President Uzzi on How the College is Approaching AI, Education & Opportunity
Dear Students, Colleagues, Trustees, and Friends of the College,
If you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ve probably been seeing a lot of Thomas College. This month the College made two big announcements. First, we rolled out a new scholarship in honor of Harold Alfond and the Alfond Scholarship Foundation’s investment in every Maine child. Our new scholarship will match the original $500 investment of the Foundation with another $500 annually for any Alfond Scholar who attends Thomas. This new scholarship is renewable for up to four years and represents Thomas’ investment in Maine students and Maine’s future.
Second, we announced a transformational $3 million Title III Strengthening Institutions Grant that will support the project “Building the College of the Future: Integrating Artificial Intelligence Across the Curriculum.” This grant is tied directly to our strategic plan Thomas 2030: Building the College of the Future, and it will help turn our strategic goals into realities.
In Thomas 2030, the College set a bold ambition: “Thomas College will distinguish itself as an institution that uniquely prepares students of all backgrounds to meet the challenges of the coming decades,” in part by “enhancing our curricula to prepare students to thrive in an AI world.” To my mind, the key word here is thrive. What does it mean to thrive? Thriving assumes the ability to design and create the life one wishes to lead. Thriving requires agency; it requires confidence. Thriving often connotes living up to one’s full potential.
AI is not going away, so at Thomas we take the pragmatic view that thriving in an AI world will require basic facility and comfort with AI. Thriving in an AI world will require an understanding of the technology that drives AI as well as an informed appreciation of the limitations and risks associated with AI and its use. The knowledge and skills needed to prepare today’s students to thrive in an AI world are not the domain of most college and university faculty, who are learning AI alongside students and themselves either avoiding AI altogether or struggling to keep pace with technological change. For these reasons, the centerpiece of our grant is an AI Specialist in Residence who will work full time at the College for two years to train every faculty member in every discipline to anticipate the changes AI is likely to bring to their discipline and to the professions it feeds. The AI Specialist in Residence will infuse the Thomas College faculty with the most current AI training available so that the faculty can pass that onto our students.
But thriving in an AI world will not stem only from learning to understand and use AI across the curriculum. The most frequent questions I am asked about this grant have to do not with what faculty and students will learn but with the risks associated with AI: the ethical dilemmas AI engenders, the dangers posed by AI, and the environmental impact of AI use. My response is that this grant provides the guardrails. Fear and avoidance are understandable responses to the rapid development of AI, but fear and avoidance are not protection; knowledge is. Protecting ourselves from the risks and dangers associated with AI and ensuring we understand how to use AI appropriately, efficiently, and ethically will only come through education. For our students, thriving in an AI world will require knowing when not to use AI, when to be skeptical or suspicious of AI, and especially when to privilege human intelligence over the artificial.
The more ubiquitous the use of AI becomes, the more critical the application of human intelligence will be. Perhaps it sounds ironic or counter-intuitive, but the single most powerful outcome of the College’s commitment to AI across the curriculum might just be in helping students understand that thriving in an AI world will require them to hone and apply their human intelligence ever more sharply.
I am immensely proud that the Department of Labor saw value in our Title III proposal and funded our grant at the full level requested. This funding will put Thomas College on the cutting edge of AI curriculum development and ensure we are doing all we can to prepare our graduates for a long future of thriving.
I wish you all the best at this season of midterms!
