In just a few years of artificial intelligence being introduced for public use, machine learning has grown exponentially in its accuracy, reasoning and generative capabilities. These developments have posed an unforeseen challenge for higher education institutions to keep up with these developments. Because AI has become an undeniable part of our future, educators are forced to rethink what accountability will mean as we approach that future. Now, the question has evolved from how educators should resist and prohibit the use of AI into the question of how AI should be incorporated in academia. 

According to the Brandeis Center for Teaching and Learning, “instructors are required by the University to include a policy in all their syllabi regarding the use (and misuse) of generative [Artificial Intelligence].” The center encourages instructors that “rather than outright prohibiting the use of generative AI,” they should create AI policies that allow students to “learn how to use generative AI tools ethically and effectively in their discipline.”

But Brandeis is taking measures to incorporate AI that go beyond encouraging individual faculty members to tweak their syllabi. Among the University’s provisions to support teaching is their Teaching Improvement, Experimentation and Research Grants, previously known as Teaching Innovation Grants. These grants are funded by the Provost’s Office and are intended to promote excelling in teaching by means of innovative and evidenced-based practices. TIER grants support two different types of projects, one of which is dedicated to exploring AI in the classroom. 

Traditional “TIER” grants work to “enhance student learning using approaches they have learned from pedagogical literature or colleagues,” “develop and try out new pedagogical methods or approaches” and “conduct classroom-based research.” On the other hand, “Generative AI-TIER” grants work to “enhance student learning through the use of generative AI tools,” “enhance student learning by developing new, innovative, authentic assignments and assessments that deter the use of AI tools” and “develop and try out new pedagogical practices that involve intentional use of generative AI tools.” 

There are ten GenAI TIER grant recipients across various schools and disciplines for 2024-25, the first academic year of this category of TIER grant. 

We are facing a future in which most areas of scholarship and processes of intellectual expansion have been fundamentally changed. This editorial board acknowledges that understanding AI is imperative and ignoring its presence can be a dangerous threat to academic institutions. However, there is just as much danger in haphazardly embracing its overwhelming possibilities, especially given its implications on the environment from increased electricity demand to water consumption needed to cool the hardware that AI runs on.

While exploration of generative AI’s role in the future of college learning is a priority, providing multiple instructors across departments funding to assign their students projects that require them to use chatbots and other forms of AI will certainly have a negative impact on the environment. Implementing these grants is a hasty jump towards integrating AI, especially in light of the fact that the University has eliminated its Office of Sustainability. Without an organized operation dedicated to promoting sustainability and keeping all parts of the university accountable for its environmental impact, it will be all the more difficult to regulate AI use on campus — let alone in classrooms where it’s required for a grade. 

No one really knows what the future of education and AI will look like, but we have to think responsibly about its very real environmental consequences. While it’s true that AI has become deeply pervasive, this board would like to warn against responding to its environmental effects with passivity. It’s easy to think that because the spread of AI is out of our hands and will be causing immense damage to the environment anyway, that it makes no difference whether or not those tools are used in class contexts.