When first-year students arrive at Trinity University, most of them have already been using artificial intelligence (AI) in their high school classes, often with very little guidance on how to do so. Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index estimates just half of U.S. middle and high schools have AI policies in place.
Because Trinity offers a combination of liberal arts and professional programs, its students aren’t just introduced to AI tools they’ll use in their future jobs. “Here at Trinity, we’re doing a nuanced and ethical integration of AI,” says Jennifer Henderson, Ph.D., the DeCoursey Senior Fellow for Campus Artificial Intelligence Strategy. Like many universities across the country, Trinity is working out how best to support its faculty in leading the charge on AI integration into its courses, and also how best to communicate to students where AI will and will not be part of their academic experience.
A recent poll of 2,500 employers published by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation showed 48% believe AI will make college degrees more important than ever over the next five years. Here’s what’s happening at Trinity.
Using AI Tools Is Balanced With Human Decision-Making
Since this summer, Henderson has been meeting with working groups of faculty and staff to help the university answer the big questions about the use of AI on-campus. The four areas of focus are:
Tools and training: Making sure faculty, staff, and students understand what AI tools they’re using and how they should use them. (Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot are available campus-wide.)
Ethics, values, and policies: Determining, as a university community, what decisions should be made by humans and what decisions can be made with AI. This also includes how Trinity protects privacy and the exchange of ideas.
Data governance and integration: Figuring out how to connect information in all on-campus technical systems so faculty can make better decisions about how best to support students and their colleagues.
Curriculum and pedagogy: Supporting faculty in their decisions on how to use AI in their teaching and research.
The goals are simple, but the questions for how to achieve them have complex answers.
“To best prepare our students for their lives after Trinity, they should have some exposure to artificial intelligence tools before they graduate. ” Henderson says. “How we ensure that, whether that’s through pathways (required courses) or through a major, all of that is really up to the faculty.” Henderson adds that conversations with students, including Trinity’s Student Government Association, will help inform AI use as well.
Professors Decide How to Integrate AI Into Their Courses
Trinity is working to create best practices around AI and update existing student policies to include AI guidance, but there will not be imposed policies about how faculty use AI in their classes or in research. That’s because faculty are the experts, Henderson says. “Some are using it for research projects with students, others are making decisions about when things need to be analog and when things should be AI-supported in individual classes,” she says.
One place on campus where AI has been significantly blended into some courses is in the Michael Neidorff School of Business. Employers in fields like finance, accounting, and human resource management increasingly expect graduates to be able to use AI effectively in professional settings, says Shage Zhang, Ph.D., associate dean for strategic initiatives and research in the school of business. Those students must first develop a solid foundation of knowledge in their discipline and understand how to independently perform a task “analog,” and then learn to integrate AI into the workflows of various tasks. That’s what industry professionals say they want, Zhang adds.
At the same time, faculty are also guiding student conversations around the ethical implications of AI in business settings. In human resources, for example, companies are increasingly incorporating AI tools into recruitment, Zhang says. HR classes at Trinity are weighing whether, when, and how using AI tools is ethical and appropriate, as well as what aspects of the process should continue to rely primarily on human judgement. “Being a liberal arts college, we’re uniquely positioned to have those conversations,” she adds.
Some professors might want to keep AI out of their course entirely, Henderson says, and that’s something the university will embrace, where it makes sense to do so. Dania Abreu-Torres, Ph.D., associate dean of the Carlos Alvarez School of Arts & Humanities, says the critical thinking and deep analysis Trinity embraces in its classrooms are skills we all need to understand and engage with AI. “The arts and humanities provide these skills across their courses,” Abreu says. “While it depends on the professor whether they choose to engage directly with AI in the classroom, students will benefit from understanding why AI is or isn’t used and how that supports the learning outcomes of the course.”
Trinity Students Are Uniquely Positioned to Guide Future Use of AI
Adapting curriculum to rapidly advancing technology with an eye on doing so ethically is nothing new to Yu Zhang, Ph.D., professor of computer science (CS), and director of Trinity’s Laboratory for Distributed Intelligent Agent Systems. The CS field is constantly evolving as new computing tools come online, and Trinity’s courses have to keep up. Recently, the CS program revised its curriculum to further incorporate machine learning. “Previously, AI was primarily covered in a dedicated course and selected upper-level electives. Now, we are increasingly integrating AI throughout the CS curriculum,” Yu Zhang Says. “Previously we banned AI use by students, but now we welcome AI.” Yu Zhang encourages students to use it responsibly, consulting it like you would a personal computer or a calculator.
And it’s not enough to simply teach CS students how to use AI tools, Yu Zhang says. They also are asked to learn how to use it in a way that considers its potential impacts on society. “The good thing about the broad education we offer at Trinity is that we not only focus on technology, but we also train students to be able to reason–they are philosophers and sophisticated thinkers,” she says. AI cannot replace human intelligence when it comes to complex reasoning, Yu Zhang adds.
Trinity Is Considering How Best to Inform Students About AI Inclusion
The Office of Admissions already sets expectations with prospective and incoming students: Here at Trinity, with an 8:1 student-to-faculty ratio, students will be expected to embrace a higher level of face-to-face engagement than they may have been accustomed to in high school. “Students who are interested in Trinity are very drawn to the strength of these powerful relationships,” says Justin Doty, Trinity’s dean of admissions.
Doty adds that prospective students and families are very curious about how AI technology is being integrated into the academic setting, and when they tour Trinity, they like what they’re hearing. “Families appreciate how Trinity is carefully evaluating our AI best practices and find it refreshing that we want to ensure the human element of learning remains a core element and not overshadowed by technology,” Doty adds.
The university is still working out how best to communicate to students which majors and individual courses use AI and to what level. “The good thing is that if you’re showing students that there are courses that have low AI integration they may be able to make choices that align with their personal ethics and values,” Henderson adds.
Henderson will serve in her role for up to two years, focusing on laying the groundwork for Trinity’s AI initiatives. While not all goals may be achieved in that timeframe, progress is already underway, including revisions to digital literacy requirements that incorporate ethical and critical AI use, greater transparency in course classifications, and faculty focus groups. “The more transparent we can be with prospective students coming in about our values around AI, and how we’re approaching it, the better it is for them as Trinity students, but also better for their overall education,” says Henderson.