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Friday, October 16
 

7:30am EDT

Breakfast at Harris
Friday October 16, 2026 7:30am - 9:00am EDT
Harris Dining Hall

Friday October 16, 2026 7:30am - 9:00am EDT
Harris Dining Hall
  Meal

9:00am EDT

Opening Session
Friday October 16, 2026 9:00am - 9:30am EDT
Crozier-Williams 1962 Room
Welcome and Symposium Overview
Friday October 16, 2026 9:00am - 9:30am EDT
Crozier-Williams 1962 Room

9:30am EDT

Opening Plenary — The Year of an Awakening in the Liberal Arts
Friday October 16, 2026 9:30am - 10:30am EDT
Crozier-Williams 1962 Room
This opening panel brings together AI leaders from small liberal arts colleges who first connected at the inaugural AI and the Liberal Arts Symposium and left with a shared conviction: that navigating AI in the liberal arts context requires ongoing collaboration across institutions. The panelists will reflect on the year since that first gathering. What has changed on their campuses? What differences do they see between SLACs and other types of institutions in their response to AI? What further opportunities for collaboration do they see between SLAC institutions? This session will set the tone for the symposium by grounding the day's conversations in lived institutional experience, honest reflection, and the power of a growing community of practice among liberal arts institutions.
Speakers
GC

George Cusack

Director of Academic AI Initiatives, Carleton College
EC
avatar for Jaya Kannan

Jaya Kannan

Director of Technology for Curriculum and Research, Amherst College
Jaya Kannan is Director of Technology for Curriculum and Research at Amherst College, where she leads the Academic Technology Services unit. She holds a PhD in Computer Assisted Language Learning and her higher education background spans international teaching, faculty development... Read More →
avatar for Susan Purrington

Susan Purrington

Harold F. Wiley Generative AI Teaching and Learning Fellow, Connecticut College

avatar for Lori Robbins

Lori Robbins

Head of AI Strategy, Denison University
Lori Robbins is Denison University's Head of AI Strategy, where she leads campus-wide initiatives focused on AI literacy and professional development. With a background in international education and educational technology, she creates programs that help students, faculty, and staff... Read More →
Friday October 16, 2026 9:30am - 10:30am EDT
Crozier-Williams 1962 Room
  Plenary, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

10:45am EDT

Harold F. Wiley Keynote Presentation
Friday October 16, 2026 10:45am - 12:00pm EDT
Crozier-Williams 1962 Room
Harold F. Wiley Keynote — a 75-minute featured address by Dr. Jon Ippolito.
Speakers
DJ
Friday October 16, 2026 10:45am - 12:00pm EDT
Crozier-Williams 1962 Room
  Keynote, Ethics, Equity, and Environmental Impact

12:00pm EDT

Lunch at Harris
Friday October 16, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT
Harris Dining Hall

Friday October 16, 2026 12:00pm - 1:00pm EDT
Harris Dining Hall
  Meal

1:00pm EDT

AI Is Not Transforming Education—We Are Using It to Preserve It
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 1:10pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
Artificial intelligence is widely framed as a transformative force in higher education, yet this assumption overlooks a persistent historical pattern: technology alone rarely produces meaningful change. Drawing on research examining how curricular ideology and pedagogical beliefs shape technology adoption, this presentation argues that institutions do not adapt to technology—technology is adapted to fit existing beliefs. Despite decades of innovation, higher education remains largely lecture-centered, with new tools reinforcing rather than disrupting established practices.AI is already following this trajectory. Its use varies not by capability, but by underlying assumptions about teaching, knowledge, and authority. This talk reframes AI not as a disruptive force, but as a mirror of institutional values. Meaningful transformation, therefore, depends less on technological advancement and more on confronting the ideological foundations of education.
Speakers
CB

Chris Bernard

Chief Information Security Officer, The Jackson Laboratory
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 1:10pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Lightning, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

1:00pm EDT

The Design Problem of AI Literacy: Teaching Thinking When Answers Are Instant
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein 210
In AI-rich classrooms, answers often arrive before questions. This creates a central paradox for liberal arts education: tools that promise intellectual support can also short-circuit the uncertainty and iteration through which thinking develops. This session reframes AI literacy as the ability to structure and sustain inquiry when answers are instantly available. Participants will examine how common assignment designs invite premature closure and will practice redesigning them using three strategies: staging tasks to delay answer-generation, requiring student reasoning before feedback, and separating composing from evaluation. Attendees will leave with adaptable frameworks for designing assignments that preserve critical thinking across disciplines, even when AI systems can generate polished responses on demand.
Speakers
BB

Benjamin Breyer

Senior Lecturer, Barnard College
Benjamin Breyer is Senior Lecturer in English at Barnard College, where he teaches First-Year Writing and directs research on AI-mediated learning and rhetorical scaffolds in the liberal arts. His work focuses on designing writing instruction that reinforces critical reading, interpretive... Read More →
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

1:00pm EDT

The Great AIqualizer: How Small Liberal Arts Colleges Can Use AI to Rethink Administrative Work, Faculty Support, and Student Success
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
The conversation about AI in higher education is loud, anxious, and often dominated by the largest institutions with the most resources to navigate it. Small liberal arts colleges are watching from a complicated position: wary of the hype (if not downright resistant), uncertain about the risks, and not entirely sure the opportunity being described is one that was designed with them in mind. This presentation will argue that, for small colleges with distinctive curricula, signature programs, and their own institutional culture, AI can offers something more interesting than automation or efficiency gains. It offers, for the first time, the ability to build infrastructure that actually reflects what makes them distinctive. Tools that understand your academic model. Dashboards that speak your institutional language. Systems that serve your students, and not a generalized approximation of them.New College of Florida decided to rethink our approach to software built for someone else and start building tools that are genuinely, specifically ours. In a single academic year, a small cross-functional team (IT, Institutional Research, Registrar, Provost's Office, and students) built working dashboards for advising, athlete eligibility, thesis progress, early alert and retention, and faculty workloads, at a fraction of commercial licensing costs.This session is a practitioner's honest account of how we did it, and why the real payoff isn't efficiency. It's institutional identity.
Speakers
ML

Manuel Lopez

Associate Provost, New College of Florida
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 1:30pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

1:00pm EDT

AI Play Lab
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
Shain Library Visualization Wall (Lower level)
This is the dedicated AI Tool demo and exploration space with our Symposium Friends and/or each other. 
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
Shain Library Visualization Wall (Lower level)
  AI Play Lab

1:00pm EDT

Lightning Talks - AI Literacy and What Students Learn
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
This session includes the following four talks:
10 minutes each with 20 minutes of Q&A for the group
1. AI Is Not Transforming Education—We Are Using It to Preserve It
    Chris Bernard | The Jackson Laboratory
2. Critical from the Start: A Coordinated AI Literacy Model for the First-Year Liberal Arts Seminar
    Sarah Lohnes Watulak & Dr. Amy Collier | Middlebury College
3. What Should Students Learn? Navigating the Paradox of AI in Liberal Arts Education
    Javkhlan Batsaikhan* | Amherst College
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Lightning

1:00pm EDT

Managing AI Burnout: Self Care for Faculty and Librarians
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein Hood Room (First floor)
Adapting to new technologies is a staple of academic life, but the rapid rise of generative AI is creating an unsustainable mental and emotional landscape for faculty and librarians. Beyond the daunting technical learning curve and the exhausting game of “whack-a-mole” as AI “assistants” pop up in familiar tools, this shift brings profound existential repercussions. Ethical dilemmas and the relentless pressure to innovate while maintaining pedagogical integrity have pushed many to a breaking point.Together, we will situate AI burnout within the broader cultural context of higher education while reflecting on our personal and professional values. Through prompts, small-group discussions, and personal inventories, participants will identify current challenges, discover areas of agency, and find sparks of hope and inspiration.
Speakers
EH
avatar for Irene McGarrity

Irene McGarrity

Head of Research Services, Mount Holyoke College
Irene McGarrity is Head of Research Services at Mount Holyoke College, where she leads a team of four research and instruction librarians. She holds an MSIS in Information Studies, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing, and an MA in English Literature. Irene has presented regionally... Read More →
Friday October 16, 2026 1:00pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein Hood Room (First floor)
  Workshop, Ethics, Equity, and Environmental Impact

1:10pm EDT

Critical from the Start: A Coordinated AI Literacy Model for the First-Year Liberal Arts Seminar
Friday October 16, 2026 1:10pm - 1:20pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
First-year students arrive at liberal arts institutions at the precise moment they are forming their intellectual and ethical identities as scholars, and they arrive already using AI. At Middlebury College, we designed a coordinated, multi-modal approach to help students critically engage with AI within that formative context. Our model centers on GenAI @ Middlebury, a short asynchronous Canvas course, paired with custom in-class workshops co-developed with First-Year Seminar (FYS) faculty, and peer support for students. Together, these resources equip students to analyze AI's role in their learning - to shortcut or support - while giving faculty the knowledge and confidence to facilitate meaningful classroom conversations. In its first year (AY 2025–2026), 250 people engaged with the Canvas course and we partnered with 11 FYS faculty to build tailored workshops for their courses. This lightning talk outlines our development process, faculty partnership strategy, and preliminary student outcome data.
Speakers
avatar for Amy Collier

Amy Collier

Associate Provost for Digital Learning, Middlebury
SL

Sarah Lohnes Watulak

Director of Digital Pedagogy and Media, Middlebury College
Friday October 16, 2026 1:10pm - 1:20pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Lightning, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

1:30pm EDT

What Should Students Learn? Navigating the Paradox of AI in Liberal Arts Education
Friday October 16, 2026 1:30pm - 1:40pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
What should students learn when the skills cultivated through higher education increasingly intersect with technologies capable of performing some of those same tasks? Students find themselves at the center of a paradox. Liberal arts institutions continue to emphasize critical thinking, communication, writing, ethical reasoning, creativity, and problem-solving, while employers increasingly seek graduates who can work effectively with AI.Drawing on conversations with over fifty Amherst College students during planning for a student-led AI Summit, this presentation explores how students are making sense of these expectations. Many recognize AI as important yet remain uncertain about what AI literacy and fluency mean in practice, as well as how AI should be integrated into learning.Rather than resolving the paradox of AI, this presentation explores how liberal arts education can use this moment to rethink learning for a future in which human and artificial intelligence work together to communicate, collaborate, and create effectively.
Speakers
avatar for Javkhlan Batsaikhan

Javkhlan Batsaikhan

Student, Amherst College
I’m Javkhlan Batsaikhan; please call me Jay. I’m an undergraduate student studying Psychology and Education Studies at Amherst College, with interests in AI, higher education, student learning, and the future of work. At the symposium, I’ll present “What Should Students Learn... Read More →
Friday October 16, 2026 1:30pm - 1:40pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Lightning, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

1:30pm EDT

Building the AI Ready Campus
Friday October 16, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
Higher education is entering a new era where AI is reshaping how institutions engage students, support staff, and operate at scale. Yet many campuses are still struggling to determine what true AI readiness actually looks like.This session explores how institutions can move beyond experimentation to build an AI-ready campus grounded in strategy, governance, and practical implementation. Attendees will learn how colleges are using AI to improve student engagement, streamline operations, and expand institutional capacity while maintaining a human-centered student experience.Through real examples and an interactive readiness framework, participants will examine common barriers to adoption, assess their institution’s current level of AI readiness, and identify practical next steps for moving forward. The session will also explore how AI agents and AI-supported workflows are changing expectations around responsiveness, personalization, and operational scalability across higher education.
Speakers
JB
Friday October 16, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

1:30pm EDT

Is this AI?: Fostering Critical AI Media Literacy
Friday October 16, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein 210
"Is this AI?" is a question vexing even the most media-savvy users today, as synthetic images and videos grow exponentially more convincing, with widespread circulation. But are there reliable "tells" and transferable frameworks for critical AI media literacy, even in this rapidly shifting landscape?  This interactive presentation invites participants to examine a curated selection of images and videos and discuss: Is this AI? How do you know? Rather than offering easy answers, this session will use guided exercises and discussion to consider critical media AI literacy, inviting participants to think about visual artifacts & physics (is the hair texture right?); anatomy & proportions (are the joints strangely elongated?); and context & coherence (what is the file provenance or source?).  Along the way, participants will consider deeper questions of authenticity, consent, and responsibility in an era of increasingly convincing synthetic media, and how critical AI media literacy has relevance in a liberal arts curriculum.
Speakers
MH
Friday October 16, 2026 1:30pm - 2:00pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

2:15pm EDT

AI and Ethics: Two Ideas, One Course
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
What can AI do, and what should it do? My approach to AI and Ethics builds a single inquiry from two disciplines that rarely share a room: computer science, where students implement a neural network from first principles without libraries, and serious philosophy, where they reason about how one ought to act. The pairing exposes a tension at the heart of the liberal arts in the age of AI. If a machine ties your shoes, do you ever learn to tie them yourself—or to do your arithmetic, your writing, your deciding? The liberal arts exist to cultivate precisely the capacities AI now offers to outsource: judgment, reflection, moral agency, the power to be more than a child of one’s time. This talk asks whether teaching AI must mean defending those capacities, and how one course might do both at once.
Speakers
DO
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

2:15pm EDT

Say “Yes” to the Mess: Critical Writing Process Reflection in the Age of GenAI
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
A common solution for wide-spread genAI use in writing courses is to incorporate tools like track changes and version histories. Ideally, these tools help students chart their writing process while working on an assignment. In practice, these tools can reinforce ideas of writing as complete and “perfectable” products with tracking changes acting as “proof” that students’ writing is their own. In this presentation, the speaker will share his development of an assignment sequence that encourages students to embrace the mess of the writing process. In this sequence, students color-code and annotate a “Writer’s Version” of their drafts as they iterate and tinker with their compositions. Students are not assessed on their final products but rather the critical reflections they perform with the assistance of these “messy drafts” that make explicit the writing process behind their projects.
Speakers
NW
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 2:45pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

2:15pm EDT

Element451 AI Play Lab
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 3:15pm EDT
Shain Library Visualization Wall (Lower level)
This is the dedicated Element451 AI Tool demo and exploration space.
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 3:15pm EDT
Shain Library Visualization Wall (Lower level)
  AI Play Lab

2:15pm EDT

Academic Integrity and the Honor Code
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein 208
Discussion on academic integrity and the honor code in the age of AI. 
Speakers
SC
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein 208
  Round Table, Academic Integrity and the Honor Code

2:15pm EDT

From Experimentation to Governance: How AI Communities of Practice Shape Institutional AI Adoption
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein 203
Artificial intelligence adoption in higher education is often discussed through policy or technology strategy, but much of the real work is happening informally through experimentation, peer learning, and day-to-day problem solving across institutions. This session explores how AI Communities of Practice can help universities move from fragmented experimentation toward more thoughtful and coordinated approaches to AI governance. Drawing from experiences supporting AI initiatives in higher education, the session examines how faculty, staff, and administrators make decisions about AI use while institutional guidance and norms are still evolving. The conversation will focus on professional judgment, trust, ethical uncertainty, institutional culture, and the hidden labor involved in helping colleagues make sense of rapidly changing technologies. Rather than viewing governance only as a top-down policy process, this session considers how governance also develops socially through conversation, collaboration, and shared institutional learning.
Speakers
avatar for Darice Corey

Darice Corey

Senior Director, Yale College - Web and IT Planning
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein 203
  Round Table, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

2:15pm EDT

Redefining the Honor Code for the Generative Era
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein Hood Room (First floor)
The rise of generative AI has disrupted the "finished essay" as a proxy for critical thinking, creating a profound paradox: tools that mimic analysis threaten to hollow out the very processes they simulate. This session proposes a shift from "policing output" to "partnering in process." Moving beyond surveillance-based integrity models, we explore how to evolve the Honor Code into a proactive pedagogical contract. By emphasizing "Process-Oriented Pedagogy"—including the use of prompt logs, iterative drafting, and reflective AI-critique—we can restore the human element to the center of the curriculum. This session explores a "tiered transparency" model that allows for varying levels of AI integration, encouraging students to navigate the generative era with agency and intellectual honesty. Participants will leave with a framework to move their classrooms from a state of suspicion toward a "covenant of transparency" that preserves the core values of a liberal arts education.
Speakers
avatar for Alyson Snowe

Alyson Snowe

Associate Professor, Community College of Rhode Island
With extensive experience teaching across Northeast colleges over the past 25 years, Alyson Snowe brings a profound understanding to the English Department at CCRI, where she's been since 2018. Holding a Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island, Dr. Snowe teaches diverse courses... Read More →
Friday October 16, 2026 2:15pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein Hood Room (First floor)
  Workshop, Academic Integrity and the Honor Code

2:45pm EDT

Reducing LLM Drift Using Explicit Ethical and Policy-Based Principles
Friday October 16, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
Large language models (LLM) are being used in educational settings to provide guidance, feedback, and policy-related judgments. However, these systems produce inconsistent responses to similar cases, raising concerns about fairness, transparency, and trust. Rather than relying on probabilistic model output, our approach represents cases in terms of salient features and applies principles derived from institutional academic policies to guide decisions. The LLM remains responsible for interpreting cases, while a separate layer using principles ensures similar cases are treated consistently. This approach offers a middle ground between unrestricted generative AI and rule-based systems.  By making the basis for decisions explicit and inspectable, it provides greater transparency, supports accountability,and allows policies to be operationalized in a consistent form.  We illustrate the approach using examples drawn from our college policies concerning student use of AI and discuss the implications for responsible deployment within the liberal arts.
Speakers
TJ
MC
Friday October 16, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Ethics, Equity, and Environmental Impact

2:45pm EDT

The Imagined Author in the Age of AI
Friday October 16, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
This presentation examines how generative and agentic AI systems reshape traditional understandings of authorship, rhetorical agency, and literacy within contemporary writing practices. Drawing on Walter Ong’s fictionalized audience, Wayne Booth’s implied author, Michel Foucault’s author-function, Roland Barthes’ “death of the author,” and Eefje Claassen’s work on author representation, the session argues that AI-mediated writing produces an “imagined author” distributed across human writers, machine systems, institutions, and algorithmic discourse. The presentation explores how students increasingly write with, for, and against AI systems while negotiating questions of authenticity, authority, labor, and technological literacy. Situating AI writing within broader rhetorical and digital literacy ecologies, the session challenges crisis-based narratives surrounding AI and composition. Participants will leave with a theoretical framework for understanding AI-mediated authorship and practical approaches for teaching rhetorical awareness, ethical AI engagement, and critical AI literacy within liberal arts education.
Speakers
BH

Brenda Hardin Abbott

Associate Professor of English, Bay Path University
Friday October 16, 2026 2:45pm - 3:15pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

3:25pm EDT

From Initiative to Institutional Collaborative
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 3:35pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
Like many small liberal arts colleges, we at Davidson College set out in the spring of 2024 to explore generative AI and its impacts on teaching and learning for our campus. Our initial approaches were thoughtful, intentional, and ultimately inadequate due in large part to the perennial challenges of communication and coordination. Fast-forwarding to this spring (2026), we have embarked upon a more inclusive, more institutional model — the Davidson AI Collaborative — with the goal of honoring domain specificity across campus while staying connected vis-à-vis our approaches to generative AI. My lightning talk will offer a brief recap of our journey, connect our past to our present, and, most importantly, offer arguments as to how the Collaborative’s model thoughtfully and intentionally addresses our challenges, even as it, too, may not be permanent. (And why that is okay.)
Speakers
avatar for Jacob Heil

Jacob Heil

AD of Instruction, Research, & Digital Scholarship, Davidson College
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 3:35pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Lightning, Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Innovations

3:25pm EDT

From Shortcut to Thought Partner: Training Liberal Arts Students to Collaborate With AI
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 3:55pm EDT
Blaustein 210
This session introduces Colgate University’s Innovation Fellows and their use of AI, and its evolution into a new undergraduate consulting program that pairs human-centered design (Design Thinking) with intentional, responsible AI use to solve real campus problems. Rather than viewing AI as a shortcut, this program trains liberal arts students to leverage it as an active collaborative thought partner for synthesizing research, stress-testing prototypes, and generating ideas.The session highlights their inaugural pilot success: a partnership with Colgate’s ITS Service Desk to rethink and revise intern training. Using empathy-gathering interviews, observations, and surveys, as well as a design sprint, the student team produced a training program that includes AI-generated instructional content, a role-playing simulation game, and a skills progression rubric. The proposal was accepted by ITS for implementation beginning summer 2026. Presenters will detail the program's design, AI learning outcomes, and pilot results, while examining why liberal arts institutions are uniquely positioned to model this work.
Speakers
KH

Karen Harpp

Professor, Colgate University

avatar for Ahmad Khazaee

Ahmad Khazaee

Director of creative technologies, engagement and support, Colgate University
Ahmad is currently the director of creative Technologies, Engagement and Support. With previous roles in student support, instructional support, and desktop administration he is able to leverage a variety of perspectives when approaching new problems.
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 3:55pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

3:25pm EDT

Lightning Talks - Institutional Programs and Equity
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 4:25pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
This session includes the following four talks:
10 minutes each with 20 minutes of Q&A for the group
1. From Initiative to Institutional Collaborative
    Jacob Heil | Davidson College
2. Developing an “AI and the Liberal Arts” Academic Certificate
    Willie Wilson | Franklin & Marshall College
3. AI and the Digital Divide: A New Era of Educational Inequity
    Atousa Kaviani* | Binghamton University
4. The Other Side of the Desk: Student Perceptions of Faculty AI Use in the Liberal Arts
    Lauren Howard & Willie Wilson | Franklin & Marshall College
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 4:25pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Lightning

3:25pm EDT

Designing the Future of AI: Using Design Thinking to Engage Students as Co-Creators of Institutional AI Strategy
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 4:25pm EDT
Blaustein Hood Room (First floor)
As colleges and universities grapple with the opportunities and tensions surrounding artificial intelligence, many institutional conversations occur without substantial student input. At Gettysburg College, we sought to address this gap by inviting students to become co-designers of our emerging AI initiatives through a series of design thinking workshops titled Designing the Future of AI at Gettysburg College. These sessions guided students through empathy-building, problem framing, ideation, and rapid prototyping activities designed to surface their experiences, concerns, hopes, and ideas regarding AI's role in teaching and learning.In this interactive workshop, participants will experience an adapted version of the process used with Gettysburg students while examining insights generated through these sessions. Attendees will leave with practical facilitation strategies, adaptable activity structures, and a replicable model for engaging students as partners in shaping institutional responses to AI. Rather than designing for students, participants will explore what becomes possible when institutions design with them.
Speakers
avatar for Richard Russell

Richard Russell

Professor of Psychology, Gettysburg College
Richard Russell is a professor of psychology at Gettysburg College. Trained in cognitive science, he discovered and named super-recognizers, people with exceptional ability to recognize faces. He is now working on humanistic, cybernetic, and cognitive science approaches to understanding... Read More →
JW
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 4:25pm EDT
Blaustein Hood Room (First floor)
  Workshop, Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Innovations

3:25pm EDT

The AI-Native Classroom: Early Lessons from a Pilot in my Class at Carnegie Mellon
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 4:25pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
Title:The AI-Native Classroom: Early Lessons from a Carnegie Mellon PilotAbstract:For the past year, debates about AI in higher education have largely focused on student access to tools such as ChatGPT. Yet access to AI and learning in an AI-native environment are not the same thing. This session examines what happened when AI was integrated directly into course materials, learning activities, and student study workflows in a graduate-level Carnegie Mellon course. Drawing on observations, usage data, student feedback, and faculty reflections, the presentation explores how students actually engage with AI when it becomes part of the learning environment itself. Participants will discuss implications for pedagogy, academic integrity, faculty roles, and the future of liberal arts education in an increasingly AI-mediated world.
Speakers
DM
Friday October 16, 2026 3:25pm - 4:25pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Workshop, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

3:30pm EDT

AI Play Lab
Friday October 16, 2026 3:30pm - 5:00pm EDT
Shain Library Visualization Wall (Lower level)
This is the dedicated AI Tool demo and exploration space with our Symposium Friends and/or each other. 
Friday October 16, 2026 3:30pm - 5:00pm EDT
Shain Library Visualization Wall (Lower level)
  AI Play Lab

3:35pm EDT

Developing an “AI and the Liberal Arts” Academic Certificate
Friday October 16, 2026 3:35pm - 3:45pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
Students and parents are increasingly eager for academic validation of AI proficiency that will be viable in the modern marketplace. As a liberal arts institution, our objective is to cultivate competencies that transcend technical utility, fostering a holistic framework for engaging with these technologies. To equip students with both technical foundations and the capacity to critically evaluate ethical, social, and cultural impacts, we have established the "AI and the Liberal Arts" certificate. This certificate is structured as an interdisciplinary program comprising 4 courses or learning experiences. By design, it requires fewer credits than a minor and intentionally integrates perspectives from multiple academic disciplines. Most importantly, the program emphasizes a liberal arts approach that leverages critical thinking, synthesizes diverse perspectives, and looks beyond the technological surface to build something truly important. It prepares our students to pose the challenging, timely, and vital questions necessary for success in this new era.
Speakers
WW

Willie Wilson

Associate Professor of Computer Science, Franklin & Marshall College
I am trying to guide our campus in ethical AI practices.  I have been working with students, faculty, and staff to educate them on AI, its strengths, and its weaknesses.  I'm also listening to their concerns and how they would like to use AI.

Students, faculty, staff, and administration all have different needs and objectives. Also, faculty from STEM and humanities usually have vastly different experiences with AI and are taking very different approaches. I'm looking to talk with people about how to get people on the same... Read More →
Friday October 16, 2026 3:35pm - 3:45pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Lightning, AI, the Liberal Arts, and the Future of Work

3:45pm EDT

AI and the Digital Divide: A New Era of Educational Inequity
Friday October 16, 2026 3:45pm - 3:55pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
Since the rise of AI in recent years has become an unavoidable issue in educational systems, its widespread use and accessibility need to be studied. Before addressing the complex question of whether using AI for writing assignments in the classroom is ethical, as well as questions of authorship, there is another issue that remains understudied. The digital divide and inaccessibility of free and reliable internet connections continue to be factors of discrimination across many communities and countries.Unstable, unreliable, and unaffordable internet access raises another important question that this presentation seeks to address: how accessible is AI in the Global South, and what impact will this have on educational equity? By showcasing three months of digital blackout and internet censorship in Iran and examining their effects on the educational system, this paper explores the relationship between the digital divide and AI within the global educational environment.
Speakers
AK
Friday October 16, 2026 3:45pm - 3:55pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Lightning, Ethics, Equity, and Environmental Impact

3:55pm EDT

The Other Side of the Desk: Student Perceptions of Faculty AI Use in the Liberal Arts
Friday October 16, 2026 3:55pm - 4:05pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
While considerable research has examined how students use generative AI, and how faculty feel about that use, no study to date has reversed the lens. This mixed-methods campus survey of ~400 liberal arts students and 100 faculty investigates how these populations perceive and evaluate each others' AI practices. Our findings reveal striking convergences and divergences. Students and faculty share similar fears (cognitive offloading, accuracy, environmental impact) and similar hopes (more training, experience, and institutional guidance). Yet students express significant dissatisfaction with specific faculty practices. For example, students are particularly against using AI to generate letters of recommendation, significant course content, and grading of written work, despite some faculty reports of using AI to do these tasks. These findings raise urgent questions about the ethical standards we apply to ourselves versus others. We discuss implications for institutional policy, pedagogical transparency, and the equitable development of AI norms in the liberal arts.
Speakers
LH
WW

Willie Wilson

Associate Professor of Computer Science, Franklin & Marshall College
I am trying to guide our campus in ethical AI practices.  I have been working with students, faculty, and staff to educate them on AI, its strengths, and its weaknesses.  I'm also listening to their concerns and how they would like to use AI.

Students, faculty, staff, and administration all have different needs and objectives. Also, faculty from STEM and humanities usually have vastly different experiences with AI and are taking very different approaches. I'm looking to talk with people about how to get people on the same... Read More →
Friday October 16, 2026 3:55pm - 4:05pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Lightning, Ethics, Equity, and Environmental Impact

3:55pm EDT

Cultivating Judgment Through Guided Experience: A Human-Centered Approach to AI Literacy
Friday October 16, 2026 3:55pm - 4:25pm EDT
Blaustein 210
This session proposes how to define and teach “AI literacy” in liberal arts classrooms for the increasingly AI-integrated world. Unguided AI use does not automatically produce literacy; instructions focused solely on a technical capacity will become outdated at every major model change. Instead, AI literacy must be captured as a disposition, or a durable habit of the mind, that emphasizes the value of human judgment in ever-changing technological landscape. The pedagogical task is to cultivate this disposition through intentional hands-on engagement that turns AI use into an object of guided critical inquiry: observing, iterating, and evaluating human-AI interaction and developing sound judgment for responsible human-AI collaboration. Participants will experience a short AI literacy activity that reveals a commonly held misconception about AI and debrief how guided encounters can help students examine AI behavior, their own assumptions, and the ethical choices involved in learning with AI.
Speakers
SK

Sawa Kurotani

Professor, University of Redlands
Friday October 16, 2026 3:55pm - 4:25pm EDT
Blaustein 210
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

4:40pm EDT

Pop-up Book Club — Academic Integrity in the Age of AI (Session 1 of 2)
Friday October 16, 2026 4:40pm - 5:10pm EDT
Blaustein 203
Pop-up Book Club (30 min), Session 1 of 2. Facilitators: Sarah Lohnes Watulak & Amy Collier (Middlebury College).
Speakers
avatar for Amy Collier

Amy Collier

Associate Provost for Digital Learning, Middlebury
SL

Sarah Lohnes Watulak

Director of Digital Pedagogy and Media, Middlebury College
Friday October 16, 2026 4:40pm - 5:10pm EDT
Blaustein 203
  Book Club, Academic Integrity and the Honor Code

4:40pm EDT

Student Experiences: DavisAI Summer Research
Friday October 16, 2026 4:40pm - 5:10pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
Teach the Room session featuring student experiences from DavisAI Summer Research. Presenters: Connecticut College students.
Friday October 16, 2026 4:40pm - 5:10pm EDT
Shain Library Chu Room (First floor)
  Teach the Room, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

4:40pm EDT

Can AI Play? Teaching French Video Games and Critical AI Literacy in the Language Classroom
Friday October 16, 2026 4:40pm - 5:10pm EDT
Blaustein Hood Room (First floor)
Can an AI play a video game? This workshop uses that deceptively simple question to explore one of the deepest paradoxes AI poses to liberal arts education: the difference between knowing about an experience and living it. Drawing on a Francophone video game course taught at UMass Amherst featuring Valiant Hearts, Life is Strange True Colors, and Under the Waves, this session demonstrates how AI tools become most pedagogically powerful not when they succeed, but when they fail. Participants will experience firsthand how ChatGPT, Gemini, Mistral AI, and Copilot generate fluent yet experientially hollow analyses of games they have never played and how students, as actual players, are uniquely positioned to identify, contest, and surpass those analyses. This "player vs. machine" dynamic transforms AI from a threat to academic integrity into a catalyst for embodied critical thinking, intercultural analysis, and genuine French language engagement.
Speakers
EB
Friday October 16, 2026 4:40pm - 5:10pm EDT
Blaustein Hood Room (First floor)
  Workshop, Pedagogical Practice & The Human Element

4:40pm EDT

The Sacred and The Synthetic: Cultivating Higher-Order Thinking and Explorative Inquiry in the AI-Era Liberal Arts Classroom
Friday October 16, 2026 4:40pm - 5:10pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
Artificial intelligence presents liberal arts educators with a profound contradiction: AI can automate portions of research, analysis, and writing while simultaneously creating new opportunities for inquiry, interdisciplinary thinking, and human-centered learning. This interactive session explores how liberal arts classrooms can utilize AI not to replace student thought, but to deepen interpretation, synthesis, ethical reasoning, and creativity. Moving beyond routine comprehension, this presentation demonstrates how educators can leverage AI as an analytical partner to heighten critical thinking, expand explorative skills, and preserve student intellectual agency. Participants will engage with interdisciplinary classroom activities that combine history, sociology, philosophy, geography, economics, and the arts. Special attention will be given to pedagogical models that emphasize critical consciousness, adaptability, and the synthesis of complex data during periods of technological change. Attendees will leave with practical, scalable frameworks that empower students to bridge the gap between the synthetic capabilities of AI and the sacred, original human capacity for insight, interpretation, and meaning-making.
Speakers
NJ
Friday October 16, 2026 4:40pm - 5:10pm EDT
Blaustein Ernst Room (First floor)
  Workshop, Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Innovations

5:15pm EDT

Welcome Cocktail Reception
Friday October 16, 2026 5:15pm - 6:15pm EDT
Humphrey's (Crozier-Williams, Second floor)

Friday October 16, 2026 5:15pm - 6:15pm EDT
Humphrey's (Crozier-Williams, Second floor)
  Meal

6:15pm EDT

Welcome Dinner
Friday October 16, 2026 6:15pm - 8:30pm EDT
Crozier-Williams 1962 Room
Supported by our Symposium Patron, Element451
Friday October 16, 2026 6:15pm - 8:30pm EDT
Crozier-Williams 1962 Room
 

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