Waco, Texas – While higher education rushes headlong into generative AI adoption, racing to automate syllabi and streamline grading, Dr. Toby Brooks is orchestrating a counterintuitive experiment at Baylor University: slowing down. As co-chair of the institution’s AI Roundtable and Director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning, Brooks isn’t interested in how quickly faculty can deploy chatbots. He’s asking whether they should—and if so, how to ensure these tools amplify rather than erode human flourishing.

“The question isn’t whether AI will transform education,” Brooks argues. “It’s whether we’ll approach that transformation with the wisdom to distinguish between efficiency and meaning.”

This philosophy, rooted in Aristotelian virtue ethics yet applied to cutting-edge neural networks, positions Brooks as a distinctive voice in the noisy AI-education landscape. Where many see technological determinism, he sees choice—a choice to build systems that honor the irreducible complexity of human learning.

From Layouts to Algorithms: An Accidental Technologist

Brooks’ path to AI leadership was hardly linear. Before commanding conference rooms discussing large language models, he spent eight years as Art and Technical Director for RPM Magazine, a Canadian automotive publication distributed across 40 countries. Working深夜 all-nighters to layout glossy spreads of custom trucks, Brooks honed an unexpected skill set: translating technical specifications into compelling narrative—an aptitude that now serves him as he demystifies AI for skeptical faculty.

“I’ve written and published more than 500 full-length features for car magazines,” Brooks notes. “At its peak, that side hustle paid more than my faculty position. But the real education was learning how to communicate complex mechanical systems to lay audiences.”

This background—spanning athletic training rooms, automotive journalism, and academic administration—gives Brooks a rare multidisciplinary perspective. He understands technology not as an abstract force but as a tool embedded in human systems, subject to the same pressures of burnout and misalignment that plague high-performing individuals.

The AI Roundtable: Ethics as Infrastructure

At Baylor, Brooks co-leads the AI Roundtable alongside colleague Gary Carini, convening a carefully curated monthly cohort spanning the Law School, Engineering, Business, and Health Sciences. Unlike typical technology committees focused on policy compliance, Baylor’s Roundtable operates philosophically. Each session centers on a shared reading and a singular prompt, probing questions like: How does human-centered pedagogy survive automation? What does responsible co-creation with AI look like? Can institutions maintain missional integrity while leveraging algorithmic efficiency?

“Baylor can remain human-centered amid rapid AI-driven change,” Brooks insists. “But that requires courageous conversations about what we’re optimizing for. Are we building systems that support deep learning, or just faster credentialing?”

Under Brooks’ guidance, the Roundtable has become a model for institutions struggling with AI integration, demonstrating that ethical frameworks must precede technical deployment. His approach rejects the false dichotomy of Luddite resistance versus uncritical adoption, advocating instead for “virtue-based implementation”—the calibration of technological use according to Aristotelian principles of courage, temperance, and liberality (generosity).

The Professor’s Playbook: Anatomy of Teaching

Brooks’ educational philosophy extends beyond AI governance into the granular mechanics of instruction through The Professor’s Playbook, a podcast that distills complex sports science and pedagogical theory into actionable frameworks. Here, the Aristotelian influence is explicit: recent episodes dissect virtues like aletheia (Greek for “truthfulness” or “unconcealedness”), exploring how authenticity in teaching mirrors accurate data collection in athletic training.

“Truthfulness in our systems equals trustworthiness in our leadership,” Brooks asserts in a recent episode, drawing parallels between shoulder girdle biomechanics and institutional transparency. “Whether you’re managing a high-performance sports medicine unit or a classroom, the principle remains: alignment between stated values and practiced reality determines long-term success.”

The podcast serves dual purposes—asynchronous faculty development for busy educators, and a laboratory for Brooks’ theories on “systems over goals.” Drawing from his experience managing acute injuries on football sidelines for Liberty University and UTEP, Brooks argues that sustainable performance—in athletics, academia, or AI implementation—requires robust systems rather than aspirational targets.

“You don’t rise to the level of your goals,” he emphasizes. “You fall to the level of your systems. This is true for weight loss, for sports performance, and certainly for ethical AI integration.”

Generative AI as a Mirror

Brooks’ recent appearance on the AI-Branding Podcast revealed his practical approach to emerging tools. Discussing platforms like Descript and Opus, he demonstrated fluency with cutting-edge content creation AI while maintaining philosophical distance. For Brooks, these technologies function as mirrors reflecting institutional priorities: “If AI reveals that your teaching was already formulaic, the solution isn’t better prompts—it’s better pedagogy.”

This perspective informs his current research at Baylor, where he investigates the intersection of generative AI, faculty mentorship, and instructional excellence. Rather than treating AI as a labor-saving device, Brooks frames it as a diagnostic instrument capable of exposing misalignments between educational mission and practice.

The Athletic Training Mindset Meets Academic Leadership

What distinguishes Brooks’ AI leadership is his insistence on embodied cognition—the recognition that learning is a biological, not just informational, process. His fourteen years directing athletic training programs at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center ingrained habits of acute observation and systems thinking that now inform his approach to digital transformation.

“Athletic training taught me that you can’t separate the physical from the psychological,” Brooks explains. “Similarly, you can’t separate AI tools from the cognitive and emotional ecosystems in which they’re deployed. The shoulder girdle fails when kinetic chain communication breaks down. Institutions fail when technological adoption outpaces cultural adaptation.”

This biomechanical metaphor extends to his critique of “productivity culture” in academia. Just as he once warned athletes against training through injury, Brooks now cautions faculty against “innovating through exhaustion”—adopting AI tools not because they improve learning outcomes, but because they signal compliance with institutional efficiency mandates.

Strategic Planning for Uncertain Futures

Perhaps Brooks’ most countercultural contribution is his insistence on long-horizon strategic planning in an era of rapid technological churn. Drawing from his MBA in Data Analytics and his experience navigating the collapse of print media during the COVID-19 pandemic—when RPM Magazine’s advertising model imploded overnight—Brooks advocates for institutional resilience over reactive adaptation.

“When the magazine went digital-only and cut my pay 50%, I learned that technical skills mean nothing without strategic clarity,” he reflects. “The same is true for AI. Faculty need to understand not just how to prompt engineering, but how to evaluate whether these tools align with their long-term pedagogical missions.”

At Baylor, this translates into what Brooks calls “virtue-based strategic planning”—the alignment of technological adoption with institutional values of integrity, community, and human dignity. It’s an approach that treats AI not as an inevitable force to which education must submit, but as a domain for intentional, values-driven choice.

Conclusion: The Measure of Intelligence

As institutions worldwide grapple with AI integration, Dr. Toby Brooks offers a measured alternative to both techno-utopianism and reactionary resistance. His work suggests that the measure of educational AI is not processing speed or content generation volume, but whether these tools facilitate the development of wisdom—the capacity to navigate complexity with discernment and ethical coherence.

In an academic landscape increasingly seduced by algorithmic efficiency, Brooks’ Aristotelian humanism—honed through automotive magazines, athletic training clinics, and the high-stakes environment of collegiate sports medicine—reminds us that education’s deepest purposes resist automation. The future of AI in higher education, he argues, belongs not to the engineers with the most sophisticated models, but to the educators with the clearest sense of what it means to become fully human.

For faculty development resources, AI ethics frameworks, and the Professor’s Playbook podcast, visit the Academy for Teaching and Learning at Baylor University or connect with Dr. Brooks through TobyBrooksPhD.com.