How Loyola Is Bringing Artificial Intelligence and Ethics into the Classroom

How Loyola Is Bringing Artificial Intelligence and Ethics into the Classroom#

Loyola News published a piece by Jeff Link, “How Loyola Is Bringing Artificial Intelligence and Ethics into the Classroom”, that quoted me at some length on how I think about AI’s place in higher education. I wanted to expand a bit on the points I made there.

AI as a Generational Shift#

In the piece, I compared AI’s emergence to “the printing press or the internet.” I don’t say that lightly — most technologies that get compared to the printing press don’t deserve it. But the printing press didn’t just make books cheaper; it changed who got to make and share knowledge in the first place. I think AI is doing something similarly big to how people create, check, and learn from information, and universities that treat it as just a faster autocomplete are going to miss that.

Why Assessment Has to Change#

I also argued that we should lean more on oral assessment — using the PhD defense as the model. A defense works precisely because a student can’t outsource it: you have to know your own work well enough to defend it in real time, under questions you didn’t get to prepare for. Written exams and take-home assignments were never a perfect proxy for understanding, but AI has made the gap between “wrote something that looks good” and “actually understands the material” much wider and much easier to hide. Oral assessment doesn’t scale as easily as a written exam, but it scales a lot better than pretending the problem isn’t there.

The Philosophical and Theological Questions Are Not Optional#

The line I’d most want people to sit with is this one: “Especially in a Jesuit university with a strong philosophy department, it would be a travesty to think about not just ethical implications of AI, but also the philosophical and even theological questions to some extent — to really grapple with issues, like, ‘What is it that makes us human?’” It’s easy for a computer science department to treat AI ethics as a compliance checkbox — bias audits, usage policies, and so on. Those matter, but they’re not the same question as what AI means for how we think about thought, agency, and what makes us human. At a university built around the Jesuit tradition, we have both the obligation and the institutional resources — a strong philosophy department, a theology department — to actually engage that deeper question, not just the practical one.

Why It Matters#

Loyola’s new AI minors, including the joint “AI and Human Flourishing” minor with Philosophy launching in fall 2026, are one concrete answer to that obligation. But the classroom-level questions — how we assess students, what we ask them to grapple with, whether we treat AI as just a tool or as something that raises deeper questions — are the ones I keep coming back to, and the ones I think matter most in the long run.

Citation#

Link: https://news.luc.edu/stories/campus-life/how-loyola-is-bringing-artificial-intelligence-and-ethics-into-the-classroom/

Link, Jeff. How Loyola Is Bringing Artificial Intelligence and Ethics into the Classroom. Loyola University Chicago News, 2025.

@misc{link_loyola_ai_ethics_2025,
  author = {Link, Jeff},
  title  = {How Loyola Is Bringing Artificial Intelligence and Ethics into the Classroom},
  year   = {2025},
  url    = {https://news.luc.edu/stories/campus-life/how-loyola-is-bringing-artificial-intelligence-and-ethics-into-the-classroom/}
}
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