In students’ syllabi, the “strictness” of AI guidelines and regulations have changed over the past few semesters as language learning models continue to evolve. Eastern University’s Academic Integrity policy has adapted every year since 2023 to continue to attempt to evolve and change with the growing technology. According to Eric McCloy, the Chief Information Officer, “Eastern has two levels of Gemini AI licensing, beyond the free versions available to any user.”
Any student staff, faculty or staff at Eastern already has access to Google Workspace for Education Plus. This according to McCloy, “offers AI integration across all Google Apps tools – Docs, Sheets, GMail, etc. This powerful suite enables students to access AI at the point of need while they are working.”
Last school year, faculty and certain staff began AI workgroups, designed to break up faculty into looking at and discussing different facets of AI so they could begin to get multiple perspectives of what the concerns and enticements of AI are.
Rebecca Gidjunis, the Assistant Provost of Academic Operations shared, “we wanted to stay on top of those changes and to be able to parse them out and share with the community what is relevant,” she continued that each work group distributes the information that they learned through trainings offered to faculty.
Faith Croll, the Assistant Writing Center Coordinator is on the work group for faculty and staff development. Their first project was a survey to all staff and faculty to learn more about what the trends and overall feelings about AI were, and now based off of those findings, are now making a Brightspace course for faculty explaining terms and policies.
Laura Thapa is the assistant director of Applied AI and Automation Solutions at Eastern; it is her job to integrate and apply AI into faculty and staff’s everyday working technology. As an Eastern data science grad herself, Thapa is focused on students being prepared when going into the workforce, especially one with more AI usage, “How do we help them navigate that?”
Gidjunis echoed this, pointing to Eastern’s close-knit community, “use[ing] AI to replace some of our repetitive tasks so that they can free us up to do more of the human connection that we love.”
When asked about the more ethical concerns about generative AI, Gidjunis shared that in the academic integrity policy, if an assignment requires AI, a student can request an alternative assignment. She continued, “we’re working on a theological [and ethical] statement about our approach to AI.”
Thapa advised, “If you are going to put this out, publish it, write it, display it somewhere, no matter what generated it, whether it was your own mind or AI generation, you’re ultimately responsible.”
Andrew Rasmussen, assistant professor of English, is a part of the Academic Integrity subcommittee, and he has mixed feelings about AI, “In some ways, it’s promising and exciting. In some ways, it’s frightening and destructive, and every university has to respond to it.”
Rasmussen was very clear that his priority is promoting integrity and virtue. His work group has been focusing on “how we can guide a positive use rather than just sort of hunting down this witch hunt for this new technology.”
Croll similarly promoted the Writing Center on campus on the second floor of the library, as a safe place for students, no matter how they used AI. The writing center has a disclosure policy which states that writing assistants are not going to report AI usage to your professors. “We want to be a place where you can freely talk about your writing process, so we’re not going to report […] that stays between you and your writing assistant.”
Croll shared that one of the most important parts of the Writing Center’s AI policy is that “we really believe that your voice is important […] we don’t want the cacophony of voices that these bots have been trained on we want to know what you have to say about what you’re learning.”
Although the University has seven AI Work Group Subcommittees with faculty and staff, nothing has been done to understand student’s perspectives of AI within the university. This year, the Writing Center is going to host a student-led discussion about AI. Croll shared, “because there’s a lot of disconnect between what faculty and administration think students are doing and feeling about AI and what you are actually doing and feeling about AI and we kind of want to help bridge that gap.” This will be in October and entirely anonymous.
But, Gidjunis shared that this year they are also starting a student focus group, overseen by Sarah Todd and Nicole Markert. This focus group will exclusively be for first-year students as an opt-in only session, for the purpose of giving first-year students who have had AI options through their entire high school career a place to be seen and heard.
Jonathan Reimer, the Faculty Senate Moderator and Associate Professor of History, spoke at the Templeton Honors College Matriculation for its first years and spoke about the importance of reading in a time of AI. He referenced Pope Leo in his call to action, “As we seek to navigate the era of AI responsibly, we should call to mind the contrasting biblical images of imperial, unilateral, and idolatrous construction of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9.”
AI is a controversial topic, especially within a university setting that is ultimately about learning and preparing for the future, there are many voices, and there may not be one right answer. The Waltonian will continue to report on this matter as policies and conversations continue to shift and change.
