Between Human and Machine: University Teachers' Accounts of Judgment, Metacognitive Defense, and Cognitive Offloading...

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) allows university teachers to delegate cognitive work while deciding how students should engage with it. Using codebook thematic analysis, we examined multi-source accounts from 25 teachers recruited through an AI-focused learning community and its professional networks in China. Materials comprised interviews with 22 teachers, three documentary cases, self-narratives and reflective essays. Three themes organize the findings: reconstructing the teacher role, defending professional judgment, and managing teachers' and students' cognitive participation. Participants described disciplinary expertise as a basis for evaluating AI outputs and reported practices intended to retain human engagement. Instrumental and partnership orientations overlapped; descriptive comparison with later use profiles did not establish a simple relationship between partnership language and usage intensity. Because the protocol introduced several focal topics, we distinguish prompted positions from volunteered formulations. The proposed belief-strategy-practice cycle is a heuristic interpretation of retrospective accounts, not a demonstrated mechanism. The study contributes an account of how teachers connect their own cognitive offloading with their reported organization of students' learning opportunities. Its claims concern this AI-engaged sample rather than university teachers generally.