As higher education institutions decide how to navigate the world of artificial intelligence, the Boston Globe has reported that Dartmouth College has moved faster than most. From developing an AI chatbot for students struggling with mental health, to incorporating it in the classroom, university leaders are moving quickly to adopt the technology.
Boston Globe staff writers Aidan Ryan and Diti Kohli have been covering the rollout of AI tools on Dartmouth's campus and they spoke with NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa about their reporting.
Transcript
An English professor at Dartmouth was appointed as the special advisor to the Provost on AI, and drafted a report last year on the adoption of the technology. What did the report say?
Diti Kohli: Essentially, he was charged with doing a temperature check, largely of the faculty, but also of students and staff. And what he found was a lot of, frankly, still resistance to the technology on campus. I think it’s long documented that there's a lot of professors who have fears about cheating and critical thinking with AI. But ultimately, the report noted that caution, but also laid out a number of ways in which the school would integrate AI into campus.
So, whether that was putting together a partnership with Anthropic, which is what we ended up reporting on, but also just ways of thinking about it in terms of the classroom, how can it be used for assignments in a way that actually engages students rather than just defaulting to it. In all, I think there were about 22 recommendations. So, it was a pretty vast list.
What has this looked like in practice?
Aidan Ryan: There are some first-year writing classes that are using AI for assignments. We’ve also seen other ways of how AI is being used on campus. One example that really kind of broke through was this chatbot, Evergreen, which is being developed by the college. It's supposed to be a kind of wellness platform, mental health platform that will include a chatbot, and it's still in development.
But [it] had a sort of mini controversy on campus when the student newspaper ran an op-ed from a student who then later disclosed that he had been paid by the college to write the op-ed, also approached and edited by the communications office at the college. The student paper then reported on that. And we spoke to several students and faculty members who took issue with that. I think people were concerned about what it meant about the integrity of AI on campus and how they can trust its implementation as it's just changing every corner of campus.
So, that's a bit about how Dartmouth is doing things. But how does this compare to other colleges and universities?
Diti Kohli: When Aidan and I talked to a number of administrators and faculty members on campus who have been involved in this rollout, the tone that is really taken is like, we don't want to be left behind, like we want to be a part of this integration. I think people were fairly open with us that there are a lot of unknowns, that there are a lot of questions about the extent to which the campus will actually want to adopt this. Dartmouth sees itself, partly because it identifies as the birthplace of AI, as a kind of college that is equipped to do this quickly. They have a smaller student population, but a level of prestige and of course, a reputed student body and faculty that they're up for the challenge in ways that I think other schools have been trying to take it more step by step. There's certainly some comparable examples, like Northeastern has also signed a deal with a chat bot version. And there's something similar at [Boston University], but it hasn't really been marketed and integrated as aggressively as [it has] at Dartmouth.
Aidan Ryan: I think just add on that too, just a little bit more context about why this is happening. I think there is an arms race, as one person in my story was quoted saying, among the AI companies to market their technology to students and faculty. We've seen it's not just Anthropic that is striking deals with universities. OpenAI is doing it as well. Microsoft with their CoPilot technology is also doing deals. There is a real opportunity for these companies to market their chatbots and their technology to these students and faculty. It’s a money-making opportunity.
On the flip side, there's also this race for competition among universities and I think especially among top universities, who is providing cutting edge research, who is innovating in the classroom, who is looking at this new technology and trying to figure out how to use it. I mean, this is not the first time that universities have worked with corporations and emerging technology to try and understand and research it. But I think what is different here is the speed at which it's happening, and also just the size of AI at this point.
There's been some pushback from faculty regarding the use of AI at Dartmouth, including from some whose work was used to train AI without their permission. What are the detractors saying? And also, are any faculty at Dartmouth in favor of the plan?
Aidan Ryan: I think what we've heard from the folks who are in opposition, or at least very skeptical of AI on campus is, I think largely, the effect it's going to have on the classroom. There's a lot of implicit pressure for students on campus to be using AI, even if they personally don't want to use it themselves. I think there's also a fear that students are using this to think and robbing them of their cognitive and critical thinking skills that a college, especially a campus [with] small classes and debates and kind of that really close, tight classroom culture is valuable.
Diti Kohli: Going along with Aidan's point about implicit pressure, it's not like they're being given resources if they did not want to use AI in the classroom. But it's not like they're being told explicitly that they have to. But it's interesting to be in a position of a professor where your students are in five other classes in which AI is either explicitly or implicitly a part of their learning. And you're maybe in a firmer boat where, you know, we're no longer in a world where you can put ‘no use of AI’ in your syllabus and that's how your classroom goes. And I feel like there are a lot of folks who are worried and feel like that's where their needs are not being met. And on top of that, it is inherently more work as a faculty member to figure out how new technology fits into your syllabus and fits into your classroom. And there are certainly faculty members who are operating on the, ‘This is happening. We also don't want our work to be hurt in the long term by AI, so we're going to keep this going.’
What have you heard from students about how they're using AI?
Diti Kohli: I'm sure similar to a couple decades ago when the Internet was becoming a larger part of college education, what I often pick up in talking to students, both for the Dartmouth story, but otherwise about the integration of AI, is how much they are operating on rules that are constantly changing, like what is permitted and not permitted in a college classroom, in a social setting, in college, and just your general integration into college life of using AI is like never really something you can answer. I think that's just an added level of confusion for students, even those who think that this will be a bigger and bigger part of their personal and professional lives going forward.
