As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) continues to expand within academic institutions, Wellesley College is taking an interdisciplinary approach to a new learning experience incorporating AI. Expanding on the initiative’s broader goals to critically examine AI’s role in a liberal arts education, the program encourages faculty to approach AI from multiple perspectives, including ethical concerns surrounding its development and use, as well as its potential benefits in teaching and research.
The College launched a GenAI Fellowship Initiative at the start of the Spring 2026 semester to consolidate faculty members whose projects integrate and investigate GenAI and its uses.
“The goal is for findings to inform future pedagogical approaches and policies at the college,” wrote Professor Orit Shaer, founder and Director of the GenAI Fellowship Initiative, in an email to the News.
Students are also directly involved in the initiative, where six student fellows collaborate on projects and share their perspectives as peer mentors. The goal is to help identify appropriate and effective ways for students to engage with AI within different disciplines.
Six faculty members were selected to participate across departments, including Sun-Hee Lee, professor of Korean in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department. Lee’s research centers around the corpus linguis, essentially a language word base, of the Korean language. She says that she uses GenAI to more easily build her corpus, creating a hub for the different structures and intricacies of the language.
“[GenAI] gives us a little bit more tools [so] that we can [easily create] the corpus and then make sure that we have the input in the format that we wanted to have,” said Lee.
As for AI’s usefulness, Lee said that, “it’s very superficial still, but in terms of a sort of apparent proficiency, it imitates the human.”
Wellesley students have also noticed professors who are more willing to integrate AI into the classroom.
In Lee’s course, “Digital Language: Corpus Linguistics and its Applications,” her students observe the efficiency Lee says that her students noticed, “AI does not do a great job in identifying defined linguistic features, like other corpus linguistics tools, [although] it has some potential to facilitate the process.”
However, there are downsides to using what she called a “superficial technology.” For example, Lee said that AI can limit students’ ability to learn if it is overly relied on.
“We need to make sure that each individual has basic literacy. [But]sometimes if you overuse it, it actually kills the room for growth,” she said.
Professor Orit Shaer, Co-Chair of the Computer Science Department, has worked with a team of students in finding ways to integrate AI into emergency medical decision support.
“This program centers on inquiry,” Shaer said, noting that projects range from interrogating the ethics of AI tools to exploring how they might be used productively in the classroom.
As a year-long fellowship, the initiative is expected to continue with future cohorts, including a group of fellows in 2027. Organizers hope that this sustained structure will allow for deeper exploration and more meaningful integration of AI into the curriculum.
Looking ahead, the faculty fellows are expected to present preliminary results at a campus event, “Imagining the Future: AI and the Liberal Arts,” on May 2 to offer insights that may shape future teaching practices and institutional policies.
Contact the editors responsible for this article: Emily Kohler and Lyanne Wang
