Since the Year of AI Exploration was launched this September, Oberlin College has conducted campus-wide surveys, hosted faculty-led panels, and welcomed guest speakers examining topics such as generative AI’s relationship to music, creativity, and critical inquiry. These efforts seek to explore the uses of artificial intelligence and give the College information to build future policy.
Building on the Review’s earlier coverage of the Year of AI Exploration, this piece examines how the initiative is unfolding.
AI Working Group Collects Student Perspectives
Student-led efforts have played a significant role in connecting campus experiences with institutional policy on AI. During the 2024-2025 academic year, the AI Working Group, a collaborative committee of students, faculty, and staff led by the Student Honor Committee and chaired by College fourth-year Lucas Daley, conducted intensive research on AI use in higher education.
A key part of the group’s work involved gathering anonymous feedback through campus-wide surveys to understand student perspectives on AI usage and policy. The results will inform the 2025-2026 Honor Code Charter Revision Committee as it refines the Honor Code.
Daley explained that the student survey aimed to capture both patterns of AI use and general attitudes toward the technology. Responses highlighted that a significant subsection of campus is strongly opposed to AI use, and while some students indicated they had used AI tools, a majority said they rarely or never do so. The largest group of respondents came from the Arts and Humanities.
“There’s definitely a pretty clear sampling bias in terms of the students who filled out the survey having stronger opinions about AI,” Daley said.
Respondents also tended to believe their peers were not using AI very often. Daley noted that this perception gap contrasted with the vast majority of current Honor Code cases involving unauthorized AI use. He added that qualitative follow-ups and focus groups would be important for interpreting the data more fully.
In addition to the survey, the group produced an executive summary of findings along with separate analyses on how AI is addressed across academic disciplines, peer institutions, and in policy and industry settings. These materials were shared with the faculty and administration involved with the Year of AI Exploration initiative to inform policy discussions.
Survey Gauges How Faculty Are Using AI
The faculty survey conducted by the College and Conservatory earlier this semester examined several areas of AI engagement. It asked which generative AI tools faculty had experimented with, primarily asking about text-based platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grammarly, though options for image and audio generation were also included. Respondents were asked how they had incorporated AI into their teaching, such as using it to assist with scheduling or organizing class activities, as well as how they had used it in their research or creative work, including searching for relevant literature or structuring ideas.
The survey results highlighted clear differences in how various disciplines approach AI. Since data collection mainly came from self-reports, individual responses could not be shared with the Review to elaborate on these differences. Faculty across departments are encouraged to decide individually whether and how these tools enhance or hinder their teaching and research, determining the contexts in which AI use is most appropriate for their work.
This approach aligns with the AI Working Group’s review of policies at Oberlin’s peer institutions, which found that flexibility, rather than uniform regulation, tends to yield better outcomes.
Privacy and Data Ethics
When Oberlin introduced institutional AI tools such as ChatGPT Enterprise and Google Gemini, Adam Eck, associate professor of Computer Science and head of Data Science, noted that some students and faculty expressed concerns about data privacy and oversight. Eck explained that while these tools provide limited aggregated usage data, such as total activity across all users, there is no institutional surveillance of individual accounts.
“To assuage one fear that I’ve heard — there is no institutional surveillance happening within our generative AI tools,” Eck wrote in an email to the Review. “Prompts that students, faculty, or staff enter are only visible to that individual; no other users at Oberlin (including CIT administrators) have access to what happens in anyone else’s account.”
Additionally, Oberlin’s institutional licenses differ significantly from the free public versions of these tools. Eck added that a key distinction is that any content entered into the College-managed platforms is not used to retrain the underlying models, a safeguard designed to protect users’ intellectual property and ensure data security.
Building AI Literacy Among Students and Faculty
As the initiative continues, the administration hopes to broaden the conversation to include other types of AI, highlighting how they differ from generative AI in terms of function, application, and societal impact.
According to Eck, a group of faculty is developing a curriculum in the interdisciplinary area of Critical AI Studies, aimed at helping students refine their ability to assess the usefulness, appropriateness, ethical implications, and limitations of AI. There has not been an official announcement as to whether this will be a new minor or structured differently.
The administration aims to address concerns about cognitive offloading. Dr. Lauren Goodlad, distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical AI, visited last week to speak on the importance of approaching AI as “researchers” rather than merely “users,” intentionally probing tools to evaluate their capabilities and limitations. Dr. Goodlad’s Design Justice Labs provide undergraduate educational resources to support this kind of inquiry. In addition, Dr. Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of Academic Integrity at UC San Diego and co-author of The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI, will visit next week to discuss strategies for teaching in the context of AI use.
In addition, the College’s Committee on Writing, in collaboration with the Educational Plans and Policies Committee, is examining AI literacy in relation to writing, while the libraries are connecting AI literacy with broader initiatives in information literacy.
Student Senate President Lily Gonzalez said that Senate has been actively involved, staying in conversation with faculty and working groups to present campus-wide concerns and gather student perspectives. They hope to use these perspectives to help shape AI literacy training and policy initiatives through informed discussions.
