<p>Generative AI has moved through higher education faster than any technology in recent memory, and community colleges are on the front lines of a shift they did not design and were not resourced to absorb. Institutions have responded primarily through policy, issuing acceptable use guidelines and plagiarism protocols, but policy is not pedagogy. Students are using AI daily. Faculty are improvising. And the deeper work of ethical reasoning, the work that will determine whether our students are displaced by AI or empowered to navigate it, is happening nowhere in particular. This paper argues that the gap is structural, not incidental, and that closing it requires more than professional development or embedded modules. It requires a transferable, credit bearing AI ethics course at the community college level, one that functions as part of general education rather than as a technical elective. Focusing on the Texas higher education landscape, the paper maps the absence of such a course within the Texas Common Course Numbering System, synthesizes workforce and equity evidence for its urgency, and proposes a course model grounded in PHIL 2306: Introduction to Ethics, a transferable lower division ethics course widely used throughout Texas public higher education. The model is organized around four pedagogical pillars, seven dominant curricular themes drawn from leading institutions, and a cross map of student learning outcomes that aligns with existing aligns with existing Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) mandates. The course does not need to be invented from nothing. The infrastructure already exists. What it needs is institutional will.</p>