National Humanities Center to Extend Responsible AI Initiative

Next Phase to Involve Partnerships with Community Colleges and Minority-Serving Institutions

Building on the success of its Responsible AI Curriculum project (RAI), established in partnership with Google Education, the National Humanities Center (NHC) is pleased to announce that it will continue the project through the 2026 academic year and extend its reach to include faculty and students from community colleges and Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs).

Working collaboratively, faculty from four institutions that participated in the initial RAI cohort will co-develop courses with colleagues from partnering community colleges or MSIs. These courses, focused on the ethical challenges presented by artificial intelligence-driven technologies, will then be held on each of the participating campuses during the 2025–26 school year.

Institutions selected to participate in the second phase of the RAI initiative include:

“Our hope for these partnerships is that they will make nuanced AI education more widely available across institution types and enhance relationships between the partnering institutions,” said NHC President and Director Robert D. Newman. “The courses developed by our original cohort of fifteen institutions have proven incredibly popular with students and inspired a deeper appreciation for the role the humanities must play if we are to ensure that AI technologies are developed and deployed responsibly.”

During the past two years, the NHC’s RAI initiative has supported individual faculty members and faculty teams at 15 institutions—R1 universities, liberal arts colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and an HBCU—as they created undergraduate courses that introduce humanities-derived methodologies to the study of artificial intelligence. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines—literary studies, ethics, cinema studies, government, computer science, data science, philosophy, and gender studies—these courses considered how the use of artificial intelligence affects the lives of everyone in the twenty-first century.

The RAI initiative has encouraged partnerships across humanities and STEM disciplines at each of the schools involved and created a lively community of practice for teachers to share materials and approaches. Faculty from the first phase of the RAI project will gather at the National Humanities Center in early July 2024 to discuss lessons they have learned in working with students and colleagues during the past two years, a period in which the topic of artificial intelligence has been the subject of intense debate on college campuses nationwide.

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