Dr. Stephanie Laggini Fiore, Associate Vice Provost and Sr. Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, hosts a faculty teaching circle on artificial intelligence on Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2023, at Temple University in Philadelphia. Educators say they want to embrace the technology’s potential to teach and learn in new ways, but when it comes to assessing students, they see a need to “ChatGPT-proof” test questions and assignments. (AP Photo/Joe Lamberti)
Dr. Stephanie Laggini Fiore, Associate Vice Provost and Sr. Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, hosts a faculty teaching circle on artificial intelligence on Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2023, at Temple University in Philadelphia. Educators say they want to embrace the technology’s potential to teach and learn in new ways, but when it comes to assessing students, they see a need to “ChatGPT-proof” test questions and assignments. (AP Photo/Joe Lamberti)
AIRED; February 11, 2026
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As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes industries across the globe, colleges and universities are grappling with how best to respond. Behind the scenes, the conversations are layered and complex, stretching far beyond whether students should or should not use tools like ChatGPT.
Dr. Leamor Kahanov says the discussion falls into several distinct “buckets.” There is the operational side — how institutions use AI in admissions, data reduction and automation. There is the academic side — how AI is integrated into classrooms and how students are prepared for a workforce where these tools are increasingly common. And then there is governance — the policies and ethical frameworks that guide responsible use.
“I think there are several buckets,” Kahanov explains. “I’m sure students are most interested in how it’s applicable to them. But the university can’t run without the other two buckets and pay attention to them as well.”
For Kahanov, this moment is not entirely new. Higher education has faced major technological shifts before. What makes this one different is the speed.
“We’ve been here before,” she says. “We’ve had many different kinds of disruptors, and I don’t necessarily think a disruptor is negative. It just is what is, and there’s opportunity on the other end of that.”
She compares AI’s rise to the early days of the internet. While it took years for widespread adoption of online tools, generative AI platforms like ChatGPT have spread in a matter of months. “I like to call it the quickening,” she says. “It’s just going faster, but I don’t think it changes the fact that it is a disruptor and maybe a positive disruptor in many ways. We are just going to have to be intellectually flexible faster.”
That flexibility is essential because AI is, in her words, a “double-edged sword.” Students are already using generative AI to help draft papers or better understand complex material. Used thoughtfully, these tools can support learning. Used improperly, they can undermine it.
“Unfortunately, sometimes they use it to do the work for them,” Kahanov says. “So that’s not really helpful to them because as they move on, they won’t have the foundational knowledge to know when AI is hallucinating or saying the wrong things.”
At the same time, faculty are experimenting with creative and meaningful ways to incorporate AI into instruction. “Our faculty across the board are learning different ways to teach using AI,” she says. “That’s a positive disruptor.”
The academic response is evolving. Some institutions now offer AI-focused majors, minors and certificate programs, particularly in engineering, computer science and tech management. Leadership programs are also beginning to address AI strategy and oversight. But Kahanov notes that what may be even more significant is the integration of AI literacy across disciplines.
“We’re seeing AI literacy and AI fluency embedded into many different kinds of majors,” she says. “It could be history, it could be political science, it could be health sciences, because those are the tools that our future citizens are going to be using in their disciplines.”
That broad approach also helps prevent programs from becoming too narrow or tool-specific in a rapidly changing environment. Higher education, she argues, has an obligation to teach not just how to use AI, but how to question it.
“We have an obligation to help students understand what AI can do, what AI can’t do, and how to ethically use it,” she says. “And how we are uniquely human.”
In fact, she sees the humanities playing a critical role in shaping AI education. Ethics, philosophy, literature and history help students examine questions of originality, authorship and responsibility. For example, in the arts, is a digital mashup of Michelangelo and a modern artist new art — or something else entirely? Those are not technical questions; they are human ones.
The trajectory, Kahanov believes, mirrors previous technological revolutions. There are early adopters, cautious followers and those resistant until change becomes unavoidable. “They all follow a typical trajectory,” she says. “Some may be faster and slower, but they all follow similar trajectory.”
Students, she adds, are often among the earliest adopters, pushing institutions to adapt. “We just don’t want to open the faucet. We want to help navigate the stream,” she says.
In fields like healthcare, data science and the arts, faculty are approaching integration differently. Healthcare students might use AI to distill information about diseases while still verifying its accuracy. Data science students must learn to spot when automated outputs look “amiss.” In theology classes, one professor asks students to compare an AI-generated interpretation of a biblical story with the original text.
“It’s an amazing way to incorporate AI and also teach students that AI doesn’t always have the answers,” Kahanov says. “It’s a facsimile of what we’ve put into it at this point in time.”
Ultimately, she believes the most important skill colleges can cultivate is not technical mastery of a single platform, but intellectual agility.
“A broader liberal arts foundation and what makes us uniquely human and how to think through and be intellectually flexible, not just creative thinkers, but intellectually flexible, is going to be paramount as we progress in this digital direction,” she says.
As AI continues its rapid expansion into nearly every field, higher education is not standing still. It is experimenting, questioning, embedding ethics and, above all, adapting to what Kahanov calls the quickening — a pace of change that demands both caution and creativity.
