Generative artificial 1ntelligence has quickly become a governance problem 1n higher education, yet much of the debate remains centered on cheating, plagiarism, detection, and academic 1ntegrity. This study shifts the focus from whether GenAI should be allowed to how course-level GenAI governance defines legitimate 1ntellectual labor and shapes graduate students’ emerging scholarly 1dentities. Drawing on a bounded 1nterpretive case study of one graduate-intensive college at a U.S. research unive