Colorado College has received a $1.5 million Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times grant to launch a three-year curricular initiative named Generative Futures: Critical Language Inquiry in the Age of Artificial Intelligence that aims to examine the shifting role of language in shaping knowledge, identity and the ways in which we understand the world in an era where the influence of AI is increasingly pervasive.
“This grant allows us to engage what is perhaps the central question facing educators—facing all of us—today,” said Ryan Banagale, Director of the Crown Center for Teaching and Assistant Dean of the Faculty, who is the faculty lead on this interdisciplinary team project. “Language and technology are intertwined irrevocably in today’s world. Our goal is to help students slow down and ask how meaning takes shape in such a deeply mediated world.”
Grounded in the liberal arts principle that meaning emerges through particular acts of interpretation, the goal of the Generative Futures grant is to examine how language systems—spoken, written, visual, computational, and symbolic—shape how people think, create, communicate and create.
“The Humanities have always been a crucial engine of critical inquiry,” said Steve Hayward, Professor of English, “and they are going to be more essential than ever in the age of AI.”
Two separate but interconnected frameworks shape this work. The first is Critical Language Inquiry which explores and interrogates the many ways in which language reflects and reinforces systems of inclusion and exclusion and the impact the advent of AI is having on them across historical and cultural contexts.
“A focus on language is something we all share at the college,” says Ane Steckenbiller, Associate Professor, and Chair of Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, & Russian Studies. “It underlies everything we do, whether that is the learning of languages in the plural or thinking about music or film or any other discipline as a kind of language—language is an embodied experience that requires nuance and care and cannot be replaced by AI and its promise of efficiency and productivity.”
The second framework is Critical AI Literacy which investigates the design, implementation, and social consequences of artificial intelligence, asking how bias, inequality, labor, environmental impact, and ethics are embedded in AI systems and how these tools influence human thought and knowledge creation.
“Part of this work is a clear understanding of the capabilities of AI, and in particular, what aspects of learning AI cannot replace,” added Cory Scott, Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Computer Science.
This initiative will work across college curricula, where AI is increasingly impacting student experiences of knowledge, to examine what AI amplifies, what it flattens, and how liberal arts inquiry can help foster more just, inclusive, and responsible uses of these technologies. There will be multiple ways for students, staff and faculty to participate, including workshops, course development grants, student-faculty summer research projects, and lectures—all of which will be free and open to the public—that will bring some of the leading voices on this issue to campus.
“One of the aspects of the grant that I am most excited about is the opportunity to develop new courses that allow both students and faculty to engage more deeply into the urgent and evolving conversations about language AI, and the future of knowledge,” said Nene Diop, Associate Professor of French & Francophone Studies.
“Our college and the U.S. are also multilingual,” reminds Professor Steckenbiller, “which is another important aspect we want to center with this grant.”
CC last received a $1.25 million Mellon Foundation grant in 2022 to support the development of a social-justice-oriented humanities curricula to equip students with the skills and knowledge they need to make the world a more just and equitable place.
