Why Faculty Should Lead the AI Revolution

• At Babson College, faculty members from multiple disciplines have collaborated to launch The Generator, an AI lab that examines the technology’s impact on higher education, industry, and society.
• Groups from The Generator study how AI will impact areas such as entrepreneurship, ethics, experiential learning, prototyping, the future of work, the arts, and research innovation.
• The Generator’s AI Teaching Training Program supports faculty as they experiment with AI tools and build community. It has resulted in new MBA and undergraduate courses that draw on interdisciplinary knowledge.

 
In an era marked by rapid technological advancements, there’s an important distinction that educators and institutions need to make: AI is not IT. While information technology has undeniably reshaped academic environments by improving organizational connectivity and streamlining processes, artificial intelligence has the potential to completely transform how students learn and how faculty engage with teaching, research, and innovation.

Understanding AI is not an “IT question.” It’s an existential imperative about effective lifelong learning in a world that requires blending technology, ethics, futurism, and the human spirit to examine new ways to create, advance, and innovate.

Because AI will have far-reaching effects on education, faculty must be the ones to lead this transformation. Specifically, faculty urgently need to build their own AI communities of practice and engage with other educators to understand both the opportunities and risks presented by AI. Faculty must come together to probe how AI can accelerate both student learning and research innovation. And they need to discuss and understand the risks of AI models, ranging from hallucination to bias.

It will be essential for institutions to take two interdependent steps to engage with the AI age. First, they must support deep interdisciplinary collaboration across the institution. When traditional academic silos break down, faculty will have a more holistic understanding of AI’s impact on higher education, society, and industry.

Second, institutions of higher education need to put student learning at the center of the AI revolution. By doing do so, universities will ensure that educational initiatives align with the evolving demands of the modern world.

Firing Up The Generator

To accomplish both objectives and seize upon the potential of AI, Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, has launched The Generator. This interdisciplinary AI lab was founded and is led by nine faculty members from across the college, including the two of us. Our aim is not only to understand AI’s impacts on our own areas of expertise, but also to collaboratively examine AI’s effects on higher education at large.

The Generator’s faculty leaders come from the fields of entrepreneurship, philosophy, AI/machine learning, writing, strategy, theater, and innovation leadership. While some of us had deep expertise in AI, some just had an interest in—or perhaps a bit of concern about—what the technology could mean for education, industry, and society at large. Under The Generator umbrella, we have launched eight separate groups to build an AI community and deepen AI capabilities at Babson. These groups focus on the following areas:

• AI Entrepreneurship & Business Innovation
• Work Futures
• AI Ethics & Society
• AI & Experiential Learning
• AI & Machine-Learning Empowerment
• Prototyping With AI
• AI for Research & Writing
• AI Arts & Performance

Each group leads its own activities to activate and engage faculty, staff, and students across the college. For instance, partnering with students, the AI Entrepreneurship & Business Innovation group organized a 150-student Buildathon to identify opportunities to use AI to improve human well-being. This event also addressed the pressing need for entrepreneurial AI to confront the risks of AI, such as bias, misinformation, and disinformation.

Understanding AI is an existential imperative in a world that requires blending technology, ethics, futurism, and the human spirit to examine new ways to create, advance, and innovate.

The AI & Experiential Learning group has led Build-Your-Own-Bot sessions for faculty. The AI Ethics & Society group is engaging students, staff, and faculty in discussions about how emerging worlds enabled by AI may irreversibly alter the meaning of politics, the economy, and culture.

Meanwhile, the Prototyping With AI group piloted an experimental Prototype-It! Bot, which helps students prototype their entrepreneurial ideas. Depending on the venture idea, the bot directs them to relevant digital prototyping and coding capabilities on campus. The tool is currently being used in Babson’s flagship Foundations of Management & Entrepreneurship program—a yearlong course for all first-year students that challenges them to start and run a business.

In the humanities, the AI Arts and Performance group hosted an interactive exhibit at Babson featuring new works of art created in part by AI. This co-curricular event welcomed faculty and students to not only explore the art on display, but also to think through their own creative processes and how AI could be a partner in these pursuits. And the AI for Research & Writing group organized a large symposium for Massachusetts-area universities on the topic of generative AI and writing.

Each disciplinary focus adds something of value to the larger conversation, and each offers a unique front door for faculty, students, and staff to enter.

Collaborating Across Disciplines

One of The Generator’s keystone initiatives, the AI Teaching Training Program (AITTP), embodies the core idea of faculty leadership. Designed by faculty, for faculty, the AITTP prepares Babson’s educators to integrate AI meaningfully into their teaching.

Launched in spring 2024, the program gives participants hands-on experience with AI tools, facilitates cross-disciplinary discussions, and promotes the development of teaching methods that leverage AI’s unique capabilities. Faculty members from across Babson have now come together through multiple AITTP cohorts to explore AI’s potential to enhance experiential learning and support innovation across varied domains, ranging from businesses to healthcare to education.

“How business schools respond to artificial intelligence will model for students how to handle this historic change,” explains Stephen Spinelli Jr., president of Babson College. “If we try to ban or ignore AI, students will think they can bury their heads in the sand in the face of disruption. But if we show them AI is an opportunity, and if we lean into change and encourage experimentation, then we’ll be teaching one of the most valuable lessons we can about how to navigate the future.”

The Generator faculty team has now peer-trained 50 percent of Babson’s faculty in AI concepts and AI tools. The collaborative environment also allows faculty members to experiment with AI tools in a supportive space where they can discuss both the opportunities and challenges AI presents.

For example, professors in the arts have showed how they use the technology as a tool for creative expression, while business faculty have demonstrated AI’s value in market analysis and venture development. This cross-pollination of ideas not only enriches the faculty, but also enhances the educational experiences of students across the college. No individual IT platform can replace such hard-fought AI community-building efforts across the university.

While collaborative, interdisciplinary learning is paramount at the faculty level, it also presents incredible opportunities for co-learning at the student-faculty level.

In addition to delivering the benefits described above, the AITTP has resulted in tangible curricular outcomes. For example, an MBA course titled AI Pioneers draws upon insights unearthed from the groups dedicated to AI Entrepreneurship & Business Innovation, Work Futures, and AI & Machine-Learning Empowerment.

A new undergraduate course—called Writing With Robots: Authenticity, Ethics and AI—draws inspiration from both the AI Ethics & Society and AI & Experiential Learning groups. The course encourages students to think critically about the connection between human creativity and machine-generated content, as well as the larger ethics of using technology for these and other purposes. Cross-disciplinary collaboration is the defining idea.

Co-Learning With Students

While collaborative, interdisciplinary learning is paramount at the faculty level, it also presents incredible opportunities for co-learning at the student-faculty level. The lines between expert and novice are blurry in our classrooms because many students and faculty are developing an understanding of AI at the same time.

We see this as a positive because it allows for experiential learning opportunities that extend beyond the classroom walls. AI-related learning can look like traditional, in-class activities and assignments, or it can look very different. In The Generator lab, students identify AI tools for faculty to evaluate and pilot in AI courses, and they suggest and lead AI-focused extracurricular events. The goal is to co-create an increasingly capable community where students and faculty engage in open dialogue about opportunities and challenges, build strong relationships, and jointly drive pedagogical innovation.

As we see it, the goal of higher education is to support learning in ways that make an impact on students far beyond their years at Babson. When students are involved in the discovery process, they take away essential lessons they can use as they lead their own learning journeys for the rest of their lives.

Taking On Challenges

To ensure that The Generator continues to support faculty learning, student learning, and AI-enabled ventures, we plan to expand our initiatives. We aim to grow existing partnerships with industry innovators to provide students with mentorship opportunities and deep exposure to real-world AI challenges. We also intend to extend programming like the AITTP to engage faculty from other institutions. Our aim is to bring together a broader community of educators committed to reimagining higher education in the AI era.

There have been many challenges along the way—growing pains associated with building and administering new tools and ideas. For example, it took time to develop the Prototype-It! Bot because it needed to have a user-friendly capability that would cater to both tech-savvy and nontechnical users. To refine the bot, IT specialists and faculty collaborated extensively, carried out iterative testing, and gathered student feedback.

University faculty can’t just rely on IT experts for the answers. Instead, they need to lead the AI revolution to best serve their students in a world transformed by AI.

One overarching challenge has been that The Generator is such a time-intensive endeavor that the leaders are essentially doing two jobs at once. Such a faculty-led initiative—one that supports faculty, engages students, and examines how AI is changing higher education and industry—reaches far beyond regular committee service and becomes instrumental leadership. Team members are working to reshape the capabilities of the institution from within by spanning boundaries between students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and innovators deeply engaged in AI.

In response, Babson’s administration has identified creative ways to support the work and recognize the contributions of everyone—not just direct AI leaders, but all faculty, staff, and students navigating this new terrain:

• The Generator’s successes have been showcased broadly in institutional communications.
• Members from the team have been invited to high-profile events where they have presented to trustees and donors.
• The College’s Advancement team has assisted in research to secure greater funding.
• The Dean of Faculty has helped secure support for facilitating faculty-facing programming.

AI has arrived in a profound way, bringing questions about its far-reaching potential as well as its complex societal, ethical, and professional dimensions. University faculty can’t just rely on IT experts for the answers. Instead, they need to lead the AI revolution to best serve their students in a world transformed by AI.