Dartmouth leaders are not mandating the use of AI, yetcritics on campus say they’ve had little opportunity to adapt to what they see as a massive change to how the college works. At stake, they say, is the tight-knit academic culture Dartmouth has nurtured in rural New Hampshire over nearly three centuries as a school that focuses on the liberal arts, with a small student body and deeply personal style of instruction. It’s the only Ivy League institution with “college,” rather than “university,” in its name.
“There is no escaping [AI], and they have to figure out how to use it wisely,” said Charles Fadel, the Boston-based founder of the nonprofit Center for Curriculum Redesign. “The hard part is to accept that you are going to lose something.”
The recent efforts at Dartmouth — touted as the birthplace of AI, thanks to a seminal 1956 research conference on campus — largely began with James Dobson. The English professor was appointed as the special adviser to the provost on AI and drafted a reportlast year on the adoption of the technology. It recommended investing in data infrastructure and a partnership with a company like Anthropic — creator of the chatbot Claude — that would gradually integrate the tech into most facets of campus life.
The report marked how far Dartmouth has to go. Dobson’s own department has integrated AI in most first-year writing courses, where students sometimes compare close readings of scholarly articles to artificial intelligence-generated summaries. But he said the majority of faculty still ban the use of generative AI in their syllabuses, a “totally unenforceable” measure, he added. And a survey showed that over half of participating professors had not changed their assessments to reflect AI as of last summer.