Navigating AI together

Last week, I was invited to testify before Congress at a hearing titled “Building an AI-Ready America: Higher Education in the Age of AI.” It was an honor to share what we are seeing across our institutions as they adopt AI, navigate the complexity of this moment, and wrestle with many of the same urgent questions.

One thing has become increasingly clear: higher education is having thousands of the same conversations in separate places.

Campuses are wrestling with questions about AI literacy, privacy, governance, teaching, learning, workforce preparation, and responsible use. Unfortunately, many are doing so in isolation.

The lack of coordination is striking. Institutions are investing enormous time and energy trying to answer the same questions independently rather than building shared understanding and learning from one another. This is exactly the kind of challenge our presidents formed the UIA to address. When campuses learn together, they move faster. They avoid duplicating effort. They spread promising ideas more quickly. Most importantly, they increase the odds that students benefit regardless of where they enroll.

My concern is that the consequences of our current approach will not be felt equally. Well-resourced institutions will continue to experiment, adapt, and move forward. But many of the lessons emerging from that work are not spreading fast enough across the sector. Students at institutions with fewer resources should not have to wait to benefit from what others are learning.

The field is still working through foundational questions around AI literacy, privacy, safety, governance, and responsible use. Those answers should emerge from broad learning and collaboration, not from thousands of institutions independently reinventing the wheel. If we are not intentional about sharing insights, testing ideas across contexts, and learning together, we risk creating a future where access to innovation, and the benefits that come with it, depends largely on where a student happens to enroll.

American higher education is the world’s greatest engine of discovery and innovation. If campuses treat AI primarily as a competitive advantage, institutions will be incentivized to gatekeep what they learn, and we will miss a much larger opportunity to unite around solving the grand challenges of our time.

The question is not whether universities can innovate. They already are. The question is whether we will build the infrastructure, partnerships, and incentives necessary to help ideas spread so that every student can benefit from what the sector is learning.

Regardless of where you land on AI, it presents an opportunity to think bigger than any single campus. It could help us amplify human creativity, accelerate discovery, and tackle challenges that no single person or institution can solve alone.

We need better ways to coordinate, learn from one another, and share what is emerging across the sector. We need to make sure the lessons learned on one campus do not stay there. We need to ensure that new insights about privacy, literacy, safety, and governance are shared, tested, improved, and spread.

Read the testimony and watch the hearing here.

Thank you for continuing to share your insights with me. I read every reply.

In partnership, 
Bridget