A reflection on the 2025 Connecticut College AI & Liberal Arts Symposium, exploring how AI is reshaping liberal arts education through cross-disciplinary learning, human connection, and a shared sense of awakening.

Introduction

Across three autumn days at the AI and the Liberal Arts Symposium at Connecticut College, the conversations felt less like a conference and more like a collective act of awakening.

First, a huge thank-you to our colleagues and friends at Connecticut College for hosting such a fantastic event. This was, without question, the best professional development experience I’ve had since the pandemic.

I only found out about it a few weeks ago, so I wasn’t able to submit a proposal this time—but I highly recommend the symposium to anyone interested in the intersections of AI and the liberal arts. It’ll return next year, and you can bet I’ll be responding to the call for proposals to share the exciting work we’re doing at Skidmore that contributes to this dynamic and evolving space.

I arrived early and after registering, participated on a group tour of Connecticut College’s amazing arboretum. It’s open to the public and I highly recommend a visit.

College Center at Crozier-Williams

Welcome packet

Vista with weeping conifers

Reflection in the Pond

AI isn’t just a new tool for the liberal arts — it’s a mirror.

Everywhere, that mirror reflected something back: our assumptions about knowledge, our fatigue with disciplinary boundaries, our uneasy faith in human judgment. Some framed AI as a pedagogical partner, others as a provocation. But beneath every debate ran a shared undercurrent — that the liberal arts must not retreat from AI, but reinterpret themselves through it.

Beyond Silos: Following the Phenomenon

One recurring theme was the generative convergence of disciplines, where boundaries became bridges. Panelists from across fields described how AI resists neat categorization: it writes like a humanist, reasons like a scientist, and fails like an artist.

A digital humanities panel explored how generative tools can help students see structure in story or bias in data. An environmental studies group used AI-generated imagery to visualize climate change as cultural narrative rather than scientific abstraction. A philosophy instructor co-taught a course with a data scientist, letting students interrogate both logic and ethics in the same breath.

These moments revealed a shift — not from one discipline to another, but beyond discipline entirely — into what several speakers called transdisciplinary learning: inquiry that follows the phenomenon, not the field.

It’s an approach that feels truer to the liberal arts than ever — dynamic, synthetic, and driven by wonder rather than walls.

The Liberal Arts Awakening

Across sessions, a pattern emerged — one that keynote speaker Lance Eaton gave a name to in his address, The Sleep of the Liberal Arts Produces AI. His metaphor caught fire throughout the symposium. In panels and workshops afterward, people kept returning to it: the idea that AI didn’t replace us — it revealed where we’d already fallen asleep.

“AI didn’t replace us — it revealed where we’d already fallen asleep.”

That sleep took many forms.

Dismissal — the academy’s habit of treating new media and emerging technologies as distractions rather than dialogues.
Fetishization — the way we mistake performance of intellect for presence of curiosity.
Externalization — the quiet outsourcing of our public mission to private systems and paywalled knowledge.

Panelists didn’t treat these as abstract critiques; they tied them to practice. A librarian showed how paywalled scholarship feeds commercial AI systems — what she called academic fracking. A literature professor confessed that she once told students to avoid ChatGPT, only to later use it with them to analyze power structures in Victorian novels. A group of students described AI as their learning partner, not a shortcut — proof that the boundaries between tool and teacher are already blurring.

“AI didn’t wake the liberal arts — it found them stirring.”

 

The Human Element: Productive Struggle, Rediscovery, and Redesign

What made the symposium electric wasn’t the technology — it was the humanity pulsing through every discussion. Faculty spoke less about how to control AI and more about how to stay human beside it.

One recurring idea was productive struggle — not as an obstacle to learning, but as its catalyst. AI tools created just enough uncertainty to be generative. Students found themselves asking new kinds of questions: What should I be doing less of? What does originality look like now? How do I make the best use of time with a professor, when the “expert” is increasingly a facilitator of knowledge, not its gatekeeper?

Faculty, too, found themselves in unfamiliar territory. Long-held routines were challenged by tools that could draft, translate, or simulate. The struggle wasn’t about obsolescence — it was about reorientation. What habits of mind are worth keeping? What does rigor mean when the machine can “write” an answer?

And in that discomfort, something vital reemerged: the shared space of learning. Office hours became less about solving and more about sense-making. Less about correctness and more about discernment. Students didn’t need someone to check their work — they needed someone to help them recognize what kind of thinking it was.

In that spirit, the liberal arts reasserted their enduring role — not as defenders of tradition, but as designers of discernment. When algorithms simulate knowledge, discernment becomes the highest art form.

AI may have accelerated this shift, but the liberal arts were always headed there. What emerged across the symposium was a deeper understanding: that growth comes from tension, that rediscovery often begins with unlearning, and that the future of learning may look less like mastery and more like a shared choreography of questioning.

Epilogue: Sora and the Mirror

After the symposium, that metaphor of the mirror stayed with me — especially as I experimented with Sora, a tool from OpenAI that turns words into video. I had received early access just before the conference began. By the time it ended, I had shared all six of my invite codes with colleagues who were curious, eager, and already dreaming up experimental test cases. Invite codes are a fascinating way for software companies to roll things out.

Watching that rollout unfold felt strangely familiar — like history rhyming. Back in 2002, when I was a webmaster in the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State, a computer science grad student forwarded me a link to something called Google Beta. “You should check this out,” he said. I did. I joined. And unknowingly, I stepped into something that would transform how the world searches and knows.

Before parting ways, a few of us made videos — short visual essays. You only get 10 or 15 seconds to try out your prompts. A philosopher in conversation with a clone of herself. A student’s dream rendered into shifting light and architecture. A reimagined classroom set in the year 2130. Each piece asked, in its own way: If AI can imagine with us, who decides the shape of the story?

Ultimately, Sora has that same quality — a shimmer of arrival. Something just beginning to shape the future of creation, while reflecting back the questions we haven’t stopped asking.

The technology isn’t just extending imagination. It’s echoing it. It’s reflecting it. And in that echo, it’s asking us what kind of storytellers we want to be.

Conclusion: The Liberal Arts, Awake

By the final plenary, the tone had shifted from anxiety to resolve. The liberal arts weren’t under threat — they were awakening.

The symposium closed not with consensus, but with a shared rhythm: a refusal to let automation define what it means to learn.

Across those three days, AI became less an existential threat and more an existential invitation — not to escape technology, but to wake beside it.

Curious. Critical. And still — profoundly human.

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A reflection on the 2025 Connecticut College AI & Liberal Arts Symposium and early experiments with Sora — exploring how AI challenges, reshapes, and ultimately mirrors the soul of liberal arts learning.