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Abstract

How might universities redesign their governance structures to be fit for professional futures? This paper explores the growing misalignment between academic appeals frameworks and the regulatory demands of professional programs, focusing on teacher education in Ontario. Using an AI-enabled simulation inspired by The Case of the Speluncean Explorers, the study stages a deliberation among fictional justices embodying diverse legal and ethical logics, including feminist jurisprudence, Indigenous law, regulatory oversight, and institutional proceduralism. The simulation functions as a foresight tool, surfacing the frictions that arise when public trust, ethical accountability, and professional suitability are filtered through academic governance structures not built for such complexity. Drawing on policy sociology and anticipatory governance theory, the paper proposes a Policy Futures Agenda with five interdependent design principles: anchoring governance in public trust, recognizing regulatory specificity, embracing epistemic pluralism, leveraging dialogic foresight tools, and treating professional faculties as sites of policy innovation. These principles offer a roadmap for institutions seeking to move beyond compliance and toward a more integrated, anticipatory governance model for professionally regulated education.

Keywords

teacher education governance public trust accountability policy futures in professional programs AI assisted scenario methods professional program governance

Teaching, responsibility, and the limits of governance

There is a curious quietness in the way responsibility circulates in education. It is present in the steady pace of classroom life, in the rhythms of planning, teaching, and assessing. And yet, when we ask what it means to be responsible for the education of another, to be answerable not only for their learning but for the legal, ethical, and relational commitments, there is nothing quiet about the implications.

While the dominant policy discourse often frames teaching as curriculum delivery, this reductive view aligns with technocratic models of education governance rooted in new public management (Gunter, 2016). Such framings position teachers as implementers of externally defined outcomes, emphasizing compliance, standardization, and auditability (Ball, 2003; Ozga, 2000). This framing stands in stark contrast to the conception of teaching as an ethical and relational practice that requires professional judgment, responsiveness, and critical engagement (Biesta, 2010; Campbell, 2008). As Biesta et al. (2022) emphasize, public education is more than a mechanism for learning. It is a foundational institution of the common good: “education of the public, for the public and accountable to the public,” and this characterization is under threat in a context which reduces professionalism in the neoliberal discourse to inspected metrics (1216). In Ontario, Canada, despite official acknowledgment of teaching as a profession governed by ethical standards, institutional policies and university appeals frameworks often revert to proceduralist logics that privilege curriculum coverage over relational responsibility. The resulting disconnect between regulatory expectations and institutional governance structures renders faculties of education vulnerable to incoherence, caught between policy logics that treat curriculum as product and those that understand education as a profoundly ethical and situated endeavor.

Teaching entails cultivating professional judgment (Biesta, 2010) within institutional conditions that enable or thwart responsible action (Billett, 2010). Scholars have long referred to teaching a moral profession (Campbell, 2006; Forster, 2012), linking ethical standards to public trust (Van Nuland and Khandelwal, 2006). Confirming a candidate’s suitability fuses competence with character. In Ontario, for example, teacher agency forms in dialogue with complex classroom realities (Priestley et al., 2015) while honoring the Ontario Human Rights Code (Ontario, 1990) and regulatory requirements such as mandatory-reporting duties under the Child, Youth and Family Services Act (Ontario, 2017). These statutory demands are animated by the profession’s core values of care, respect, trust, and integrity (Young and Boyd, 2010).

Professional regulation formalizes those expectations. The Ontario College of Teachers Act (Ontario, 1996) grants the College exclusive authority to license educators. Its Foundations of Professional Practice (Ontario College of Teachers, 2016, nd-a), Ethical Standards (1999b), and Standards of Practice (1999a, nd-a) define the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for entry. Accreditation transfers part of that authority to faculties (Ontario College of Teachers, nd-b): deans recommend candidates for licensure and design evidence-based remediation when problems arise. This “uncoupling of professional certification from the autonomy of university credentials” (Young and Boyd, 2010, 5) shifts governance away from universities.

Policy, however, is lived in practice (Ozga, 2000). Ambiguity around professional suitability governance reflects contested jurisdiction more than rule absence; tensions echoed in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Europe (Mockler, 2011; Office of the Independent Adjudicator, 2019).

These jurisdictional tensions expose a deeper structural problem: professional education programs operate within institutions whose governance frameworks were not designed to evaluate moral or relational fitness. While regulatory bodies emphasize ethical responsibility and public trust, universities continue to rely on appeals processes oriented toward academic fairness. The result is a growing dissonance between what professional faculties are accountable for and what institutional policy can meaningfully assess.

University appeals systems are built for academic disputes, not moral judgment. Academic freedom and student-rights’ frameworks can therefore collide with legal obligations that constrain professional speech (Axelrod, 2021; Langor and Baxter, 2023). The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) acknowledges that academic freedom is bounded by professional standards and institutional responsibilities (Universities Canada, 2011). Managing these tensions, rather than asserting the primacy of one governance mode, is essential (Young and Boyd, 2010).

This paper traces these tensions as a composite teacher candidate Kenna Thompson experiences difficulty in her teacher preparation program and engages with the university appeals’ process. Kenna’s storyline incorporates the most common offenses cited in recent OCT disciplinary decisions (see, for example, Ontario College of Teachers, 2018; December, 2021; January, 2023; February, nd-c). A landmark precedent, Ross v New Brunswick School District No. 15 (Supreme Court of Canada, 1996), is woven in to demonstrate how off-duty misconduct can also undermine professional standing. Her simulated journey articulates how policies governing teacher professional suitability are enacted through competing dimensions: university procedures that prioritize centralized appeals (authoritative choice), faculty efforts to uphold professional standards (structured interaction), and the broader meaning of what counts as “suitability” in a public profession (social meaning) (Colebatch, 2006). This speculative method, grounded in both policy sociology and critical jurisprudence, allows the competing logics of university policy, professional suitability, and public accountability to be surfaced dialogically. The argument unfolds in three movements: (1) the narrative presentation of Kenna’s case and institutional response; (2) a staged judicial hearing in which simulated justices deliberate from distinct normative orientations; and (3) an analysis of what these tensions reveal about the limits of proceduralism in university governance. The paper concludes by advancing a “Policy Futures” agenda, proposing principles to guide anticipatory, relationally accountable governance in professional faculties.

Scenario-based policy foresight in the professional realm

This paper adopts a policy sociology lens (Ball, 1994, 1997) to examine how institutional policies are not neutral procedures, but discursive enactments of governance logics that often conflict with the normative demands of professional programs. To illustrate, I have employed a hybrid method using a composite case (Kenna Thompson) and AI-enabled simulation of deliberation among diverse policy voices. This simulation is an enactment of “thinking otherwise”; it acts as a collaborative governance prototype, enabling institutions to rehearse complexity and pluralism before real crises emerge (Policy Horizons Canada, 2018, 2025). It ends with a Policy Futures Agenda, focused around five key principles: (1) Reframe governance around public trust and relational responsibility; (2) Recognize the specificities of regulated programs within policy design; (3) Invite plural epistemologies into university policy deliberations; (4) Experiment with dialogic foresight tools to surface conflicting institutional logics; and (5) Recognize faculties as sites of generative policy innovation. I begin by introducing you to the case.

The Case of Kenna Thompson: A teacher Candidate’s conduct in question

Kenna Thompson, a second-year teacher candidate in the University of Ontario’s¹ Bachelor of Education program, entered her final practicum in a Grade 6 class located near a First Nations community. Four patterns of conduct raised concerns:

1. Cultural insensitivity. Kenna staged an unvetted “paper-headdress” craft to “celebrate First Nations culture,” dismissed Indigenous pupils’ objections as oversensitivity, and triggered a parent complaint.

2. Boundary violations with pupils. She counseled a vulnerable child in private, recommended a therapist without parental or school knowledge, and initiated unsolicited hugs; actions that ignored mandatory-reporting duties.

3. Unprofessional self-disclosure. Classroom anecdotes about past romantic relationships made several students uncomfortable and were logged by the supervising teacher as unprofessional and not relevant.

4. Disruptive university conduct. In a professional ethics seminar, Kenna derided peers’ accounts of racism as “politically motivated,” prompting a formal complaint.

The faculty placed Kenna on probation, drafted a remediation contract, and postponed her next practicum. Kenna appealed. Since the university’s generic undergraduate appeals framework did not distinguish professional policies from standard undergraduate academic policy, the professional faculty’s decision was overturned. A neutral university official then recommended Kenna for certification to the OCT. Procedural processes nullified professional judgment and public-safety safeguards.

Kenna’s narrative has been presented as a hypothetical but generative site of policy tensions that exist amongst the competing logics of governance policies that try to serve both undergraduate students in traditional disciplinary programs, as well as those in professional programs. Surfacing the often-overlooked assumptions embedded in university policy frameworks governing professions requires an interrogation of often competing logics. The structure that follows is designed to model a pluralized mode of reasoning that foregrounds relational accountability and anticipatory governance.

Method: Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated scenarios simulating expert judicial discourse

Inspired by Fuller’s (1949) legal thought experiment The Case of the Speluncean Explorers, I employed a simulated deliberation method to stage a jurisprudential dialogue around professional suitability. For background, the original article, published by legal philosopher Lon L. Fuller (1949) in the Harvard Law Review, presented a fictitious legal case in which a group of trapped cave explorers resort to cannibalism to survive. The judge in the case expressed personal discomfort with both the verdict (murder) and the sentence (death by hanging), setting the stage for the fictitious Supreme Court of Newgarth to hear the appeal.

The case is debated by five fictional Supreme Court Justices of Newgarth. Each delivers a distinct judicial opinion that reflects a different philosophy of legal reasoning: formalism, natural law, positivism, textualism, and pragmatism. The mandatory death sentence served as a legal and ethical burden, forcing each judge to confront the tension between legal positivism (applying the law as written) and natural law or moral reasoning (interpreting the law in light of justice, purpose, or consequences).

I was curious to learn whether we might use this approach to surface the tensions in our contemporary professional contexts in ways that could point to gaps in our application of existing policies to students in professional programs. Simulating judicial reasoning could illustrate how different governance logics might interpret the same facts, providing fertile considerations for policy makers. This simulation was created using ChatGPT (version o3), which was prompted to read and interpret two source texts: (1) The Case of Kenna Thompson, detailing the fictional but composite misconduct case of teacher candidate Kenna Thompson; and (2) Fuller’s original Speluncean article, to model the structure and discursive stance of each justice. Initial outputs were generated by uploading both texts and prompting the AI to simulate judicial reasoning through five legal-philosophical lenses: formalism, natural law, positivism, institutionalism, and pragmatism.

ChatGPT Prompt: I am going to upload two documents. The first, is the fictitious case of “Kenna Thompson,” a teacher candidate in the second year her professional program in Ontario, Canada. The second is a mentor text that I want you to use (Fuller’s 1949 article, The case of the speluncean explorers). Using the Fuller article as a model, generate a judicial debate by the five fictional justices of Newarth to argue the Kenna case provided that honours their distinct judicial perspectives.

The simulated judicial dialogue was generated and recorded verbatim, without post-editing, to preserve the integrity of the AI’s discursive modeling.

Upon reviewing the generated text, I identified critical omissions in the original five-justice configuration: the absence of decolonial, regulatory, and feminist legal perspectives. Given the context of teacher education in Canada, a largely feminized profession regulated by the Ontario College of Teachers, and one positioned centrally in responding to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada’s Calls to Action, I extended the simulation. I prompted AI to incorporate three additional perspectives: (1) an Indigenous justice drawing on relational accountability and land-based legal traditions; (2) a regulator representing the statutory obligations of the OCT; and (3) a feminist jurist drawing on Canadian feminist legal theory, with sources provided from jurisprudential commentary and academic journals (e.g., Canadian Journal of Women and the Law).

ChatGPT Prompt: As I reviewed the justice’s responses, I recognize that they are insufficient for our contemporary reality. I would like you to generate three new justices and simulate their contribution to this dialogue. (1) An Indigenous legal perspective that acknowledges our commitment to the TRC (https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525) and recognition of Indigenous legal traditions (https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/jr/rjilt-jrtja/p5.html); (2) A Regulator’s perspective given the dual accountability the profession holds with the OTC (https://www.oct.ca/public/professional-standards); and (3) a Feminist perspective given the female dominant makeup of the profession. See Boyd and Sheehy’s article attached.

The curated prompts included hyperlinks to relevant codes, standards, and relevant texts (Fovargue, 2023; Friedland, 2016). Their inclusion was not a neutral technical step, but a deliberate act of epistemic and methodological expansion, aimed at pluralizing the interpretive logics that are often excluded from institutional policy processes.

The AI-Generated Scenario Method functions as a dialogic tool to perform deliberation across multiple institutional logics; not to determine the truth of any one position, but to hold a set of competing truths in productive tension. My rationale is twofold: first, I sought to make visible the institutional disjuncture between a professional program’s obligations and a university’s generalized policies; and second, to invite others to explore dialogic simulation as a legitimate and generative research strategy.

The intent here is for ChatGPT to function as a simulator, translator, dialogic companion, and a methodological device (Floridi and Chiriatti, 2020; Van Dis et al., 2023). Its use enabled me to enter conversations with discourse communities (legal; governance; policy) that are outside of my disciplinary training, and that combined, serve as gatekeepers for institutional policy change. The outputs produced by AI represent probabilistic language modeling that must be interpreted as discursive approximations, and explicitly not jurisprudential claims. The value of their use is in their capacity to make visible the institutional conflicts that may be obscured by procedural and bureaucratic priorities.

Following Denzin’s (2003) call for performative, morally engaged inquiry, and Richardson’s (2005) framing of writing as method, this AI simulated deliberation is both an analytic and an ethical act. The approach draws on qualitative traditions including role-based simulation, discourse analysis, and dialogic inquiry. It is informed by emerging research on AI-enabled methods (Ahmed and Mahmood, 2024; Fan et al., 2024; Gao et al., 2024; Rahman and Watanobe, 2023; Stokel-Walker, 2023). It aligns with John Law’s (2004) call for methodological approaches that can make visible the “mess” of complex systems where multiple (and in this case) often incommensurate realities, coexist. Since this paper treats method as an act of composition, the simulated judicial dialogue is not only data but also method-as-performance (Barad, 2007; Markham, 2018). As a speculative interlocutor, generative AI functions somewhat like scenario testing in interpretive policy analysis (Bayne and Gallagher, 2021), surfacing competing rationalities experienced in institutional decision-making.

In doing so, it responds to Denzin’s (2003) insistence that qualitative research must be performative, political, and morally engaged. The simulated justices bring particular perspectives to the discussion. It is in the particular, that we are better able to think about institutional silence(s), policy incoherence, and the ethical risks of governance systems that refuse to distinguish between disciplinary fairness and professional responsibility. The policy texts governing appeals and conduct are discursively saturated with procedural values, and these discourses (often) render invisible the relational and ethical responsibilities of professions.This method resists the constraints of conventional legal analysis by simulating a multivocal judicial dialogue to surface multiple interpretive frameworks while acknowledging that no single framework can fully account for the social complexities at play (Law, 2004) when professional standards, regulatory obligations, and institutional governance collide. This choice deliberately embraces the epistemological “mess” that Law (2004) sees as intrinsic to responsible inquiry.

Like many qualitative approaches that foreground reflexivity and positioning (Lingard, 2021), this method seeks to create space for multiple interpretations to be taken seriously. It makes visible not just the what of institutional conflict, but the how. It seeks to provide a glimpse into the way reasoning is constructed, constrained, and made persuasive within specific discursive regimes. Professional programs are spaces in which professionals and developing professionals, must navigate and internalize diverse obligations. Policy must be seen as shaping, and and being shaped by, the practices of those it governs (Billett, 2014). Mapping the existing terrain allows us to imagine educational policy futures that help ensure we are future ready.

The AI-generated deliberation employed in this study is not intended to produce generalizable data or be understood as legitimate legal reasoning. Rather, it follows what Clough (2002) describes as a fictionalized method: a performative strategy that mobilizes narrative, voice, and imaginative construction to provoke theoretical and ethical insight. In this way, it engages ambiguity, surfaces institutional tensions, and stages possible futures (Markham 2012). The simulated justices, while algorithmically generated, function as discursive personas: each one embodying a distinct policy logic, institutional ethic, or epistemological stance that may be already implicit (if unarticulated) in university governance structures. Rather than revealing what institutions are, these simulated voices invite reflection on what institutions do, and what they might become.

The material world of AI is limited to what Donna Haraway (1988) refers to as “partial, locatable, critical knowledges” (584) and to what Amoore (2020) poignantly argues are algorithmic systems that actively reshape what is perceivable and meaningful. At the same time, Barad’s (2007) agential realism urges us to acknowledge that humans are very much a “part of the configuration or ongoing reconfiguration of the world” (224). Humans play an active role in “producing mutually informative insights” (225) where knowledge practices are inherently entangled with the material world. Our current policies and practices are very much the outcome of what some have historically considered perceivable and meaningful. But reality is much more complex than our ability to accurately represent it in ways that do justice to the diversity of contexts within which we operate.

Staging policy conflict: Simulated justices and the governance of professional suitability

The dialogue generated through this method resulted in the following multivocal perspectives: Justice Governance (Formalist View), Justice Professionalism (Natural Law View), Justice Due Process (Institutionalist View), Justice Praxis (Pragmatist View), Justice Complexity (Conflicted View), Justice Regulation (OCT Perspective), Justice Indigenous (Decolonial View), and Justice Feminista (Feminist Legal View). The full transcript of the simulated Justices’ arguments (see Appendix 1) mirrored the pluralistic dialogue present in Fuller’s original text. A check in with colleagues within the legal profession reassured me that the output was indeed reasonable and a few commented that it reminded them of exercises they engaged in during their formal legal training. With that informal feedback, I turned to the texts themselves.

Summary of the Justice’s perspectives

The eight perspectives that are presented shine a light on conflicting logics that future governance models must reconcile (see Table 1). These tensions are not flaws; they are diagnostic. They reveal the absence of shared institutional grammar for professional judgment. They point to what a coherent, future-ready governance architecture must entail. Each justice’s reasoning surfaces a distinct institutional rationality that aligns with one or more of the five design principles proposed in the Policy Futures Agenda put forward at the end of this paper. For instance, the Feminist and Indigenous justices foreground the importance of plural epistemologies and relational ethics in defining professional suitability. The Governance and Due Process perspectives highlight the urgent need for program-specific rules and codified authority structures. The voices of Justice Complexity and Justice Praxis make visible the systemic fragmentation that calls for dialogic foresight tools and scenario-based planning. Meanwhile, the Regulatory and Professionalism perspectives articulate the profession’s core duty to uphold public trust, a normative anchor around which governance reforms must be framed. Rather than seeking consensus, this typology of deliberative conflict offers a blueprint for governance innovation. It allows institutions to move beyond compliance logics and toward anticipatory, relationally accountable futures. This method does not claim cultural authenticity, legal authority, or epistemic neutrality. Rather, it stages a speculative dialogue intended to surface institutional tensions and reflect on the limits of current governance regimes.

Table 1.

Typology of simulated judicial perspectives as diagnostic tools for governance redesign.

Lens/Mode of reasoning	How the issue is framed	Core priorities	What the justice calls for
Governance (proceduralist)	A breakdown of codified procedure	Uniform rules, policy clarity, and administrative consistency	Explicit, standardized processes that guarantee uniform treatment of all students
Professionalism (ethical–Pedagogical)	A question of ethical unfitness jeopardizing public trust	Context-sensitive judgment, relational responsibility, and mentorship	Faculty-led ethical assessments and care-based remediation pathways
Due process (rights-based)	Institutional overreach that risks violating student rights	Transparency, formal fairness, and liability containment	Clearly codified accountability structures that center individual rights
Praxis (restorative)	Justice as learning: Remediation over punishment	Conditional remediation, reflective engagement, and growth	Structured pedagogical pathways for ethical repair and reintegration
Complexity (systems)	Symptom of fragmented, siloed governance	System coherence, coordinated oversight, and interdependence awareness	Integrated governance architecture that bridges currently disconnected units
Regulation (statutory)	A matter of statutory delegation and risk containment	External standards, licensure authority, and compliance	Deference to licensing rules; decisions anchored in statutory mandates
Indigenous (relational accountability)	Harm understood through disrupted relationships and land-based ethics	Relational responsibility, historical context, and decolonial critique	Decision-making grounded in relational ethics and community accountability
Feminist (epistemic-justice)	Epistemic violence and gendered silencing within institutional hierarchies	Valuing care-based reasoning, exposing patriarchal norms, and voice equity	Policy design that elevates marginalized knowledges and dismantles structural bias

Analysis

Guided by critical discourse analysis, institutional critique, and Bacchi’s (2009) What’s the Problem Represented to Be? framework, this study treats each judicial opinion as a socially situated speech act. The opinions reveal how universities, regulators, and courts allocate responsibility, construct “professional suitability,” and exercise authority.

Policy is co-produced by faculty, rules, regulators, and professional standards (Hay, 2025). Nowhere is that co-production more visible than in appeals processes, where regulatory obligations collide with institutional norms. Ignoring this collision obscures the governance work performed by professional faculties and weakens their capacity to meet public-safety mandates.

Accordingly, each justice’s contribution is read through three questions.

1. Normative orientation—Which legal, professional, or ethical norms take precedence (e.g., procedural fairness, regulatory compliance, and Indigenous law)?

2. Institutional logic—What model of authority underpins the reasoning?

3. Policy implications—What direction does the reasoning give to institutions faced with similar cases?

Results

The simulated judicial voices demonstrate the complex and layered accountability that faculties of education must navigate. The university’s appeals policy frames the “problem” solely as procedural fairness. Governance and due process logics converge on codification, while professionalism and regulation rely on contextual discretion. By privileging the former, the institution erases the latter, exposing a discursive and structural gap that hinders its duty to ensure candidates’ ethical readiness for public service. Table 1 offers a summary of the Justices’ perspectives that could serve as a typology for governance redesign.

Taken together, the responses signal a need for institutional reform. The policy silence produces a performative structure in which professional faculties appear to comply with both institutional and regulatory expectations, while being structurally incapacitated to meet either fully. Professional faculties are distinct academic units, and credentialing bodies with statutory obligations. The addition of Regulation’s voice makes visible the obligations that professional programs must adhere to, and the cases that have successfully tested their application to date. The addition of a decolonial judicial voice in this deliberation highlights the necessity of considering not only the legal frameworks established through settler colonial law but also the ethical and legal traditions rooted in Indigenous governance. Decolonial legal perspectives, grounded in relationships, responsibilities, and land-based obligations, demand a broader conception of what it means to serve the public. As scholars such as Borrows (2010) and Val Napoleon (2013) explain, Indigenous legal traditions are living, pluralistic, and robust systems of accountability. Including this voice not only counters erasure but reframes the question of professional suitability around relational trust and harm rather than institutional procedure alone. This approach recognizes that public education, especially post-TRC, must be grounded in culturally respectful and legally plural frameworks. The addition of Feminista’s voice reminds us of a reality for female dominated professions: our authority does not enjoy the same level of acceptance of our professional knowledge as medicine and law, despite taking the same or longer to earn the professional designation as other professions (see for example, Fovargue, 2023).

To clarify how the simulation can inform a Policy Futures Agenda, Table 2 links each justice’s governing logic to the specific design principles. This mapping illustrates the simulation’s heuristic function: it surfaces not only institutional tensions but also latent design imperatives. By making these links visible, the typology becomes not just diagnostic but prescriptive—a speculative foresight tool to inform future-ready governance.

Table 2.

From diagnosis to design: Mapping simulated judicial logics onto the policy futures agenda.

Simulated justice	Governing logic/concern	Revealed tension or gap	Policy futures principle informed
Justice professionalism	Protection of the public trust; programmatic gatekeeping	Appeals processes override regulatory mandates	Public trust framing
Justice regulator	Statutory obligations of the OCT	Lack of policy specificity for regulated programs	Program-specific policy authority
Justice feminist	Care ethics; professional precarity in feminized fields	Neutral policies ignore gendered impacts	Plural epistemologies
Justice indigenous	Relational accountability; sovereignty of law	Western proceduralism erases legal pluralism	Plural epistemologies
Justice due process	Academic freedom; procedural rights	Institutional logics conflict with regulatory obligations	Dialogic foresight tools
Justice praxis	Situational judgment; ethical ambiguity	Rigid policies cannot address moral nuance	Dialogic foresight tools
Justice institutionalist	Loyalty to internal hierarchy and process	Appeals mechanisms obscure public accountability	Faculty innovation
Justice complexity	Multi-system governance; institutional incoherence	No unified governance grammar for professional faculties	Faculty innovation

Discussion

Rights with responsibilities: Free speech in professional programs

Freedom of expression is constitutionally protected in Canada under Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982). That right, however, is not absolute: Charter Section 1 permits reasonable limits when demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society, particularly to protect competing values such as equality and non-discrimination. In the educational sphere those counter-vailing duties are explicit. The Ontario Human Rights Code (1990) obliges educators to maintain inclusive, harassment-free learning environments (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2013). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action (2015) further charge schools and faculties of education with integrating Indigenous histories and knowledges “in ways that foster understanding, empathy, and respect,” and implicitly to do no further harm.

Consequently, teacher education programs, as our case example, must prepare candidates who can exercise free expression without perpetuating colonial narratives or discriminatory speech (McKay-Panos, 2016). Provincial policy instruments reinforce that duty: the Ontario College of Teachers’ professional advisories (nd-d; 2021) and the Ontario Ministry of Education’s policies on culturally responsive teaching (2007, 2017, 2021) spell out expectations for respectful, accurate representation of Indigenous cultures. As soon as candidates like Kenna step into faculties of education, they become subjected not only to university regulations but also to board policies, ministry guidelines, and professional standards. In short, “freedom must always take the hand of responsibility and be reconciled with other important interests” (Clarke and Trask, 2014, 117).

Rejecting the normalization of policy incoherence

Professional and public stakes demand that governance be more than procedural. Future-oriented universities must carve out forums where educational judgment, rooted in disciplinary standards and public safety, can override general undergraduate rules when necessary. Authority to educate for the public good is meaningful only when matched by the capacity to act.

Professional programs stand in a difficult middle ground. They must certify professional readiness, yet they operate inside institutional structures that often ignore that specialized task. Without structural backing, ethical responsibility risks becoming performative; sound judgments may prove powerless.

But there are also legal stakes. Under the common-law doctrine of proximate cause (Linden et al., 2022), foreseeable harm arising from ignored expert warnings can attract liability. Excluding faculty experts from appeals that hinge on professional suitability therefore exposes universities to claims of contributory negligence. A balanced safeguard is to accept sworn testimony from conflicted faculty while seating an independent, senior academic with regulatory expertise on the central appeals panel. This approach respects Doré v Barreau du Québec (2012 SCC 12), which requires rights to be balanced against statutory obligations. The question is no longer whether institutions recognize these duties, but whether they will redesign policy to honor them. If governance remains silent while professional duty grows louder, coherence unravels, and responsibility falls into the gap.

Policy futures agenda: Designing for professional judgment and public accountability

This paper began with a concern that the governance structures of universities often revert to proceduralist logics that are insufficient when applied to the distinct obligations of regulated professional programs. Governance tensions constitute a global policy moment: systems that cannot reconcile dual accountability jeopardize public trust and cross-border credential mobility (Fraser, 2009; Unsworth, 2011). Structural coherence (Ball, 2001) and practice-based responsiveness (Billett, 2011) must work together. Instead of avoiding conflict between academic and professional standards, universities should transparently repair systems that fail. When policy is treated as governance-in-action (Ozga, 2000), integrating professional judgment yields durable foundations for public trust. Seeing how problems are constructed allows us to imagine reforms that center professional expertise as a core element of institutional accountability. It allows us to imagine a form of anticipatory governance where institutions can rehearse complexity before a crisis. The methodology stages conflict to illuminate where policy gaps exist and to invite plural logics of interpretation. In this way, the work aligns with Barad’s (2007) concept of entanglement and performativity: knowledge-making as world-making, always situated, always partial, and always consequential.

A future-ready governance architecture must respond not only to internal institutional tensions but to the broader transnational shifts in how professional education is regulated. Around the world, higher education regulators are beginning to recognize the limitations of generic institutional policies when applied to professionally accredited programs. For example, the Office for Students (OfS) (2021) in the United Kingdom has issued guidance distinguishing fitness to practice from standard academic misconduct, calling on providers to create governance structures attuned to professional and public responsibilities (OfS, 2025). Similarly, Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) (2021) has emphasized the need for differentiated quality assurance mechanisms for professional degrees to protect public trust and enable international credential mobility. In Australia, Weber et al. (2024) have called upon a multilateral approach in paramedicine, suggesting the support of an international accreditation scheme to “ensure practitioners are well-prepared for safe and effective patient care” (209). Notably, Klassen’s (2022) research in professional engineering programs across the United Kingdom, South Africa, Singapore, and Australia argues that “research-intensive universities … invested less in centralized control systems. Their perceived status also helped them via favorable expectations from accreditors—they were less likely to be challenged for not meeting standards to the full extent” (1114). As Simons and Masschelein (2016) argue, the “governmentalization of learning” in higher education produces an administrative apparatus that privileges procedural uniformity, outcome metrics, and institutional accountability over contextually grounded judgment. This “learning apparatus” functions as a depoliticized and self-referential regime, increasingly removed from the ethical obligations and relational responsibilities that govern the professions. In the Kenna Thompson case, the university appeals panel exemplified this dynamic: treating professional unsuitability as a matter of academic disagreement, it failed to consider the statutory and ethical dimensions of teacher conduct. The Faculty’s decision was overridden by a mechanism ill-equipped to assess breaches of regulatory trust. The jurisprudential simulation used in this paper acts as a counter-governance device, making visible the multiple rationalities that should inform professional decision-making. In this sense, it re-politicizes educational governance by reasserting the legitimacy of faculty judgment in regulatory contexts, something increasingly eroded by proceduralist structures. This tension reflects a broader global shift in university governance that threatens the public trust placed in all professional programs. These examples affirm that the challenges faced by professional programs in Ontario are not anomalous but symptomatic of a broader governance problem in professionally regulated programs globally.

Implications for professional programs

While this case is grounded in teacher education, its relevance travels across the professions. Faculties of medicine, law, nursing, and social work, for example, all operate within regulatory environments where professional suitability extends beyond academic success. These programs carry delegated responsibility to assess readiness for licensure that includes academic success and ethical comportment alongside relational accountability. As Abrandt Dahlgren et al. (2014) have noted, students move between university and professional worlds, navigating sometimes incommensurable cultural logics. Where institutional governance fails to recognize this boundary-crossing, it risks diminishing both professional integrity and public trust.

This analysis gains further urgency in light of Biesta et al.'s (2021) call for a new publicness in education; one that centers justice, responsibility, and epistemic humility in governance. Professional faculties are far more than credentialing programs. They are programs entrusted with preparing future professionals for public service. Their governance frameworks, accordingly, must recognize policy mechanisms designed to account for this trust. This includes embedding regulatory expertise into university appeals processes, supporting relational models of remediation, and recognizing when due process must include professional process.

In response, this paper proposes a Policy Futures Agenda comprising five interdependent design principles.

1. Reframe governance around public trust and relational responsibility.

2. Recognize the specificities of regulated programs within policy design.

3. Invite plural epistemologies (e.g., feminist and Indigenous legal traditions) into university policy deliberations.

4. Experiment with dialogic foresight tools (like simulated jurisprudence) to surface conflicting institutional logics.

5. Recognize faculties as sites of generative policy innovation.

This work contributes to higher education’s broader engagement with the professions. Examples of collaborative shifts in policy engagement are emerging. For example, Beth Simone Noveck (2015) “Governance Lab” (GOVLAB) is an example of finding ways for people to collaborate on governance issues. Professional faculties are ideally positioned to lead governance reform in ways that address social inclusion, social cohesion and professional identity alongside serving the public interest. Institutions must shift; from procedural control to institutional intelligence; from compliance to co-creation. These design elements, taken together, offer a pathway for institutions to rebuild coherence across governance layers, align professional standards with academic freedoms, and protect the relational integrity at the heart of public-serving professions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

I would like to acknowledge the feedback from my colleagues at the Writing Revolution, Bond University, Australia.

ORCID iD

Kathryn Hibbert

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article through the Distinguished University Professorship award from Western University; R4129A31 (ETKP).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

Author biography

Kathy Hibbert is a Distinguished University Professor at Western University, London, CANADA. She has served as Acting Dean, Associate Dean and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research in Curriculum as a Social Practice. Her research focuses around the question, How do our abilities to “read” texts and to use and understand multimedia/other technologies shape our ability to communicate & learn? For the past 14 years, she has led educational change alongside the first medical responders at Fukushima Medical University and the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure future approaches to teaching and learning reflect lessons learned following the Great East Japan Nuclear Accident, and that we remain forward looking.

Simulated justices and the governance of professional suitability

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Judging the institution: Simulated jurisprudence and the governance of professional futures

Abstract

Keywords

Teaching, responsibility, and the limits of governance

Scenario-based policy foresight in the professional realm

The Case of Kenna Thompson: A teacher Candidate’s conduct in question

Method: Artificial intelligence (AI)-generated scenarios simulating expert judicial discourse

Staging policy conflict: Simulated justices and the governance of professional suitability

Summary of the Justice’s perspectives

Analysis

Results

Discussion

Rights with responsibilities: Free speech in professional programs

Rejecting the normalization of policy incoherence

Policy futures agenda: Designing for professional judgment and public accountability

Implications for professional programs

Footnotes

Acknowledgment

ORCID iD

Funding

Declaration of conflicting interests

Note

Author biography

Simulated justices and the governance of professional suitability

References