Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

The University in Crisis? Smart Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

April 11, 2025, 1:00pm-3:00pm
HKS, Malkin Penthouse (Littauer 4th Floor)

Abstract

As students, we are increasingly experiencing our years of schooling “online.” With the advent of Generative AI, some conversations about how technology is changing and should change learning are afoot in newspaper opinion sections and faculty meetings. Harvard has recently inaugurated several efforts to respond to Generative AI, including the creation of task force on GenAI and the issuance of responsible experimentation guidelines, yet questions of how these technologies are already changing what learning means at Harvard have yet to be thoroughly explored.

A roundtable hosted by the Program on Science, Technology and Society’s Undergraduate Fellows, with faculty panelists Bharat Anand, Amanda Claybaugh, David Lamberth, Rebecca Nesson, Jane Rosenzweig, Jim Waldo, and Madeleine Woods in conversation with student panelists. 

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This event is the second workshop in a series hosted by the Undergraduate Fellows. Motivated by a convergence of moments which have been labelled variously as “crises” in higher education, “The University in Crisis” series brings together students, administrators, and faculty in conversations that frame these developments through STS scholarship and perspectives. These workshops approach The University as an institution of knowledge production and a custodian of the public good that molds and represents commitments to what we know, who we are, and how we should live.

To address broader concerns about the state of the university in contemporary American society and politics, this discussion-based event aims to step back and examine the very nature of the “crisis” in which Harvard finds itself – for today’s panels, the integration of AI (particularly LLMs and ChatGPT) in academic work. How do we know the university’s educational mission, who defines it, and where do student’s imaginations of the right way to learn find resonance? How might Harvard reimagine what it means to be responsible, yet critical, custodians of knowledge and cultivate nuanced forms of citizenship in this artificial age?

The STS Undergraduate Fellows believe that we need to be asking better questions about the state of education and its technological democratization. How are ideas of efficiency and accessibility, in combination with the rapid development of new technologies, transforming the public sphere of education? What does it mean to be a student, and what is it that we are being asked, or want, to learn? Rather than uncritically allow education to “be” transformed, we hope that this workshop can be a starting point by which to critically examine what technology is doing to the classroom and the student experience in order to transform technology’s place in our education.