An Invitation to Shape our Approach to AI

Dear Colleagues,

We are writing with an invitation for Holy Cross faculty and staff to engage more deeply with artificial intelligence. We ask: what will it take to create and sustain a truly transformational liberal arts education in an era of rapid technological change? Together with Holy Cross students, faculty, and staff, we can build on the outstanding foundations laid down by last year’s Presidential Task Force and begin to answer this question for our College.

Absent a radical and systematic shock, artificial intelligence tools and systems will continue to rapidly evolve in their potential, prompting urgent questions and compelling our institutional response. Leading voices, including Pope Leo XIV (Magnifica Humanitas), and Nobel laureates, have sounded the call for action to ensure that human flourishing remains the core priority. Pressures on higher education and the College to adapt to such transformative potential proactively and in a mission-aligned way will increase. 

Our goal must be to create an unmatched liberal arts education for every Holy Cross student that cultivates enduring habits, capacities, and characteristics. Across their time at the College, we hope that all of our students develop the discernment, expertise, imagination, and commitment to justice that the future needs. 

Developing enduring habits of mind is the core academic and educational work of the College. If a Holy Cross liberal arts education is to be transformative and sculpted by cura personalis, it will have academic, interpersonal, moral, spiritual, and sociocultural dimensions. Desirable difficulty and effortful activity are central to individual development and lasting learning across the disciplines. Critical thinking, creativity, judgment, and expertise are developed over time and between people – especially in courses and high-impact learning experiences which promote individual agency, celebrate curiosity, and inspire independent research.

As has been observed systematically, uncritical reliance on AI systems within learning, teaching, and knowledge-creating work can: create cognitive debt/cognitive surrender; reduce the effort essential to durable learning and the development of expertise; reduce trust in academic work products and create gaps between student and instructor; reduce the appetite for creativity, uncertainty, and the curiosity necessary to identify questions worth asking; obscure or hide forms of bias and inequality; and diminish human agency and autonomy. On the other hand, intentional adoption of AI systems and tools can unlock astonishing intellectual breakthroughs and organizational improvements, including in areas we are only just beginning to identify. 

Some leading institutions have taken deliberate steps recently to clarify the role of AI in learning and teaching, including the University of Chicago Law School, which provides a helpful conceptual frame:  students should learn “with, without, and about AI.” MIT has recently announced priorities for learning which closely resemble the core offering of a residential liberal arts college. At Holy Cross, we too should learn, teach, and research with, without, and about AI, while adding a fourth term: Why. Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas provides direction and inspiration, reminding us not only to work against dehumanization, violence, and shallow techno-solutionism, but also calling on us, as an academic institution, to center learning, teaching, and scholarship that cultivates human flourishing. 

Learning may be enabled with or without technology. Teaching strategies, course designs, assessments, and activities should reflect intentional, evidence-based decision-making anchored in the science of learning and motivated to create the conditions in which all students can realize their academic potential. Faculty must have the freedom to explore and implement what works best to promote long-term learning in their courses and programs, whether that includes technologies or not. As a community, we should be relentless in our commitment to cultivating human potential through learning, including the moral and spiritual dimensions of learning described so eloquently in the College’s mission statement.

We can learn from current research on the interactions between AI and learning and study evidence-based approaches adopted elsewhere; we should also conduct our own research, experiment here on campus, and share the results of our experiments openly. In order to ensure that familiar institutional structures and legacy approaches are not barriers to effective learning, we should also be fearless in asking questions about our educational assumptions, structures, systems, and practices. At Holy Cross, we need to take an active hand in steering any AI-prompted transformation by reaffirming the need to direct systems towards our highest goals—including by insisting on tools and systems which reduce harm and inequality. This includes our reflective awareness of AI as an end-to-end system, supply chain, and environmental phenomenon.

To support these broad institutional goals we have identified two core areas for intentional exploration. This will be the work of many hands, and our approach will necessarily evolve as we progress. 

Identify dedicated leadership to steer academic and educational engagement with AI:

1. We propose to recruit a tenured faculty member as Special Advisor to the Provost to lead these efforts, to work in partnership with a dedicated academic technologist housed within ITS. 
2. We plan to appoint a cross-divisional AI Steering Committee to assist in guiding the educational and academic work, maintaining as the north star our shared commitment to developing the capacities and habits of mind essential to a liberal arts education. 
3. We will follow up shortly with a call for expressions of interest in the leadership role and in the College-wide steering committee, including places for faculty members recommended by the AGC. 

Build institutional capacity to sustain and extend the quality of learning, teaching, and research to fulfill our core educational purpose:

1. We will invite the community to roundtable and collaborative design sessions to explore how we wish to form the future together.
2. By launching an AI research and exploration lab, we will provide dedicated time and resources for faculty members to explore appropriate pedagogies, systems, course designs and structures. This commitment includes exploration and implementation grants to promote evidence-based learning, teaching, and knowledge creation, including grants that explore teaching with, and crucially, without AI.

Further thoughts are detailed in this linked academic AI strategy document. We invite your collaborative partnership, questions, concerns, creative ideas, and expressions of interest. 

Yours sincerely, 

Elliott Visconsi, Provost & Dean of the College

David Shettler, Vice President & Chief Information Officer