Report of the Hastings Advisory Committee for AI and Humanity (2025-2026)

Martin Abel (Economics), Allison Cooper (Romance Languages and Literatures and Cinema Studies), Eric Chown (Director, Digital and Computational Studies), Willi Lempert (Anthropology), Fernando Nascimento (Digital and Computational Studies), and Beth Stemmler (Chemistry)

Charge

Appointed by Bowdoin President Safa Zaki in the spring of 2025, the Hastings Advisory Committee for AI and Humanity was charged with leading the College’s efforts to “critically examine, thoughtfully utilize, and ethically shape AI’s trajectory.” The committee was also charged with establishing Bowdoin as a leader among liberal arts colleges in the development and cultivation of AI for the common good. In its first full year, the advisory committee: 1) supported the Office of Academic Affairs and CEP in efforts to allocate and fill ten new tenure lines; 2) led conversations about the challenges and affordances of AI; and 3) created resources to support existing Bowdoin faculty in their efforts to engage with AI in their teaching, research, and artistic practice. Recognizing that the Committee in Teaching and Classroom Practice (CoTCP) is in the midst of a three-year, Davis Foundation funded “AI and Teaching Initiative,” our primary focus this year has been on supporting AI-related research and artistic practices. The Hastings team has also worked to meet President Zaki’s additional charge to 1) develop a mission statement to guide the future work of the Initiative, 2) propose a sustainable organizational structure, and 3) identify resources and activities that might best support the Bowdoin community’s engagement with AI on a continuing basis.

I. Annual Report

Our work this year took place on several levels, from efforts to establish the Initiative’s own structure and position at Bowdoin, to activities intended to reach constituencies beyond our campus. Our annual report structure reflects this multiscale approach, summarizing our internal (Initiative-building) activities through external (beyond Bowdoin) activities. For a more detailed list of Initiative activities in AY 2025-2026, please see the attached appendix.

A. Building the Initiative

We were able to staff the Initiative by the start of this academic year, bringing on board two post-baccalaureate fellows, Jenna Barac (’25) and Anya Workman (’25), and two postdoctoral fellows, Adrienne Kinney (PhD in Applied Mathematics, University of Arizona) and Collin Lucken (PhD in Philosophy, University of Cincinnati). The Hastings post-baccs and post-docs are cornerstones of the Initiative’s foundation and are responsible for creating educational resources, supporting the research of grant recipients, outreach on campus and beyond, maintaining the Hastings website, coordinating academic programming, and providing technical support. In addition, in the fall we hired six Hastings Student Ambassadors who, supervised by post-doc Lucken, brought the work of the Initiative directly to the student body. The student ambassadors’ academic-year work will be taken up this summer by a cohort of six. Hastings Summer Fellows, who will support and participate in AI-related faculty research under the supervision of Kinney and Lucken.

The Initiative also produced several resources for our own use and for the Bowdoin community, all of which are shared on a dedicated Hastings website, developed and launched last summer. These include, for example, an Environmental Impact Hub and an overview of AI’s impact on high school education “AI in High School Education: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities.” The website is the primary channel through which the activities of the Initiative are shared. It features weekly updates on significant developments in artificial intelligence and a Perspectives on AI page featuring voices across the Bowdoin community.

The work of building the Initiative has principally been carried out by its full-time post-baccalaureate and postdoctoral fellows, under the supervision of faculty director Eric Chown. The faculty advisory committee, which meets weekly for two hours during the academic year and throughout the summer, plays an active role in guiding the Initiative by helping to establish priorities and supporting activities. This summer, we will focus on the second half of President Zaki’s charge, developing a mission statement, proposing an organizational structure for the Initiative, and identifying key areas of support, resources, and activities moving forward.

B. Focusing on the Bowdoin Community

The Initiative engaged Bowdoin faculty and instructional staff this year through grantmaking programs, educational offerings, and public-facing events including lectures and speaker series. We designed and operated internal funding mechanisms to seed AI-related work, including critical inquiries into AI, across the Bowdoin community. Funding categories include Explore AI grants (up to $1,000), Project Seed Funding (originally up to $5,000, now $3,000 following the addition of a more robust grant category), Full Project Grants (up to $10,000), and, upon request, student summer support in the form of trained Hastings Summer Fellows. The grants, which are typically reviewed on a biweekly basis by the advisory committee, invite colleagues to join in the Initiative’s work to critically examine, thoughtfully utilize, and ethically guide AI’s trajectory. To date, the Initiative has funded 24 Explore AI grants, 28 Project Seed Funding grants, and 5 Full Project grants. The overall distribution of grants across the divisions of the College is roughly 36% Humanities and Fine Arts, 26% Social and Behavioral Sciences, 24% Natural Science and Mathematics, and 14% Interdisciplinary. Additionally, 10 colleagues have requested support from trained Hastings Summer Fellows.

We added a funding program for students in the spring, enabling them to apply for grants of up to $1,000. In the initial granting period we approved 24 such grants. This pool of funding also supports the six Hastings Summer Fellows who will start in June and will receive training from the Initiative before working on a variety of projects. Many of the Summer Fellows will support Bowdoin faculty research and many others will be connected to local non-profit organizations, reflecting our commitment to the common good.

Initiative support for faculty and instructional staff interested in engaging with AI also included a two-day AI Short Course in January along with many one-on-one meetings and research collaborations with Hastings team members, with the latter occurring most frequently in the context of support for proposed research projects or grant-related activities. In the spring we also began adding small workshops covering topics such as using Claude Cowork, and teaching without giving up on essays as assignments. Our plan is to significantly ramp up such events in the coming year.

Complementing these faculty-directed educational offerings were a variety of student-facing activities, including a panel on AI at this year’s Sophomore Boot Camp, a fireside chat co-hosted by Bowdoin’s BUMP initiative (Bowdoin Underrepresented in Medical Professions) as part of our AI & Health mini-series, and a Cowork and Prompting Workshop with the AI Impact student club.

Finally, the Initiative played an important advisory role in the expansion of the faculty with regard to the 10 new lines created by the Hastings gift. We did not participate in the actual vetting or approval of submitted AFPs or in hiring processes that were beyond the scope of our charge, but we consulted on select elements of the process. In the spring of last year the committee worked with Academic Affairs and CEP to establish guidelines for how the initial three hires might take place. We started with a guiding principle that the hires should fall into at least one of three distinct categories with respect to AI: thoughtful use, critical examination, and ethical guidance. We also suggested that the hires span the College’s divisions, with the choice of individual departments left to CEP. This process repeated itself this year as once again we advised Academic Affairs and CEP regarding how the process might proceed and how proposals for the allocation of faculty positions might be evaluated. Initiative director Eric Chown and advisory committee members also met with candidates during campus visits to answer questions about the Initiative and the role that new hires might play in it. We emphasized that the Initiative would offer a community and opportunities to new hires, but that they would be under no extra obligation due to the nature of their positions. It is our collective belief that there should be no extra burden placed upon junior hires, as it could interfere with their ability to succeed at Bowdoin and ultimately to achieve tenure. More than anything we want them to be successful.

C. Beyond Bowdoin

The Initiative brought a number of highly regarded scholars and practitioners to campus for public lectures and workshops, including computer scientist and digital activist Joy Buolamwini for the Kenneth V. Santagata Memorial Lecture and author and researcher Brian Christian, whose work spans computer science, philosophy and writing, as part of our community reading project.

Our plan is that each year the Initiative will have a theme. In the first year the theme was “Health.” As befits the theme, we hosted physician-researcher Leo Celi for a public workshop engaging local healthcare providers in addition to the College community, and Kirsten Ostherr, whose work focuses on trust and privacy in digital health ecosystems for a public lecture on the importance of digital health humanities. Bowdoin alum Sam Nordberg (‘99), chair of psychiatry and behavioral health at Atrius Health and Reliant Medical Group, hosted a student conversation on how AI is transforming health care. Next year’s theme will be “Creativity.” We encourage community members to give us suggestions for speakers and activities around that theme.

We also co-sponsored several events focusing on important issues in AI. These included a talk by Elif Nisa Polat, a policy expert and economist at the World Bank, on how the humanities have prepared students for the post-AI world. We also co-sponsored computational linguist Dan Loehr’s visit for a public talk on climate change and AI. Harvard professor Jennifer Hochschild, giving the John C. Donovan lecture, spoke on political responses to new technologies. Finally, we co-sponsored a dinner and panel discussion with the leadership office that brought back alumni panelists for a discussion of AI’s impact on jobs.

In addition to public-facing events, Initiative team members engaged directly with the surrounding community, presenting our work to the Small Point Club and the Friends School of Portland, and participating in a journalism class interview about AI at Camden Hills Regional High School. We consulted with a number of local school systems on how they are engaging with AI. We also collaborated with colleagues at Colby and Connecticut College in webinar panels focused on AI in liberal arts institutions and have since expanded that effort to include six more liberal arts colleges. That group is now working to build programming and material centered on how liberal arts colleges can meet the AI moment.

II. Concerns and Recommendations

The following recommendations address, respectively, the scholarly, pedagogical, and institutional dimensions of the College’s AI engagement.

A. Defining, Evaluating, and Supporting Scholarly Work in the Age of Generative AI

Generative AI’s potential to disrupt traditional understandings of scholarship will increasingly raise questions about how scholarly work is to be defined and evaluated. For many scholars, it is already playing a significant role in the analysis, summary, and evaluation of information. For others, it is playing an important role as a reviewer or pre-reviewer of grants, papers, and books. And for others still, it is already being used to generate and edit drafts of written work, emails, letters of recommendation, etc. The insertion of AI into the realm of scholarship gives rise to real and pressing questions about authorship and attribution, especially in the context of high-stakes evaluations of achievement like tenure and promotion.

Scholarly engagement with AI is also likely to enable access to previously intractable research questions and expedite efficient access to data that would otherwise be bogged down by tedious and repetitive tasks. In this realm, access (or lack of access) to the most capable AI models and tools will play a critical role in defining research trajectories and scholarly productivity. The College needs to ensure that faculty and students do not fall behind in research environments that are propelled by access to AI.

Recommendation: Departments should articulate disciplinary norms when it comes to evaluating scholarship in the AI era and, in parallel, CAPT should develop formal guidance. The College should facilitate cross-unit discussions among departments, divisions, CAPT, and the Office of Academic Affairs about evolving understandings of ethical AI engagement. It should also ensure faculty access to frontier models across disciplines.

B. Providing Clarity About AI’s Place in Bowdoin’s Educational Mission

The recent explosion of AI usage has proven to be a divisive phenomenon in society, and Bowdoin is no exception. Faculty have concerns about students’ submission of AI-generated work and students have concerns about faculty outsourcing grading and lesson development to AI. Reciprocal distrust impedes the success of the College’s educational mission, and both faculty and students would benefit from greater transparency about how AI can and should be used at the College. And yet, we note that well-resourced liberal arts colleges such as Bowdoin—with small class sizes and high intrinsic student motivation—are perhaps best 4 positioned in this current AI wave to meet the moment: fostering mutual trust, transparency, and purpose in navigating this powerful set of technologies. The hiring of 10 faculty, in addition to adding technical expertise, is also meant to further increase the one-on-one human engagement between faculty and students that is so vital to imparting the importance of human labor, relationships, and inquiry in what it means to have a well-rounded liberal arts education that cares about the common good.

Recommendation: All Bowdoin faculty members should make the effort to include a course-specific AI statement on their syllabi that addresses two crucial questions: 1) What, if any, is the role of AI in this course? and 2) Why is that the case and how does this position about AI support the course’s stated learning goals? Additionally, the College should work to develop guiding principles to ensure that students and faculty have a mutual understanding of expectations and standards for the use of AI in the context of instruction, learning, and evaluation.

C. Balancing the Educational Mission and the Needs of Critical Support Units

We have focused on seeding and supporting research this year. Increasingly, it has also become evident that the College urgently needs to determine how to balance the needs of the academic mission, defined as the direct engagement with research and teaching, with those of units on campus that support the mission in essential ways. Some examples include the Bowdoin Libraries, IT, and the BCLT, as well as administrative units like Admissions, Student Affairs, HR, and Grants, which have compelling reasons to leverage the power of AI towards their goals. The success of Bowdoin’s administrative programs and units is critical to fulfilling Bowdoin’s ambition to be a leader among liberal arts colleges in the development and cultivation of AI for the common good, but supporting their needs is beyond the Hastings team’s ability in our current form – we lack both the capacity and the authority to do so.

Recommendation: The College should develop a plan to assess AI needs at Bowdoin beyond those of the academic mission and work to expand funding and training across the entire College community.

III. Concluding Remarks

AI is changing higher education, whether we like it or not, just as it is transforming society as a whole. Moreover, AI itself is still changing rapidly and will continue to do so. The overarching goal of the committee has been to support the Bowdoin community as it navigates a tumultuous period, whether that is at the institutional level by guiding the development of policy or at the individual level by providing support for research or opportunities for learning. The transitional moment we now find ourselves in offers opportunities to help criticize, guide, and shape AI-related change. It also poses a very real challenge of keeping up with rapid change while we simultaneously work to maintain our institutional values. In discussions with other schools, it is clear that Reed Hastings’ gift has provided the College with a significant catalyst that has put us ahead of our peers, but we are really only at the beginning of a new era for higher education. Meeting current and future challenges posed by AI will require significant engagement from the entire community. We’re counting on our colleagues’ collaboration as we face those challenges in the coming months and years.

Appendix

Timeline of the Activities of the Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity (2025-2026) (Community events in bold)

April 2025

Advisory committee begins weekly meetings (first meeting 4/4/25)
Committee charge drafted (President Zaki establishes committee with 1.5-year term)
Early strategic planning discussion
Joint meeting with CEP on allocation of faculty positions (4/21/25)
AI consultation with Carleton College (4/23/25; Eric)
Retreat I scheduled
Director meeting with President Zaki, "Initiative Kickoff"

May 2025

Retreat I: Vision, Funding, Governance (5/12/25, Coastal Studies Center)
Advisory meetings (weekly) focused on grants and hiring
Meeting with Anthropology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy to discuss hiring (5/14/25; Eric)
Postdoc and postbac searches underway
Faculty grant program designed
Job ad language drafted for Hastings-linked tenure lines
Listening tour prompts drafted
Bowdoin Women in Technology presentation (5/9/25): Eric Chown, "Exploring the Future of AI at Liberal Arts Colleges" (Bowdoin, Bates, Colby)

June 2025

Advisory meetings continue (weekly)
Postdoc interviews conducted
7 faculty grant applications received
AI platform pricing research
Meeting with Michael Donihue (Colby) to discuss joint Colby-Bowdoin programs (6/26/25; Eric)
Faculty grant application form and process finalized
Website design begins (internal mockups; first external Communications meeting 7/1/25)
Anya Workman starts as postbac
Faculty-Staff Grant Round 1 call circulated

July 2025

Jenna Barac starts as postbac
Communications meeting on website and branding (7/1/25)
Student AI Ethics Module meeting with Library (7/16/25)
Communications website update meeting (7/22/25)
AI tool guide created AI glossary created
Other schools benchmarking research completed
Comparison of AI Education Plans produced
Listening tour launched across 15 non-academic departments, administrative offices, and centers
Website launched
Retreat II (7/10/25)

August 2025

Environmental Impact messaging meeting (8/4/25)
“New to AI Faculty Guide: A Brief Introduction to Generative Artificial Intelligence and What It Can Do for You” created
“AI in High School Education: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities” report created
Meeting with Bowdoin Academic Deans to discuss position allocation (8/11/25; Eric)
Aliosha Barranco Lopez rotates off of the committee as part of her sabbatical
Small Point Club community outreach (8/14/25): Eric Chown, "AI and the Common Good”
Admissions Retreat presentation (8/20/25; Jenna and Anya)
Education Department consultation (8/20/25; Eric)
AI consultation with The New College (8/22/25; Eric)
Alumni Volunteer Conference planning meeting
Faculty tenure line job ads released

September 2025

Postdocs Adrienne Kinney and Collin Lucken start
Willi Lempert joins the committee as a faculty member
“AI Research by Field: A Bowdoin Departmental Guide” created and sections sent to department chairs
Biochemistry department consultation on Hastings faculty positions (9/9/25; Eric and Anya)
Parents Executive Committee presentation planning meeting
“LibreChat Guide for Science Instructors” created
Meeting with CEP to discuss new faculty positions (9/15/25; Eric and Fernando)
Alumni Fall Volunteer Conference presentation (9/19/25; Jenna and Anya)
CXD Co-curricular Opportunities meeting
Report to Faculty delivered at Faculty Meeting (9/19/25; Allison and Fernando)
“LibreChat Quickstart Guide” created
Joy Buolamwini visit for the Kenneth V. Santagata Memorial Lecture (9/23/25, cosponsored)

October 2025

Schiller meeting (10/2/25)
Brian Christian campus visit (10/6/25)
Joint CEP-Hastings info session for new faculty positions (10/7/25)
Joint CEP-Hastings info session for new faculty positions (10/9/25)
Student Affairs presentation (10/9/25; Anya)
HPC/IT infrastructure meeting (10/10/25)
Generative AI Hackathon (10/14/25, cosponsored)
Board of Trustees presentation (10/17/25; Eric, Adrienne, Jenna)
Newsletter planning meeting with Communications (10/17/25)
Alan Lightman visit (10/20/25, cosponsored)
Family Weekend Panel: AI at Bowdoin — A Vision for the Future (10/24/25; Eric, Adrienne, Jenna, Allison)
Parents Executive Committee presentation (10/24/25; Anya)
First monthly newsletter drafted Student ambassadors hired
McKeen Center "What Matters" conversation (10/30/25; Anya): "Creativity in the age of AI”
E-news rolling content submissions in place

November 2025

Faculty-Staff Grant Round 1 deadline
Meet with 3 Anthropology candidates; attended 3 job talks (Eric)
Consulted with Education (11/11/25; Eric)
AI & Health Speaker Series planning begins (meeting 11/12/25)
Consulted with Africana Studies (meeting 11/13/25; Eric and Anya)
President Safa Zaki attends Advisory Committee meeting (11/14/25); preparation and follow-up in 11/7 and 11/21 meetings
AI Initiatives in the Liberal Arts group created (Colby, Bowdoin, Connecticut College) (11/21/25; Eric)
Environmental Impact Hub created
Ambassador composite photo and announcements in e-news

December 2025

“Addressing Climate Change with AI” event (12/2/25, cosponsored)
Meet with 3 Neuroscience candidates; attended 3 job talks (Eric)
AI & Health Speaker Series planning meeting (12/3/25)
1794 Society Virtual Town Hall (12/10/25; Collin and Jenna)
ICF GHG Emissions consulting slides received (12/11/25)
AI Short Courses planning and logistics finalized
Continued advisory committee meetings (12/5, 12/12)
AI Initiatives in the Liberal Arts meeting (12/19/25; Eric)

January 2026

AI Short Courses delivered (1/12–1/13/26, Mills Hall)
Sophomore Bootcamp session with panel on AI (1/16/26)
AI Initiatives in the Liberal Arts meeting (1/16/26; Eric)
AI Initiatives in the Liberal Arts meeting (1/23/26; Eric)
Meet with 3 Philosophy candidates; attended 3 job talks (Eric)
GHG Emissions corpus assembly underway

February 2026

Faculty-Staff Grant Round 2 call circulated
AI Initiatives in the Liberal Arts meeting (2/2/26; Eric)
Student AI Grant and summer fellows call circulated
"Awakening Together: Building Community Around AI in the Liberal Arts" webinar panel (2/4/26; Eric)
Student funding meeting (2/3/26)
AI Drop-In Session: NotebookLM (2/6/26; Jenna and Anya)
GHG Emissions EPA corpus finalized
AI & Health: Sam Nordberg visit (2/12/26, cosponsored)
Elif Nisa Polat visit (2/12/26, cosponsored)
Faculty Seminar AI Project Showcase #1 (2/25/26; Eric moderating; panel of Hastings grant recipients)
AI Initiatives in the Liberal Arts meeting (2/27/26; Eric)
Student AI Grant applications in process

March 2026

Summer fellows chosen
Perspectives on AI website page launched
Friends School of Portland presentation (3/10/26; Jenna and Anya)
AI Weekly website page launched
Camden Hills Regional High School journalism interview (3/18/26; Anya)
AI Initiatives in the Liberal Arts meeting (3/20/26; Eric)
"Who Built the Room? Belonging by Design in the Age of AI" webinar panel (3/24/26; Eric)
Bowdoin Women in Tech (WIT) Showcase (3/24/26; Adrienne and Anya)
Jennifer Hochschild visit for the John C. Donovan Lecture (3/26/26, cosponsored)
Alumni Volunteer Breakfast / Presentation (3/27/26; Adrienne, Collin, Anya)
Faculty AI panel

April 2026

Cowork & Prompting Workshop for students (4/1/26, cosponsored)
AI & Health: Leo Anthony Celi workshop (4/2/26)
“Let’s Not Give Up on the College Paper in the Age of AI” lunch panel (4/13/26)
AI and leadership alumni panel (4/14/26, cosponsored)
AI Project Showcase #2 (4/15/26; Eric moderating; panel of Hastings grant recipients)
“The Case Against AI Detectors” infographic created and distributed through the website and the BCLT newsletter
Faculty-Staff Grant Round 2 deadline
AI Initiatives in the Liberal Arts meeting (4/17/26; Eric)
AI & Health: Kirsten Ostherr lecture (4/21/26)
Claude Cowork workshop for faculty (4/29/26; Collin)
End-of-year report to faculty created
Summer fellows announced in e-news

May 2026

AI Initiatives in the Liberal Arts meeting (5/1/26; Eric)
Consultation with Skidmore College on AI initiatives (5/12/26; Eric)
AI Initiatives in the Liberal Arts meeting now including - Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut College, Middlebury, Trinity College, Carleton, Le Moyne (5/15/26; Eric)
Brian Kim workshop (5/20/26)

June 2026

AI for Nonprofits Workshop (6/10/26)

Summer 2026 (Planned)

Summer Fellows Program AI & Liberal Arts
Summer 2026 event ideas in planning
Continued research projects: Map of AI at Bowdoin; Multidimensional Poverty POIs; LLM Engagement Study