Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to a new academic year. I hope the summer break gave each of you a real chance to rest and reflect, because the year ahead will demand a great deal of attention and effort from all of us.

Since the emergence of the artificial intelligence revolution, the pace of change has become exponential in every field, and the future is no longer simply a linear extension of the past. Not a single field has escaped the repercussions of this transformation, and higher education has been no exception.

In July 2026, the Jacobian Conjecture was disproved with the help of AI. That same year, the first vaccine targeting coronaviruses was designed entirely by AI. In materials science, Google DeepMind's GNoME system succeeded in predicting 2.2 million new crystal structures, expanding the known database of stable materials tenfold.   Berkeley's A-Lab system runs around the clock, without human intervention, creating new materials capable of improving battery and fuel-cell performance, under the guidance of AI.

These are just a few of many examples illustrating the spectacular, growing power of AI while still in its infancy.  When a tool becomes able to compose, summarize, translate, calculate, code, and reason alongside both student and professor, it forces us to ask some fundamental questions concerning the core mission of the university and of the professor that we thought were settled decades ago:

• What should we teach?
• How should we teach it?
• What, in the first place, is a university for?

We can no longer let our raison d'être sit neglected as an assumption between the lines of our curricula. The time has come to reexamine it deeply, restate it, and build our programs on that foundation.

We are witnessing today a comprehensive reset of higher education. Every university in the advanced world and in the third world alike faces the same great challenge: how do we redefine the mission of the university?

We have launched an initiative to reform our academic programs.  I need to emphasize that we do not mean partial or cosmetic measures reduced to adding a policy line about AI use to the syllabus of every course. Our ambition is a thorough, root-and-branch reform that equips our University's graduates with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to compete in the labor market wherever they go and to help shape the University's future for decades to come.

A reform of this kind cannot be designed from the top alone. A working group with representatives from every college is currently laying the foundations on which this reform will be built , based on a detailed analysis of AI's implications and the requirements of the Outcome-Based Framework (OBF) developed by the Ministry of Higher Education.

Redesigning a course and its learning outcomes, training students in the optimal use of AI, and striking the right balance between technical skills and deep understanding constitute important academic work that will receive the recognition it deserves under the new annual evaluation system.

This is a unique moment and an opportunity to seize. I urge you all to contribute to this important endeavor.  There is no room for hesitation or delay in the reform of our programs, because the universities that succeed in accelerating reform and adapting to the changes induced by AI will lead, while the rest will be left behind. 

I wish you all a successful academic year.

 

Professor Nouar Tabet

Acting Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

Dean of the College of Sciences