Episode 121: Tradition Meets Innovation with Dr. Andrew T. Hsu, President of the College of Charleston
Dr. Andrew T. Hsu is the 23rd President of the College of Charleston, formally taking office on May 16, 2019.
As a faculty member, Hsu exemplifies the faculty-scholar model. He received numerous teaching awards as a professor, maintained a continuously funded research lab for 15 years, and published 98 refereed journal and conference articles. He is a fellow of the American Council on Education (ACE) and is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
How to negotiate the future of Higher Education while keeping the core values?
As Charleston is one of the oldest towns in the country and one of the oldest universities in the United States, with a long history, the traditions are important to both the College of Charleston and the people. The College of Charleston has developed a strategic plan that was made 6 years ago with the help of the community, which is titled “Tradition and Transformation”. With this plan in place, it switches to maintain the liberal arts tradition, such as a historic university and as well as all the nice things about a small private college, but transforms it to a modern public higher education institution. The strategic plan lays out what we need to do to transform it, but not using the history and traditions. There are a lot of things changing rapidly in the world, and that is especially true in the tech industry. It is a different world now, so we will need to make the necessary changes to just be relevant and to stay relevant. The guiding force is educating students, so as long as the College of Charleston focuses on the success of the students and their retention and graduation rates, too. As long as the goals are being focused on, then it becomes easier to determine what needs to be done, and it becomes clearer how to navigate this current state.
AI as a transformative change to help Students, Administrators, Advisors, and Facilities evolve
AI is one major change agent for higher education for the foreseeable future. There have been many changes in the past few years that require the institution to both teach differently and also teach different content, and AI is just one of those examples. What the College of Charleston is doing now is to look at what our students need in order ot be successful in today’s world and tomorrow’s workforce. What the institution is trying to do is develop a comprehensive way of embedding AI in all that we do. Being located in the south, the institution is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC ). With them, there is a process called the QEP Quality Enhancement Program that all SACSCOC-accredited institutions have to develop. There needs to be a new one every 10 years, and follow through with a 10-year effort in making improvements. We are required to report back to SACSCOC during the reaccreditation cycle. The institution has just finished one QEP in the area of sustainability, where they embedded the teaching of sustainability in all disciplines, and the next one has just been selected by the campus through the faculty process, where we ask faculty to propose different topics for the QEP, and the one that was chosen was intentional AI basically where we take a holistic view of what is needed to both run a university successfully with the help of AI in all the various divisions as well as how to teach and what do we teach in term of AI in the various disciplines, not just computer science but political science, philosophy, etc. The first step is to train the trainers, to develop a curriculum in the various disciplines that would incorporate AI education into the courses, and that’s what is being done with AI and the various divisions as well.
How to negotiate that resistance from faculty with dealing with AI?
There is always resistance to anything new and human biased nature in general, resistance to new changes. When talking about AI, there were those naysayers who would say, “Oh, you can’t really teach AI to cheat on the exams, and they won’t learn anything, and all their work will be done by AI.” We also know that if a student is not well-versed in AI, then they are not gonna be effective in the future workforce. We rely on a process that would bring in all the various opinions, whether it is for it or against it, and whatever the newest initiatives that we might need to embark on. It is the same with AI. Before we had the proposal on the quality enhancements program that focused on AI, we formed a faculty committee on AI, and that faculty committee has debated to the full extent, whether it is all pros and cons of teaching AI, not teaching AI, where to teach AI, ow to teach AI and all of that. Through the center of teaching and learning, there was a long debate on that, and the result is that faculty are, by and large, very astute and very smart, and they see the future of what’s coming down the pipe. AT the end, the majority of the people that was on that committee all agreed that this is something you have to do. Through the QEP process, the faculty and staff are better versed in what is needed.
Contact Dr. Andrew T. Hsu
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-hsu-248ba133
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cofchsu/?hl=en
Learn more about the College of Charleston
Website: https://charleston.edu
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