects the educators’ response to student AI use with their sense of professional self.

Methodologically, this study uses qualitative discourse analysis of spontaneous online professional discourse, avoiding the social desirability bias associated with interviews or surveys. Data were collected from the Reddit community r/Professors through purposeful sampling based on search visibility, selecting the five most notable threads returned by a targeted Google search, all posted between 2025 and 2026. The top ten upvoted substantial comments from each thread, defined as responses of minimum two sentences and forming a corpus of fifty comments, were analyzed in an inductive manner.

Preliminary examination reveals three dominant frames. The first is a helplessness and institutional abandonment frame, professors navigating AI challenges as isolated individuals or groups, receiving neither guidance nor support from their institutions. The second is a nostalgic resistance frame, in which educators are drawn to pre-digital teaching practices such as handwritten assignments and oral examinations, revealing deep uncertainty about evaluation in the age of AI. The third is a professional erosion and loss of trust frame, exposing a drastic decrease in students’ work, a sense of wasted professional efforts, a great psychological and emotional toll. An important finding is the lack of comments mentioning institutional support, suggesting adaptation is perceived as entirely individual, a result which could be significant for educational policy and faculty wellbeing.

This study contributes to literature concentrating on educators’ perspective on AI, providing insight into the authentic educator experience by analyzing naturally occurring online discourse within teaching communities. The findings underline an urgent need for systemic support frameworks rather than reliance on individual resources. For the broader public, the discourse reflects a general cultural negotiation about the purposes of education and the future of the teacher-student relationship. The current exploration covers a research angle which allows other lenses to be added and viewpoints to be approached across institutional and cultural contexts, the roles and realities of educators continuing to adapt to societal and technological shifts.