When a university creates an AI-focused administrative role and then quietly absorbs that person into an unrelated associate deanship, it has made a decision — it just refuses to name it. The institutional logic is preservation of face: announcing an AI initiative signals modernity; quietly unwinding it avoids the admission that the initiative was theater. The practitioner who observed this cycle [3] is not describing an outlier. The compression from announcement to abandonment is the tell. Genuine structural commitment produces durable positions. What higher ed is producing is a paper…