The Spire

Ashwin Prabaharan ’26

Co-Editor-in-Chief

Andy Smarick, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, identifies a four pronged crisis in American education today. In his Substack newsletter Governing Right, a national situation stemming from unimaginably low levels of student achievement, chronic absenteeism, outsourcing education to artificial intelligence, and an electorate ignoring the issue plagues our schools. As college students, we need not look high and low to find evidence of Smarick’s third point concerning artificial intelligence. We know the problem all too well.

Headed by Dean of Experiential Learning Daniel Klinghard and authorized by President Rougeau, the Artificial Intelligence Task Force was charged with reviewing comprehensively how AI “could affect our academic programs, student experiences, and operational effectiveness.” The college seeks to best harness the technology as it remains mindful of the “ethical implications.” Holy Cross and other colleges must undoubtedly reckon with the new force because it poses too many questions that cannot be left ignored and passed on to the future for answers. 

The task force’s final report, a culmination of a year’s long review of AI practices and effects, has provided the college with several recommendations concerning further use of AI technologies for students, faculty and staff alike. The most important of its suggestions is the development and use of SuarezAI for students. SuarezAI, named after Jesuit scholar Francisco Suarez, is a creation of the Holy Cross Information Technology team under Vice President David Shettler. The report indicates that the platform allows users to access “multiple subscription-level chatbots, custom chatbots, and image generation.” As a proprietary product of the college, it seeks to provide equitable access to AI technologies for all students regardless of their financial means while in a “secure, controlled environment.” It is designed to provide students with the opportunity to compare the output of several AI models to examine for biases, thus strengthening our critical thinking capacity. To access the platform, however, students must complete an AI Literacy Training Module to learn about the ethical parameters of the program. The college hopes this would ensure students employ SuarezAI in a manner consistent with its values and mission.

Though the College ought to be commended for undergoing an exhaustive review to understand AI’s place in higher education, its decision to release SuarezAI for academic use is mistaken. I am sympathetic to the argument that giving students access to Suarez allows for the College to focus its efforts when trying to figure out just how dependent students are on AI, and for what purposes it may be used. Suarez certainty has limits on what it can actually provide students, and knowing this helps professors tailor their courses so that they can either incorporate it into their work or tailor their assignments such that they are out of the technology’s reach. My qualms with Suarez rest with what it does to our capacity for ideation, the most critical element of a liberal arts education.

In an age where AI is beginning to define how students and workers complete their work, we must set Holy Cross students apart by engendering a rigorous curriculum that individualizes a unique capacity for free, creative, and independent thought. While SuarezAI is an admirable technological achievement, we risk too much by engraining it into the academic fabric of our school. 

A study conducted by Inside Higher Ed shows almost 85% of sampled students having used AI to complete or help with their assignments. The most prevalent use of AI programs is for brainstorming purposes, to help develop and tailor ideas for writing assignments. How we produce and engage with ideas across any discipline must be considered one of, if not the most critical component of learning. 

College students must be able to demonstrate some capacity to come up with original ideas derived from their readings and other sources of information with which they have had contact. We must possess the intrinsic ability to piece together ideas from our books, writings, and the conversations we have to create personal thoughts that can be evidenced in some way both on paper and before an audience. At the heart of a liberal arts education is the desire to endow students the unparalleled ability to think for ourselves, to be innately creative and be progenitors of bold, fresh ideas about any subject matter. 

AI pieces together the information it has within its world to form sentences and other material for users based on probability. That is, it tries to assess what order of words in response to a given prompt makes the most sense probabilistically. It is a mathematical gambit, and it cannot mimic the mind. Students should not, and cannot be led to think like a learning model. SuarezAI would be an incredibly difficult barrier in Holy Cross’ pursuit to teach us how to think for ourselves. Indeed, we risk relegating the mind to nothing more than a regurgitation machine of unoriginal thoughts that renders the student incapable of forming anything naturally of their own volition.

 Eventually, they will not be able to produce new ideas of their own making even if they wanted. To answer any given prompt, we will dash to SuarezAI and other language models for guidance. We will not be any different from an AI machine, which only works off of others’ works without properly crediting them while not being able to create any original thoughts to contribute in our spaces. SuarezAI will also worsen an ongoing worry about our inability to read well and esoterically, and it will make the issue measurably pronounced amongst students even more. While it is sensible to prepare students for an increasingly AI-driven world, releasing SuarezAI opens the floodgates to unmanageable levels of misuse that will directly harm our capacity for ideation. Our first instinct ought to be to turn to the words of our reading materials, office hour conversations and independent readings, to those things that compel us to answer questions we ask ourselves. AI cannot be our first remedy. We ought to control very tightly how it would be used in order to properly balance the need to work with AI with the desire to develop those analytical and critical thinking skills that AI strips from us.

The deep political, financial, and intellectual problems of our time require great minds. They need men and women with an indescribable sense of individuality, a capacity for perception and learning, that helps produce extraordinary literary works, create machines, and lead nations. Holy Cross has done a laudable job preparing students for exactly that demand. Let us not falter now in the name of access or a short-sighted and anxiety-driven need to catch up with technology. We must let the liberal arts formula flourish, rather than be sequestered in favor of a technology that threatens to severely diminish it. We owe every student, to ensure their chance to build and lead futures of prosperity, vibrant culture, and intellectual freedom.