A campus-wide dialogue on artificial intelligence and how the liberal arts can engage with it constructively will take place Jan. 26-29.
The wide-ranging series of events comprising Kenyon’s Summit on Liberal Arts x AI will include renowned speakers, hands-on workshops, and voices from faculty, staff and students who are experimenting with AI in their teaching and research.
“Higher education today is a sector immersed in institutional conversations about the risks and rewards of artificial intelligence. For Kenyon, the hope is that these conversations can bring new initiatives while also allowing us to reaffirm our mission and values,” said Associate Provost Travis Landry.
The goal of the four-day summit — whose full schedule can be found here — is to highlight a range of possibilities and create a space for conversations about emerging horizons and concerns with AI, framing the technology not as an existential threat but as an opportunity for the liberal arts to show their enduring value.
Events will explore opportunities for AI to strengthen teaching, research and creative practice; identify the capacities students will need to thrive in an AI-shaped world; and ground engagement with AI in Kenyon’s liberal-arts mission.
“We need to be forward-looking,” said R. Jordan Crouser, professor of computing and founding director of the new interdisciplinary program in computing. “And so we started to think about how we might put together a program that is not about convincing everybody that they should learn about AI or should use it … but rather is a space for us to surface a lot of these tensions.”
The summit will feature a multitude of perspectives and be hosted by the Office of the Provost, the interdisciplinary program in computing and the information technology department.
“It is not a one-size-fits-all event, and the objective is not to promote wholesale AI adoption across campus,” Landry said. “Rather, the format is better described as AI à la carte.”
The summit kicks off Monday, Jan. 26, with a book reading by D. Graham Burnett, co-editor of “Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement.” A Princeton University professor and national thought leader in AI and higher education, he will give a keynote address Tuesday, Jan. 27, addressing AI’s capabilities and limits and what they mean for the study of the liberal arts.
The Kenyon Student AI Club and a variety of faculty from across disciplines will make up two “Kenyon Voices on AI” sessions that take place Tuesday and Wednesday. In the moderated discussions, participants will discuss how AI is touching their teaching, research and creative practice.
Other summit events include hands-on workshops with tools like the collaborative AI platform BoodleBox and the AI-powered research tool Keenius. A panel discussion featuring library services staff will focus on how datasets are constructed, where popular chatbots excel and fall short, and how to make AI ethical and equitable within Kenyon’s community.
Wrapping up the summit will be Michelle R. Weise, a leading thinker on the future of education, work and lifelong learning. The award-winning author of “Life Long Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet,” she will give a keynote address on Thursday, Jan. 29.
Wisdom Akanwe ’27, president of the Kenyon Student AI club, said the AI programming represents an important opportunity for students.
“For many of us, the summit represents a space to critically engage with how AI intersects with ethics, creativity, academic disciplines and future career paths, rather than viewing it solely as a technical tool,” he said.
The Summit on Liberal Arts x AI is supported by a generous gift from John W. Adams P’93,’13, GP’21, former chair of the Kenyon Review Board of Trustees.
AGILE@Kenyon (AI Group for Institutional Leadership and Education), a cross-divisional AI working group at Kenyon, helped with planning for the summit.