"The sleep of liberal arts produces AI." At the opening of the previous symposium, the keynote speaker shrewdly put forward this statement, proposing the liberal arts education to stay awake in the age of AI. At Colby College, the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence endeavors to integrate the two, interrogating and experimenting a liberal arts education organically intertwined with AI. In collaboration with academic and administrative departments across campus, Colby has initiated a responsible AI ecosystem for research, learning, and entrepreneurship. We are developing a multitude of AI programming by situating faculty, students, and staff at the center, while piloting privacy preserving and cost-effective technical infrastructure for campus use. During this session, we will share our approach to a responsible AI ecosystem, attempting to carve out a space and time for the audience to think through a practical AI integration in the context of their home institution.
AI provides an unmatched opportunity for both accelerating and degrading high quality learning. Institutions of higher education must adapt by providing guidance to faculty and students across all departments; integrating AI literacy into the larger curricula rather than only covering it in specific computer science courses. In order to most effectively plan and evaluate these actions, we argue institutions implement a capabilities-based framework that understands faculty and students in terms of their capacities and functions in relation to existing college missions to produce socially and intellectually responsible graduates. The four capabilities—Access, Association, Involvement, and Literacy—give faculty, staff, and students a shared scaffolding and vocabulary for preserving the cognitive work genuine learning requires. We illustrate this recommendation through concrete examples across disciplines and work with the audience to brainstorm how they can apply this framework to their own classrooms and institutions.
