A question I often hear from alumni these days is, “What is the College doing about AI?” It’s never clear whether the questioner is worried about AI and hopes we can prevent it from negatively impacting our students’ education or is worried that we are falling behind in use of AI and hopes that we are doing all we can to keep up.
That contradictory set of feelings is represented across Carleton’s campus community as well (and, as I have found, can co-exist within an individual perspective). The public discourse around AI is sometimes divided into “boosters” and “doomers,” but the reality is that most people land somewhere in between, recognizing both the potential benefits and the possible threats of AI, to education and to other aspects of human endeavor.
As someone who started my teaching career a few years before the invention of search engines, I have seen the impact of rapid technological change on higher education before. There were predictions that the universal availability of information on “the internet” would eliminate the need for formal education; then, that “MOOCs” (massively open online courses) would destroy the business model of universities by providing definitive lectures on every topic at minimal cost. Most recently, we heard that the online learning of COVID would render physical campuses obsolete. What we discovered, of course, was that making information available is not the same as teaching it, and that human connection is essential to the learning process. The dream of using technology to offer low-cost education at scale overlooks the importance of the relationship between student and professor, and of the relationship among students as members of a campus learning community.
That does not mean, of course, that we are not living through a period of rapid change that will require thoughtful experimentation and adaptation. Our students come to us from secondary schools where AI-enabled tools are already common, and they will leave us to enter a world in which businesses and organizations are already rethinking job qualifications and the nature of work.
This makes the liberal arts education Carleton provides more urgent and relevant than ever. At a time when specific professional skills and tasks are becoming easily replaceable, students will need the broad base of analytic, creative, and expressive capacities cultivated by a Carleton education. Even more importantly, our graduates must be prepared to bring intentionality and meaning to arenas that should not be left to automated decision-making.
Last year, we announced an AI Year of Curiosity involving a task force, seminars, workshops, curricular development grants, and other resources to encourage faculty and staff engagement with AI tools and topics. This year, we are using the rubric AI Year of Experimentation to describe an expanded structure of discussion and support for faculty and staff.
What have we seen so far? During the 2024–25 academic year, we held more than 60 events related to AI, sponsored by the Perlman Center for Teaching and Learning, Academic Technology/Information Technology Services, the Writing Center, the Provost’s Office, and Staff Council, as well as individual departments. Many faculty members now include a course-specific AI policy on their syllabi. In addition to offering a number of courses specifically related to AI, faculty members across the curriculum integrated AI assignments into their courses, asking students to use tools such as NotebookLM or Playlab, often requiring students to produce and then critique AI-assisted work. In the coming year, planned courses include Living with Artificial Intelligence; Cognitive Dimensions of Artificial Intelligence; AI: Economic Impacts, Challenges, and Opportunities; Education and Technology in the 21st Century; Frankenstein’s Progeny; Writing with Artificial Intelligence; and Gazing into the Black Mirror.
Carleton has long had a reputation for an outstanding faculty, and that does not happen by accident. Our faculty members not only love teaching, they work hard at it, by continuously updating their knowledge of their fields and by updating their pedagogical techniques, as well. The world is changing, but that has always been the case, and our faculty is used to teaching new students every year.
This may be a challenging, even disruptive time, but I believe that soon teaching with AI will be like teaching with the internet—not a thing to talk about, just a thing one does, like teaching with books, films, art supplies, or lab equipment. It will be simply another dimension of excellent teaching at Carleton.
—Alison Byerly