As we near the end of the semester, we near, too, the halfway mark of Oberlin’s Year of AI Exploration. Over the span of the last few months, the College has surveyed students, faculty, and staff, assessed AI-related Honor Code violations, and introduced a new AI minor, among other things. But how is this Year of AI Exploration taking shape for professors at Oberlin?

In seeking to assess how the Year of AI Exploration has been unfolding for Oberlin faculty, the Review reached out to professors across disciplines in both the College and Conservatory.

Almost every professor who responded wrote that there were no unified policies or guidelines within their department, and many wrote that faculty in their departments were still sorting through questions about AI use.

“I think I’m sort of in the weeds like everyone else,” Professor of English Jennifer Bryan wrote in an email to the Review. “I haven’t received anything I’d call ‘guidance’ — telling people how to teach isn’t really the Oberlin way. I’d say I’ve gotten more ‘help and conversation’ this year.”

Professors have responded to the increased use of AI in varied ways. Several wrote that they have switched away from assigned papers and to the use of in-person exams to ensure original work, while others have encouraged students to use AI. Some professors stated that they have simply asked their students not to use it.

“To prevent the temptation to use generative AI, I have switched my lecture classes away from short papers to in-class exams,” Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Aaron van Neste wrote to the Review. “I still assign papers for my seminars and will continue to do so — I think teaching students who do want to learn how to research and write is one of the joys of teaching and outweighs having to grade a certain percentage of non-human written work.”

Chair of Law and Society and Assistant Professor of Politics Joshua Freedman also wrote that he has started administering in-person exams, stating that this semester, he replaced the take-home midterm with a timed and in-person blue book exam. As a consequence of this, he wrote that he had had to lower expectations for student work.

“Timed exams prioritize memorization and breadth,” Freedman wrote. “On exams such as these, students can get away with having only a shallow understanding of the course material because there simply isn’t enough time to showcase analytical depth and detail across a dozen readings in 90 minutes of work.”

Meanwhile, some professors have seen the benefits of incorporating AI into the classroom.

“For most undergraduate courses, the impact is limited,” Chair of Economics Paul Brehm wrote in an email to the Review. “AI has greater potential to help professionally-trained economists produce high-quality work. For example, it can help students in our senior seminars improve the coding that is required to manipulate and analyze data.”

Additionally, van Neste also pointed to the potential benefits of AI in the digital humanities and in analyzing data, writing that it could make dataset analysis more accessible to those with less experience.

Program Director of Latin American Studies Sebastiaan Faber noted that the expanding use of AI is undermining language education and contributing to faculty cuts, even as it compels scholars to reflect more urgently on their work.

“College administrations across the country are using the availability and promise of AI already to justify position cuts,” he wrote in an email to the Review. “If I had to point to something positive that’s coming out of our being forced to take a position on AI and protect or brace ourselves against its potentially catastrophic impact (for labor, pedagogy, the environment, and students’ intellectual development), it’s that the threat has forced us to think hard and urgently about what it is we do, or want to do, in our scholarship and teaching.”

Three faculty-led sessions were held this semester to further the discussion of generative AI. Two sessions in the Conservatory that were titled “AI Music Generation” and “Information Literacy in Music,” while the session in the College was called “What We Talk About When We Talk About Al.” The sessions were complemented by seven workshops, four of which were organized by the Center for Information Technology, including a first look at a Blackboard AI tool. 

In a recent AI panel hosted by Student Senate, the Student Honor Committee, and the Office of the Dean of Students, faculty and staff discussed the importance of training students in Al literacy, aiming to enable students to become not necessarily users, but evaluators of AI.  Additionally, a Critical AI Studies minor is set to launch in fall 2026 . 

Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand said faculty in the Classics department are extremely dubious as to the value of generative AI based on their research in the field of “Critical AI” and highlighted the importance of the process of writing.

“The more critical problem for us as educators is that when students (or professors or anyone) use AI to produce written work, they aren’t engaging in the learning process that is supposed to produce that writing — and as a result, they aren’t learning anything,” he said.

The impact of AI use on academic integrity has been called into question by faculty and students alike. Student Honor Committee data indicated that the total number of Honor Code violations has remained around 50 cases per year from 2022–25. While AI-related Honor Code violations were less than one-tenth of the total number in 2022, in 2024–25, the number rose to over 55 percent. Over one-third of AI-related violations come from the Computer Science department, nearly 13 percent come from first-year seminars, and about five percent each are from the Politics and French departments.

The student survey provided additional insights, receiving 848 responses, with nearly 60 percent of respondents being Arts and Humanities students. Nearly 40 percent of respondents said they had used generative AI before coming to Oberlin, primarily first- and second-year students. Lowest AI usage was reported by Arts and Humanities students, whereas Natural Sciences and Math students reported the highest usage. Though half of the respondents said they never use generative AI, about 45 percent of students said they believe their peers use AI in an unauthorized manner.

Primary student concerns included environmental impact, cognitive offloading, effects on the job market, and concerns about faculty use of AI worsening the quality of education. Students also reported certain academic benefits, referencing generative AI’s ability to explain a course concept, identify academic sources, and summarize readings.

Multiple professors expressed worries over the AI initiative, with one raising the concern over the lack of guardrails in place to mitigate the biases of AI. Meanwhile, several underlined the value of the conversations coming out of the initiative.

“Last year I was pretty frustrated, because I felt like there was this giant THING coming at us, and nobody was talking about it, and I didn’t know what to do,” Bryan  wrote. “But this year the conversations have really ramped up, and I feel a lot more support and community…. We have to teach students how to think for themselves, which means that we have to prevent them from using AI as a shortcut.  But on the other hand, we can’t send them out into the world without AI skills, because they’ll get eaten alive.”