In August, MIT released the final report of its Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training. Like many institutions across higher education, MIT began with questions that have become increasingly familiar:

• How are students using generative AI? How should faculty respond?
• What needs to change about assessment?
• What kinds of institutional policies are needed?

The report ultimately moves toward a more fundamental concern, arguing that the rise of AI requires colleges and universities to clarify the purpose of higher education and which parts of the learning experience matter enough to preserve as this emerging technology radically transforms what students can do.

What struck me most while reading the report was how closely many of MIT’s concerns mirror conversations we have already been having at Boston College. Our commitment to formative education and the Jesuit pedagogical tradition of cura personalis, or care for the whole person, have consistently grounded discussions about AI in questions of human development, discernment, relationships, and purpose. MIT’s report arrives at many of those same concerns, albeit from a very different institutional starting point. It urges universities to put humanity “front and center,” preserve the productive struggle required for learning, and use AI to augment rather than automate the critical intellectual work students need to be able to do for themselves. In many ways, MIT’s concerns mirror our own here at BC.

Attending to the Whole Person

For a university committed to student formation, the arrival of generative AI raises questions that extend well beyond the capabilities of the technology itself. One of the goals of a college education is for students to acquire new knowledge and skills while also developing critical thinking, judgment, confidence, habits of deep reflection, and a clearer sense of who they are becoming as human beings. Cura personalis asks us to attend to the whole person. In an AI context, that means thinking beyond what a tool enables a student to produce and also considering how its use shapes the experience of learning and the learners themselves.

From the beginning, our conversations about AI at Boston College have focused on what we want students to gain from the learning experience and how emerging technologies might support that process.

• What kinds of thinking do students need to practice for themselves?
• Where can AI create space for deeper exploration?
• Where might its use interfere with the intellectual work that gives an assignment its educational value?

For me, this is also where MIT’s framing becomes especially interesting. The report treats AI as a truly human challenge and as an educational issue before it treats it as a technology issue. It asks what happens when students use AI to bypass some of the thinking, practice, and intellectual struggle that real learning has traditionally required. It also describes concerning signs of students becoming more isolated, interacting less with instructors and classmates, and feeling less confident in their own ability to reason and work through difficult problems.

An AI tool might help a student produce a more polished final product while also reducing some of the deep thinking, reflection, or intellectual struggle that gave the assignment its educational value in the first place. At the same time, AI can open new possibilities for exploration, accessibility, and creativity. Used effectively, it can clear roadblocks to deeper application and exploration of concepts. Used poorly, it can subvert the human dimensions of learning in damaging ways. The question for educators is how its use shapes the learning we want to happen.

MIT frames this through its principle of augmentation rather than automation. The committee argues that AI should expand what students can explore and accomplish while preserving their agency, judgment, and responsibility for learning. It also warns against “cognitive surrender,” where students begin turning to AI at the first sign of difficulty and lose opportunities to build real understanding by working through problems themselves. Often, we find that real learning resides more in productive toil rather than in completing a deliverable.

Preparing Students for the World They’re Entering

There is an important tension here because some of the things AI is very good at doing are exactly the things that can short-circuit student formation if we are careless about how we use it. Formation asks students to reflect, struggle, discern, develop judgment, build relationships, and gradually become more capable of thinking and acting for themselves in ethical and moral ways. AI can make many tasks faster and easier, but it can also reduce the amount of sustained intellectual effort those tasks require.

At the same time, our graduates are entering a world where AI is already becoming ubiquitous in many fields of professional practice. They will encounter the expectation that they use these tools in business, medicine, education, law, science, communication, public service, and in fields that are still deciding what responsible use should look like. Preparing students for that world means helping them develop technical fluency with AI alongside the ability to discern where human effort and critical thinking remain necessary elements of their contributions to society and the world of work.

This is where MIT’s principle of augmentation rather than automation intersects especially closely with Boston College’s commitment to formative education. Both approaches place the development of the learner ahead of the efficiency of the tool. What a technology can do tells us very little about its educational value until we consider what it contributes to the learner’s development. Both approaches ask whether students are becoming more capable of thinking, deciding, and acting for themselves as a result of the learning experience.

Cura personalis asks us to prepare the whole person for the world they are going to enter. In this context, that means helping students become capable users of AI while also developing the ability to recognize when efficiency is helpful, when human interaction matters more than productivity, and which kinds of thinking they must continue to do for themselves. Those are questions of technical literacy, but they are also questions of discernment.

A Jesuit education has always aimed to prepare students to engage the world as it is while asking them to consider how they should participate in shaping the world around them. AI provides another context in which that work becomes increasingly essential.

Starting With the Core Intentions of Learning

This is also where I believe the Center for Digital Innovation in Learning (CDIL) has an important role to play. Our work supporting faculty can help focus the conversation on what we want students to get out of the learning experience.

• What has AI changed about that experience?
• Where can it add value?
• Where might it shortcut something students genuinely need to experience for themselves?

That approach resonates deeply with how CDIL has always worked. Co-design, student-centeredness, and the core intentions of learning have long been at the forefront of our approach to instructional design and digital learning development. When faculty come to us with questions about emerging technologies, the most productive starting point is usually the same one: What do you want students to know, do, understand, or become through this experience?

MIT’s report recommends a similar approach. It encourages faculty to begin with educational purpose, then determine where AI supports those goals and where it may interfere with them. The answers will differ across courses and disciplines. A first-year student developing foundational skills may need a very different relationship with AI than an advanced student or researcher who already possesses substantial disciplinary expertise. Faculty need the space, support, and opportunities for collaboration necessary to make those judgments thoughtfully.

The Faculty AI Fellows program developed by the Provost’s Office and facilitated by CDIL under the AI Collaboratory initiative is one example of how we are already engaging in this work. These kinds of efforts create space for faculty to explore emerging practices with colleagues, examine what AI changes within their disciplines, and make informed decisions about how those changes should shape teaching and learning.

The same intentionality applies to human relationships. MIT reports decreased participation in office hours and other forms of social learning and argues that institutions should deliberately strengthen the human communities through which higher education happens. Students still need opportunities to explain their thinking, receive feedback, encounter disagreement, and learn alongside people who challenge their assumptions. Faculty and peers remain absolutely central to how students develop intellectually and personally, even when AI can provide an immediate response to almost any question.

Preserving What Matters While We Embrace Change

One line in the MIT report resonates with me in particular: “Preserving what’s most important will require deliberate change.” Boston College is uniquely positioned to meet this moment in part because of its Jesuit educational identity and strong sense of mission. There is something significant about MIT, an institution so closely associated with technological innovation, arriving at such a deeply human-centered framing of AI. It suggests that institutions with very different identities are beginning to converge around a shared concern: as AI becomes more capable, higher education has to become more intentional about the human dimensions of learning it wants to preserve.

For Boston College, that concern has been present from the beginning. Our Jesuit tradition has grounded conversations about emerging technology in questions of human dignity, formation, responsibility, and purpose. In that sense, MIT’s report reinforces an approach that already feels familiar here while also reminding us that this is a challenge facing higher education as a whole.

Some existing practices may need to change as AI reshapes the conditions of teaching and learning. Some assignments will need to be redesigned. Some approaches to assessment will need to evolve. Faculty will develop new ways to structure learning, and AI will make experiences possible that we have not yet imagined. The important work is being clear about what we want to preserve while those practices evolve.

Boston College is also part of a broader network of Jesuit colleges and universities wrestling with these same questions. In a June 2026 address to the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, Pope Leo XIV emphasized that colleges and universities have a special role to play in addressing the consequences of AI and called for renewed attention to the principles of Catholic social teaching as institutions respond to the digital revolution. That address was distinct from his recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which similarly calls on institutions to approach AI in ways that safeguard human dignity, preserve human agency, and keep technological development oriented toward the common good. Together, these calls place the work happening at Boston College within a larger Jesuit and Catholic conversation about how higher education can respond to technological change while continuing to form students for lives of discernment, responsibility, and service.

At the same time, this challenge clearly extends beyond Jesuit and Catholic higher education. MIT’s report demonstrates how institutions with very different missions and traditions are confronting many of the same fundamental questions about learning, human agency, relationships, and intellectual development. In that sense, all of us in higher education are navigating this moment together, even if the traditions and language we draw upon to guide us are different.

Institutions and organizations across higher education are rapidly developing new policies, frameworks, and technologies in response to AI. Boston College has an opportunity to contribute something distinctive by preparing students to use powerful new tools while remaining deeply attentive to their development as thoughtful, responsible, and fully human people.

We have to prepare students for the world they are entering, and AI will be part of that world. Our responsibility is to help them use these tools with confidence, judgment, and purpose. That means preparing them to recognize when AI adds value and when the thinking needs to be their own.

At the same time, this moment should remind us that some of the qualities we most need from one another remain distinctly human. AI can generate language that sounds compassionate, offer recommendations that appear thoughtful, and reproduce patterns that resemble human judgment, but humanity, kindness, wisdom, empathy, moral responsibility, and the ability to understand another person through lived experience belong to us. As people increasingly work and live alongside AI, these qualities will become more important, not less.

Jesuit institutions like Boston College are uniquely positioned to help students understand that. Our responsibility extends well beyond preparing them to use increasingly powerful AI technologies. We also have to help them develop the wisdom to know how and when those technologies should and should not be used, the judgment to recognize their limits, the empathy to understand how their choices affect others, and the humanity to bring something to their work and communities that’s uniquely human.

CDIL sees that we have an important role in helping Boston College navigate that work. We can create opportunities for faculty to explore how AI is changing teaching and learning, support thoughtful experimentation and course redesign, and help connect emerging technologies with Boston College’s commitment to formative education. Just as importantly, along with our colleagues across BC, we can help bring faculty and students into these conversations so that our collective response to AI grows out of the values that define a Boston College education. As AI becomes ever more capable, our commitment to helping students experience their own formation as thoughtful, wise, empathetic, and fully embodied humans must grow stronger with it. They will inherit a future in which humans and AI increasingly exist alongside one another, and their generation will ultimately determine what role humanity plays in shaping that future