About This Session
What happens when an AI fellow and a VP of IS walk into a three-year initiative together? At Connecticut College, the answer involved faculty courage, wicked problems, unexpected collaborators, and more than a few flying monkeys. In this 45-minute session, Connecticut College pulls back the curtain on AI@Conn — a campus-wide initiative to integrate artificial intelligence into the liberal arts.
Drawing on two years of experience designing, implementing, and evaluating the initiative, the presenters share what worked, what proved genuinely wicked, and what was ugly but essential to acknowledge — particularly at a small liberal arts college where institutional values and the rapid pace of AI change do not always move in the same direction.
The Three-Part Lens: Good, Wicked, and Ugly
The Good
What actually worked in building a campus-wide AI initiative — structural choices, faculty partnerships, and early wins that created momentum.
The Wicked
Problems without clean solutions — institutional values in tension with AI adoption, questions that don't have right answers, and challenges that required navigating rather than resolving.
The Ugly
The things that were hard to acknowledge but essential to share — failures, missteps, and honest reflections that the annual report doesn't capture.
Your Wicked Problem
The session closes with a brief structured audience exchange: what is the wicked problem you are facing on your campus? The road is shorter when traveled together.
About AI@Conn
Connecticut College's own Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives holds the Bromberg Collection — a trove of Oz ephemera that has lived on campus long before AI arrived on the scene. The Wizard of Oz framing in this session is no accident: it anchors the honest, behind-the-curtain metaphor in something distinctly Connecticut College.
AI@Conn represents a campus-wide initiative to meaningfully integrate artificial intelligence into the liberal arts — not as a productivity tool bolted onto existing workflows, but as a subject worthy of sustained scholarly and institutional engagement.
Learning Outcomes
- Identify at least three structural considerations that shape the success or failure of a liberal arts AI initiative, drawing on concrete examples from AI@Conn.
- Distinguish between what is "good," "wicked," and "ugly" in initiative design — and apply that framework to honestly assess the state of AI work at your own institution.
- Name at least one transferable strategy and one shared challenge with a peer institution, using the structured audience exchange built into the session.