Occidental has a newly formed artificial intelligence (AI) council to address the impact that AI has on the college, Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer James Uhrich said. According to Uhrich, the goal of the council is to create a plan to provide the community with more information about opportunities involving AI, create policy and discuss concerns.
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and professor of religious studies Kristi Upson-Saia serves as a co-chair on the council, along with Uhrich.
“The Occidental College AI Council serves as a central hub for engagement and deliberations about artificial intelligence on campus,” Upson-Saia said.
According to Uhrich, he and Upson-Saia have had conversations with members of the community throughout the past year to begin forming the council. During a faculty meeting last week, the two presented the charge, or formal objective, of the council.
Upson-Saia said that the council is broken into four parts: AI in the classroom, AI in post-graduate work/life, AI in campus operations and ethical/societal implications of AI. According to Uhrich, each group has its own specific goals for the academic year and the first working meeting is scheduled to take place within the next two weeks.
“The idea is to have working group and council meetings throughout the course of the academic year, and develop the first AI plan for Oxy,” Uhrich said.
According to Uhrich, one objective is to take inventory of the AI tools that the school currently uses, such as Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot. Although the school already has policies in place regarding general technology, Uhrich said they do not encompass what an AI policy requires.
“One of the main tasks of the AI Council and some of the working groups is going to be development of those kinds of policies and guidelines to offer sort of a road map for what we think we should be able to do,” Uhrich said.
Uhrich said it is immensely important for the Occidental community to participate in discourse regarding the usage of AI in educational settings.
“The biggest risk we have as a community that wants to […] provide the best education for our students, is not [contending] with this topic in a thoughtful and engaged way,” Uhrich said.
According to the Occidental website, there are courses available across departments that involve AI — including cognitive science, computer science, Media Arts & Culture, music and philosophy — since AI is transforming every field.
Director of the Writing Center and professor of American studies Julie Prebel said that AI is unavoidable in education today.
“If you want to invest in becoming a better writer, which to me is connected to becoming a stronger, critical thinker, then avoiding AI is just the way to go,” Prebel said.
Professor of economics, Associate Dean for Curricular Affairs and director of the Core Program Brandon Lehr said the use of generative AI goes against the purpose of the First Year Seminar (FYS) courses and is therefore prohibited within the program.
According to Prebel, there tends to be more skepticism of AI in humanities departments because tools like writing are tied to creative thinking and expression.
“Writing allows for that process of really pausing, reflecting, and untangling a problem,” Prebel said. “To me, those are elements that are distinctly human.”
Prebel said she appreciates the imperfection of the writing process and strives to teach it in her own classes.
“The product you produce or that you deliver in writing might eventually look polished, but in the process of getting there, it shouldn’t look like that at all,” Prebel said.
According to chair of the computer science department and professor of cognitive science Justin Li, writing involves numerous practices that do not correspond to computer science.
“Writing already has a history of checking with students, looking at drafts and then making sure that students actually respond to their feedback,” Li said. “That’s something that traditionally has not happened in computer science.”
Li said he tells students in his senior seminar they can use AI as much as they want as long as they can accompany the process with a paper that reflects the work.
“I’m actually not necessarily against students using AI, as long as they’re still actually learning the truth,” Li said.
Li said that this semester he has started giving a spiel about AI at the beginning of his courses, encouraging students to consider their goals in the course.
“There are many cases where students are using AI [in class] to create a presentation that is actually very shallow because the AI doesn’t have all the context of the student who has been thinking about it for months,” Li said. “There’s more than just feeding an AI and then taking things out.”
Professor of computer science Joel Walsh said he rebuilt his “AI and Learning Technologies” course after noticing that agentic coding was becoming a norm.
“For the final exam I actually required students to use Claude Code, ChatGPT and Codex, but with guardrails,” Walsh said. “I think so often people forget that there are many other bottlenecks in how software is made, and [coding] is only a small part of it.”
According to Walsh, the different courses he teaches have various levels of AI integration, and he wants to familiarize students with other aspects of software development.
“I also teach deep learning, which is the technology that underlies ChatGPT and many other AI systems,” Walsh said. “You actually need to be putting the math in yourself and testing it.”
Contact Lila Weiner at weinerl@oxy.edu
