What AI Means for the University with Dr. Julie Jordan

In this episode of UnchartED State, co-hosts Susan Seal and Maddie Ludt are joined by Dr. Julie Jordan, Mississippi State University's first Senior Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Data Governance.

Dr. Jordan shares how AI has evolved from a niche technology into something more like electricity: embedded in everything and impossible to ignore. The conversation examines how universities are navigating this acceleration, the challenges of institutional pace and adoption, and broader implications for the labor market, knowledge work, and the long-standing "social contract" of higher education.

From billion-dollar data centers rising across Mississippi to free AI models you can run offline on your phone, this episode covers a lot of ground while staying rooted in what it all means for the university.

In This Episode:

• Why AI is being compared to electricity, not just another tech trend
• When three-to-five-year plans become three-to-five-week plans
• How AI is reshaping jobs, skills, and the value of a degree
• Creating space for faculty to tinker, explore, and talk about it
• Equity, access, and downloadable AI models for rural learners
• Why communication and human connection matter more than ever

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The other groundbreaking I think that sometimes gets forgotten is that when OpenAI dropped Chat GPT, they made it free and available to anybody that had an iPhone or had a computer to use. And so when you democratized it and everybody could have access to it, and it didn't cost them anything, that was a moment in time that we can't go back to.

SPEAKER_02 0:27

Welcome to Uncharted State, where we explore the changing landscape of higher education. And today we are going to focus on one of the most consequential. Consequential. Let's all say that three times. Yeah. But today we're really going to dig in a little bit, go deeper, and focus on it for the whole episode. We have a special guest with us today, Dr. Julie Jordan. Welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. Dr. Jordan is Mississippi State's first ever senior advisor for artificial intelligence and data governance, reporting directly to the Office of the President. She leads MSU Strategic AI initiatives, oversees comprehensive data governance, and serves as an ex officio member of the Mississippi AI Regulation Task Force established by the Mississippi Legislature. Dr. Jordan previously served as VP for research and economic development here at Mississippi State. So tell us a little bit about your journey. I've known you for uh you were at uh researching curriculum in the RCU.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

I was at the RCU for my first leadership role here in 2010. Uh spent um seven years there, and along the way, I had a chance to do some traveling to Morocco with our partnership with the University of International Robot. And so then around 2017, Dr. Shaw asked me to be um take responsibility for the International Institute. So I became director there and associate vice president. And then um in 2019, when Dr. Shaw was promoted to provost, um, I stepped in as interim vice president for research and was there up until November of 2025. And um just realized, I think, that from a leadership perspective at the institution, we needed to have somebody that could focus 100% of their time on AI. I think the it was the sort of as you got into the middle of 2025, you know, this whole AI thing. So when ChatGPT, AI has been around a long time, but when ChatGPT dropped in November 2022, the world kind of stopped and took notice to something being really different about this generative AI stuff. And so 2023 rocked along and people kind of played around with it. 2024 rocked along. And as we rolled in, I think, to 2025, we began to see the capabilities accelerating and the and thus a lot more conversation around what was this gonna mean to the institution and to every organization, honestly, every corporation. Uh, and so during 2025, Dr. Shaw and I had many conversations around what we needed to be doing. At that point, I had started chairing the data governance committee. Um, AI is one of those things, if you don't have good data, it isn't gonna make any difference. So really started looking at the data governance. Um, and somewhere during the year, I realized, you know, we just needed somebody to kind of wake up every day thinking about this. And I said, you know, you know, I'll do it. And so that's that's you know how it kind of happened. Uh willing and willing to kind of step aside from being vice president so that instead of 10 or 15% of my time being spent thinking about data governance and AI to 100% of the time, you know, that's what I'm thinking about.

SPEAKER_02 3:43

Because you you were you were doing it there as well. So you were interested in it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

I was interested in it. I was playing around with it, you know, trying to figure out what to do. In fact, as the vice president for research, you know, I was the one that kind of reached out and said, let's go, let's go buy some of these co-pilot licenses, let's get some people started, let's see what we can learn. Uh, you know, there's there's a always a set of early adopters. Um, I believe that we need to empower early adopters. Um, but they're the ones that will shape how everybody else comes along. Um, you know, yeah, whether that those folks are going to be the ones that are gonna blaze the trails, they're gonna be the ones that spend extra time, where they're gonna spend that weekend trying to figure out how to make something work, then they ultimately make it easier for everybody else along the way. The technology's changing, honestly, sometimes it feels like daily and sometimes hourly. And so we need though, we need those people. And I've really tried to work and empower that group and and make sure they had access to the resources that they wanted to honestly tinker around with and play with because they're gonna be key as we try to bring everybody else along. Yeah, it's hard to have a three to five year plan anymore. Yeah, you can't have a three. I mean, no, no, no. Three to five-week plan is Yeah, it's a three to five-week plan. And um, no, you can't even, it's hard to even think about a three to five year plan. I I do think because the institution uh moves a little slower, then the technology is going to move, which is not a bad thing. Uh, we need to have a little time, we need to be able to think about it. Um and so I do think that we've seen acceleration this year. The conversation on this campus, uh, I think accelerated one, because somebody was named to be in charge of it. Uh, and two, I mean, that raised the visibility of it. It raised the expectation for the institution that we were doing something. And so then the community began to want to know what are we doing and how to, you know, the early adopters wanted to know how to get involved. And then everybody else wanted to know where where was their place in this? How is it going to impact academics? How is it going to impact my teaching, my research, and everything else about the institution? So uh 2025 has seen an acceleration in the conversation across campus, uh, but also an extraordinary acceleration in what the tools do for us. Uh what I do today with the tools I use every day was not possible in November. Yeah. It just wasn't possible. And acceleration scares people. Acceleration scares people. Um, I've been, there have been many different things. It excites people that I've said, let maybe don't use that word. So maybe that's one that, you know, um we got to be careful about. Uh, but I do think it's it's not, and the reality of it is it's not Mississippi State accelerating it. Right. It is the industry accelerating it. And we're just trying to keep up. And so I I don't think we're not ahead at all. We're not behind, I don't think, our sister institutions either. I think education's gonna move slower. I mean, all of educational moves slower than the in the private sector.

SPEAKER_02 6:40

So, you know, the headlines are, you know, AI is gonna replace jobs. Yeah. And you look back at the history, you know, we had the industrial revolution, which was more about uh the mechanization of labor. And this is more the mechanization from a cognitive standpoint, which is different. But also, and we were at uh UPSIA last week and a lot of talk about it's really more like when we had electricity, the changes that took place when everybody started using electricity because it was in everything we do. It wasn't replacing one thing. It I mean, yeah, now you we couldn't even imagine what it would be like to not have electricity.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and that electricity enabled so many other things to happen.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

And so I think that's what AI is right now, because you're right, it's not mechanizing manual labor, which is ever out, I think every other technological revolution mostly focused on mechanizing some form of manual labor. Um, this is knowledge work. Um, and it empowers everything we touch for the most part, whether it's automate something in your car, it's something in your phone, it's on your watch, it's in every medical device, it's inside every application that we're using in our computer. Uh so it's just it's it is ubiquitous and it will become more so uh as we go. And I think um I think it's education when we talk about knowledge workers. You know, we think about you know, the GI Bill that sent so many more people to universities to higher education following World War II. And then the the promise then was you're gonna get that knowledge job, you're gonna get that desk job, you're gonna get that sort of different kind of career. And so I think our institution, I mean, higher education in general has the social contract that we've had with every student that comes here for the last 30 years has been around we're gonna get you that job so that you don't do manual labor. And so some of the side effects over the last 30 years, we have stigmatized manual labor and thus manufacturers and people that need manual labor, carpenters, plumbers, builders. We've we struggled to have enough workforce there because we've had this social contract that come to higher education, come get a four-year degree, and you're gonna get that desk job. You're gonna be in air conditioning, you're not gonna be outside. And so that's gonna change because AI is gonna displace the knowledge worker positions or and displace some absolutely. And I mean they're gonna change. It's gonna happen some. It's gonna happen some. Um but it's already has. And it's gonna create more. I mean, it's gonna create more. Absolutely in the near term, we're gonna need more people to help every organization with the transition. And and in the long run, there'll be different, you know, different paths for different people. Um, it remains to be seen how many fewer people that we actually need as an institution. But and I and I don't know because we're if we if we remain an institution that's about people, and we're not about just AI, uh, which I hope that's what we do, um people need people. And the only way to learn to be human is to be with people. Right. And so I think it's really important to understand that there's a human and there's an AI collaborator now. Um, and it's a real mind shift to think about using a tool as a collaborator and not as a tool like a spreadsheet that just gives you an answer. And it it's that's a really interesting shift for people to make as they begin to use the an AI as thinking about it as a collaborator and not just a tool that gives you an answer.

SPEAKER_02 10:32

Am I the only one that Barbara Streisand popped in their mind? People, people who need people now, yeah. So this relates to the conversation that you and I were having earlier about from the student perspective. Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Um, because I'm working with non-traditional students, we have a lot of adult learners, they're already out there in the workforce, and I can feel this apprehension from them because they can already see how it's changing their day-to-day. And what does that reskilling look like for them or upskilling look like for them, given rapid changing uh that we're going through with AI? And to speak to your previous point, too, it sounds like, you know, we we've got a bit to do with like managing expectations and kind of resetting what that looks like.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Yeah, uh, you mean with expectations with this social contract that we have? Yeah, I I think I think we do as a country. I think we got to come to uh think about a different type of social contract with with everybody. And I don't know what that is. If there's a lot of smart people talking about it, um, what what's the world gonna look like in five years or 10 years? And it's it is hard to imagine. Um, you know, when when that AI, as they say, stands up and walks across the room and it's a robot, that's gonna be another sort of sea change when imagine this campus when we we, you know, we walk around there's humanoid-shaped robots or some other shaped robot that's just roaming around campus doing some task.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

How close are we?

SPEAKER_01 12:03

Um I think we're probably, I think I would think realistically five years. I think most of the robots that are being built now are gonna go into manufacturing environments. That's what they're being built for. That's where the biggest financial opportunity is for the companies that are building. There are some being built that are gonna go in our homes. And so I think somewhere in the middle of that, we'll we'll end up with robots that are, you know, doing traditional manual labor thing, moving boxes from one building to another and things like that that'll come out of that manufacturing set of robots. And then we'll end up with robots that are in our buildings, um, doing various things. We're finally gonna get rosy. We're gonna get rosy. And I'm, you know, I'm I'm gonna go. From the Jetson. This is I don't mind being on the leading edge. I'm not sure I want to be on the leading edge of having that robot in my house with the first cycle of the beta tester. Yeah, I don't want to be the beta test. You know, I don't want it to squash my refrigerator or, you know, put a hole in my window or something or drop all my glasses.

SPEAKER_02 12:55

So you you were talking about the acceleration and then how gotten some pushback on that from faculty sometime about wait a wait. There's people all over the place, which there's those who are leading, they're ready to go, do exciting things. There's those in the middle, and there's people who just 100% this is just still, I mean, it just seems so what's the biggest misconception that you that you're seeing from people?

SPEAKER_01 13:19

So I I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that AI is new. I mean, the the concept of AI and machine learning has been around for decades. What feels new about it, honestly, is generative AI feels a little new. Um machine learning is a little different, it's more deterministic, and you know, it's been the things that when you use Amazon and it knows what you've already bought and it shows you what you want to buy. Uh, we're all familiar with that. It's uh what makes our cars know how to not bump up against the one in front of us. Um but the the generative AI happened, and that the other groundbreaking I think that sometimes is forgotten is that when OpenAI dropped Chat GBT, they made it free and available to anybody that had an iPhone or had a computer to use. And so when you democratized it and everybody could have access to it, and it didn't cost them anything, that was that was a moment in time that we can't go back to. I mean, I think we are we are going to always have that pressure. In fact, there were some blog posts about it today around keeping it free, keeping it democratized so that everybody has access. Yeah. I think is that realistic? It's not realistic that ever that the capabilities of the what's free is the same as the capabilities of somebody that's paying for it. But it's I think it's realistic to keep basic conversational back and forth querying free. I really do. That the higher end work will be the higher end work we're gonna have to start figuring out how to pay for. And we're all gonna learn we're this whole word called token is gonna be something we're all gonna figure out because we're gonna pay, we're gonna stop paying $20 a month, I think, in a lot of places, and we're gonna start paying by the token. You know, the more you use it, the more you pay. Which is the more gasoline I use, the more I pay.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

Well, it's like a lot of things, it's you're it's a commodity, the more electricity you use.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

So, you know, if we think about it as it should become an essential utility, yeah, the more we use it, the more we pay. And and to some degree, I think that's where we land. Yeah. Yeah, always fundamentally it's electricity. Yeah. I mean, you none of it works without electricity. The core commodity that make drives all this now is electricity. And somebody's gotta pay for it.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

Okay, so let's talk about that. Okay. I I knew I was teeing that one up for you. The environmental environmental piece. So um that's a concern. I mean, a lot of people talk about the environmental um aspects of it. And there's a lot of things that's that's going on with it. I saw uh CBS Sunday morning last weekend, they were showing this uh floating hydroelectric dam. Yeah, I saw that. Did you? Yeah. Uh and then you've talked about putting, you know, data centers in space. Um I was talking to somebody who was here the that did the session on the new poverty AI, and they were concerned about you know, we've already polluted our oceans in a lot of ways. We've we've changed ecosystems, we've affected the uh in environment in in doing a lot of things. Yeah. So are we gonna do that same thing? Are we gonna expand that? Are we gonna do that also in space? So talk about the environmental concerns that people have uh and kind of what you see are their ways to start mitigating some of that.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

Yeah, anytime you build something, you're uh disrupting something else. And so, yes, um, I think I think what is feels different about this is the if what it's the dollar amount of money that's being spent right now, or it's being talked about being spent by these companies. There's no pro there's very few projects, maybe the maybe the Apollo mission, and I think this dwarfs that, you know, that talks about spending a billion dollars a building. I mean, the AWS facilities that are going in Madison County, Mississippi, are on average about a billion dollars per building. And they're building a campus of them. So when they say they're building 20, they're spending investing 20, 25 billion dollars, you can bet that's 20 to 25 buildings that they're working on. And it's like 10 billion in Meridian. It's about 10 billion in Midian. And I don't I don't know what the latest number is for Elon Musk up in DeSoto County, you know, that one. That one's caught the most slack, but even down in Meridian, I've talked to the economic developer, not in Meridian, in um Madison County, the economic developers, I mean, at this point, they're they're doing more to try to help the community understand, help people understand what the truth is about the, you know, the water usage, the the power usage, and so forth. Um, waters of all the environmental impacts, actually Ethan Moloch said something about it recently, of all the environmental impacts, water is the least to worry about. Um somehow we've gotten it in the public's mind that it's you know it's using up the water table. It's not, you know, it's a closed water loop. They build a fill a tank up and the water just circulates and cools. It has driven uh uh if you want to talk about generating energy, it has driven an explosion of um solar facilities. So it is pushing more development of cleaner energy. If data centers weren't happening right now, we wouldn't be talking about building small nuclear reactors either, which is super clean energy. And so it's driving a a big research and development effort and investment effort in cleaner energy around the world right now. The floating, the ones we saw about the the floating ones, I mean, that's that's pretty clean. That's really really clean energy. You know, when you go into space, if you can actually make that work and you can put a data center and a satellite in space, you're using solar energy only.

SPEAKER_02 19:15

And so from a university from a higher ed standpoint, these are new jobs we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

These are new jobs to build more satellites to go, I I I don't you know robots are gonna we're gonna build we're gonna build robots and the robots are gonna build those satellites, to be honest.

SPEAKER_02 19:32

Um yeah Well and one thing is kind of interesting is we haven't seen this before either, that AI is being used to improve itself. 100%. I mean, other things you look back in history that we've talked about, that hasn't happened before.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

Yeah, it's called recursive self-improvement. Yeah. And that's what's allowing these companies to say, okay, here's this week there's here's version 4.5. Two weeks from now there's version 4.6. And a week from now there's version 4.7. It's a self-improvement loop. And it that's gonna get a little scary. You know, there was a little hype this last couple of weeks about Mythos, this model that was super duper cybersecurity, either opportunity or threat, whichever way you want to use it. If you want a red team or a blue team, you know, whichever way you want to use it. So yeah, they're gonna get super smart. Uh and and but the the other part, when I say super smart, is that's it's that's a jagged, that's a jagged scope of knowledge. For example, super smart. I use Claude a lot, but Claude cannot get consistently that that the 22nd of April is Wednesday. You're right. It will invariably say it's Tuesday or Thursday. Claude cannot get the days and the days of dates. Not good with that. And so I tell it all the time it's terrible at that. And it comes back and says, I know that. So, you know, it's um I recognize my weakness, Claude says. So, you know, while it's super smart at some things, there's some things you want that it just doesn't do well. It seems very simple. Yeah. Yeah, it's it seems you seem very simple that it can't do. And, you know, those are the pieces that'll get cleaned up over time. But yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

So let's talk global and then move down to Mississippi. You know, we talk about US and China a a lot uh in in competition for different things. Where is AI in in that? Is there a race? Um, and and there's different components of it, right? I mean, there's the chips and the data centers and development and adoption and all the different pieces. So it's not like just like we're winning at this one thing. But how does the competition between world powers or whatever how does that play in? And how does that affect 100% of competition?

SPEAKER_01 21:55

I who's winning Like you said, depends upon whichever metric you want to look at. China has added more power than the in the last bit and can build power faster than we can right now. Or add new gigawatts or megawatts of power. Um so ultimately more power is good. Uh right now we had uh because we had a head start, we still have the vast majority of data centers in the world are in the United States. That's because our telecom infrastructure, I mean, every data center is a data center, whether it's providing telecommunications or it's, you know, serving your AI model. So all of those get counted because they're there's cap its capacity. That is the that's the big geopolitical nut. I mean, we're gonna be battling this out in the near future. I don't think there's anybody else that's a player other than the United States and China for the most part. And they want to win and we want to win. Whatever winning looks like depends upon probably whoever's talking about it. Education's a big piece of that. Education's a big piece of it. We'll we'll keep, we'll continue to chase one another. There'll continue to be this measurement of, oh, that open um deep seek just dropped to China, the Chinese model just dropped, and it's open source, and it's better than ChatGPT 5.4, but it's not better than Opus 4.6. You know, there'll continue to be those narratives. The reality of it is these things are so smart right now that one of them being a little bit better than the other one from a from the from the average user, me, it makes no difference. It just doesn't make any difference. I just want it to do the date right. It's already super smart. If it could just get my date started. And so um, yeah, it they need we need to round out some of the edges for the average user so that they there's a better trust. Because every time it gets something simple like that wrong, I think we all go, well, what else are you getting wrong? Um, so uh the geopolitical landscape will continue to play out. Part of that's just the amount of money that is being spent.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

So kind of circling back to something that we spoke about earlier, um, in terms of economic impact, talking about these new data centers that are being built and the type of jobs that that's bringing to Mississippi. I see this a lot from talking to our partners. We've got a lot of construction going on, electrical, um, solar technology, like you mentioned. Um, so there's definitely economic impact that we're already feeling from this. But when we think about our workforce in a state like Mississippi, a rural state like Mississippi, something that's always been a challenge for us that we've been combating, even though we have a strong university system, community college system, is the brain drain and talent leaving our state. So I'm curious what you think about um given our challenges with workforce in that regard. You know, we've got massive investments coming in with AWS and their training model. If universities become part of that training model as well, we're preparing people for this AI economy. Do we risk losing that talent also?

SPEAKER_01 25:03

Yeah. Yes, we will. I mean, the honest answer is yes. I mean, we're gonna risk losing people. But, you know, I think there's we we gain people too, people move here. So I the the net is not so bad, I think, in the long run, uh, when you look at some of the data. But and most of our outflow, some of the data that then Spark's done and some others is that most of our people are gonna go to adjacent states and we're attracting actually from those states over to work in Mississippi because we drive, you know, even if they're gonna work out here at PACAR, um, the uh was in a meeting just recently, and they were talking about, I mean, they've got a lot of, you know, a good 60 to 100 miles migration. Everybody doesn't live right there. Yeah. And so um, they're already driving from Alabama over here. And I'm sure we've got people driving from Mississippi to go work at the Mercedes plants, you know, between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. So I, you know, I, you know, that could change with gas prices. You know, there are a lot of things that could impact where people work. Uh, the best thing we could do, I think, for uh that is huge economic impact. Those data centers are gonna pay a lot of taxes to those counties where they're going. And so that's the attraction to the location where they're going, is the huge amount of taxes that they're gonna pay. And they generally bring all the resources that they need with them, or they're gonna pay for all the resources that they need. I don't see Mississippi with our um drive for economic growth stopping data centers.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:31

I don't think that's happening. Uh, we're giving a lot of people a chance for construction jobs. We're also attracting people. Those companies aren't Mississippi companies. A lot of them aren't. And so they're coming to the state, they're building, and so maybe we get to keep some of them. They like it, they stay, they they keep working here. We've got to figure out how to uh be more in an entrepreneurial state. I think we can keep people if we can show them how they can stay here and work and have a good job. But I don't think that's an AI thing. I think that's always been a challenge in Mississippi. I don't know that AI changes that very much. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:05

Well, the Mississippi's leading, I mean, I won't say leading, but working with our community college system with 100%.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

Three years ago when Accelerate Mississippi funded the Mississippi AI network, um, we are way ahead. That was I was talking to those guys this morning, and the fact that we have a statewide education network trying to support AI, first of all, in education. The next layer that will become more visible probably this year is how that same network is supporting industries. Um, and then um at the same time supporting state and local governments. So the the there's going to be this layered effect of how the Mississippi AI network is supporting economic growth and development, but it started with education, it'll be branching out.

SPEAKER_02 27:53

So switching a little bit to kind of the culture uh our Center for Innovation and Teaching Excellence um site, which for a lot of universities is their Center for Teaching and Learning, or people call it different things. We've worked closely uh with you, um I think done some really cool hands-on AI training. I mean the AI tinkering, I think, is something that it's that's not hard or rocket science or anything, but people have really benefited being able just to play with it in a safe space.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

That's it. And it's it's um people need time. They need time to play, and that it's really comfortable. It does a couple of things. When you have a face-to-face workshop like that, it allows that employee to move away from their desk and their normal job and focus on tinkering for an hour and not get interrupted by their regular emails or you know, somebody knocking on their door. And so that's really that that protected time to play and tinker is what we all need more of. If we if we could we could all spend an hour a week right now or two hours a week, and we probably couldn't keep up. Anything we do face to face, as we all know, it's kind of hard to scale. You got to get people. Um, people like webinars. Webinars are really passive learning. Uh I wish we could get more people engaged in a little more active learning around this. I'm not 100% sure how to do that. So if anybody's got any fabulous ideas.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

So and and we've talked um with the site staff about that we support all faculty. 100%. Um, and there are people who are just I I am not using AI. How do I teach? And we've talked about this before. How do I teach in a world that has AI, but I want to teach without AI? Um, and we've said those are we've got to help them teach well. Uh, I don't know how they're gonna teach without using it to some some degree. But in in your role that's senior advisor for AI, do you feel it's your responsibility to represent all those voices, to listen to all the voices, whether they hate AI or love it? Yeah. Uh, you know, how how is that role?

SPEAKER_01 30:10

100% when I listen. I mean, I've had I've had individual coffees with people who want to talk with me about why it's terrible. Um, it's an existential threat to humanity. Um, and I don't I don't disagree that it's there's plenty of people that see this as a dystopian future. So I I don't discount that at all because it could go really, really bad. And there's plenty of movies and books written about how bad this could go that we've all seen or read or heard of. There's just, you know, I wish there were a few more books and movies about how this could go really well.

SPEAKER_03 30:45

Go well.

SPEAKER_01 30:45

Um Star Trek's probably the best thing that we may have in in our in growing up of how does this look positive in the future. It regardless, everybody's it at a different place. And 100% respect that. But at the same time, we're not going to stop, you know, moving the institution forward and serving what we think is in the best interest of all of our students. But now I will say that students need to know the upsides and the downsides. Just like with any technology that's ever been here, there's a positive and a negative. There's always unintended consequences. There's always that um that that other use case for the technology. It doesn't matter what we created, it can be used for good or it can be used for bad. And this is no different. And I we just have to make sure people under. I believe that if the better we understand it, the more we can grapple with the, with the with those societal challenges and those potentially existential threats that are going to be there, we got to understand it. I'd like to understand if it's a foe, I want to understand the foe. If it's a friend, I want to understand the friend.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

And so how do we create, continue to create that culture? Maybe it's some of the things that we just talked about. I mean, it's just sitting down talking.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

I can't tell you. I mean, even today on the call that we had this morning, I said, y'all, we just have to talk about this. You need to talk about it in small groups in your department. You need to talk about it with your department heads, your colleges need to be talking about it. This this is something people just want to talk about. They want to talk about their fears, they want to talk about what's working. If they're excited about it, they want to talk about what they just built and did that was really cool. Uh, people want to talk about it. Uh, and we just need to create space, many, many opportunities for that to happen. So, as leaders at the institution, I'm trying to create space for all those conversations to take place. And now working with students. So, I'm now working with the SGA president and the director for policy, and we're going to establish a student task force that will work with me and begin meeting with them this summer so that we can have those student voices that I can try to balance and and figure out, you know, is this something we need to respond to, or how do we respond to their needs and their desires?

SPEAKER_00 32:53

So I want to shift toward equity for just a moment. You know, as we're talking about, we're very fortunate here that our universities embrace this and we're having these conversations. We're allowed to play with these tools. Um, but what does that look like for institutions who maybe don't have the money to invest and even individuals as we start exploring what this cost model looks like long term with these AI tools? So, like every time you have this major technology, a gap opens up between the people who have access and the people who don't. My first career was in public libraries, so I've saw this with the digital divide. We have a lot to talk about there. I can tell. Um, but you know, libraries have been trying to combat the digital divide for like 40 plus years, and sometimes it feels like have made very little progress. Um, so when we talk about AI inequity, does is this something that's actually going to help level that playing field between learners and workers who have and have not access, um, or or does it create a new version of the same type of divides that we've been seeing? And what's our role as an institution in that?

SPEAKER_01 34:00

I I think the immediate role has been to make sure we have the basic tools available to everybody. So students don't have to if they they don't have to be paying for it if they don't want to be. We we have the tools available for them. Um and so that's the immediate reaction to how do we how do we deal with equity so students um have a at least a baseline to to work from. I think this is a technology that from an educator, we've talked about personal tutoring, personalized education for decades. Uh this could really do that. This really has the capability of doing that. And the interesting piece of it is now it has the capability of actually you can do it on your phone. You don't have to have a computer. Um, I downloaded the Gemini, an entire model called Gemma 4. You can download it to your cell phone, it's free. You now have your own personalized chat tool on your phone, and it you can turn your internet off and it will work. They can download their own model. And if they live in, I don't know, let's pick Rolling Fork or Chula or you know, Charleston and they live out in the country, and Charleston's already in the country and they live out in the country from Charleston, and they don't have good internet, they don't have to have it. Go to That'll be huge. Go to McDonald's, download the model, and you can use the model at home and offline have that interaction, have that learning opportunity. But you got to realize what's driving that for these companies. Now, this is Google. Um, not the other two, not the other big ones right now. But Google's got great products. But Google has always been out in front when it comes to that education as far as K-12 education. They kind of have the they have the market in K-12 and have. Um the United States has what, 320 million people? We have a very small percentage of the people on the planet. So when you look at where the opportunity is for people to use your product globally, a lot of them are on the continent of Africa, they're in Southeast Asia, and they don't have the level of bandwidth or access to broadband that we do. And so they they, you know, you just need to give them a device because it'll, it'll, it'll work.

SPEAKER_02 36:20

Well, COVID exposed some of the issues with internet, giving students here's your Chromebook or laptop or whatever, now go do your work at home.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

And you got kids going, I don't know. So I mean, Google, these companies are going to put these technologies at the edge. So a lot of conversation about moving the technology to the edge.

SPEAKER_02 36:40

So as we kind of kind of wrap up, is this I mean, some people think this is a catastrophic moment. Is it a as uh trumpeter talked about that creative destruction moment that I mean universities may I don't think we're gonna look like we do today in a few years. I think I don't think we I don't know that we But the creative comes out of that.

SPEAKER_01 37:03

I don't know that we'll look exactly like uh we do in ten years. Um and we probably shouldn't. And we probably shouldn't. So it's exactly what that is. I think we have the opportunity to make it what we want it to be. Uh I I think experiential learning when you have a something in your hand that is smarter than that knows everything, that knows anything, knows the answers to most any questions you want to you want to ask it. Um what is it we want to teach the students? And so that's gonna be how to apply that. And I so I think the land grant mission of always kind of being building and applied engineering, applied agriculture, uh, I think it serves us really well because I think we'll I think we've got to lean forward into experiential learning. Uh I think in order to assess what somebody knows about something. Um I've already had faculty tell me they're they're doing those um Socratic method and and talking to their students to understand what they know um and not relying on an artifact. I think we've got to, I think we will begin very rapidly to rely less on artifacts to assess learning and more on communication. Well, what that's what's that's gonna do for us? We've been complaining that kids can't communicate for 10 years now. We blamed it on social media, we blamed it on a lot of things. But now to succeed, we're gonna have to, they're gonna have to talk about what they really know. Just generating an artifact and turning it again, nobody's gonna think you really did it. It's gonna make communication cool again. It's gonna make communication really cool. I actually read a blog um that said, you know, it talked about all the cool things we're gonna do in STEM, and it's gonna solve all these science and biology and engineering and health and you know, medical issues, new materials, and it comes down to it, you know, what's gonna matter is communication. And oh, by the way, the humanities may win after all.

SPEAKER_02 38:57

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:58

Um so the idea of what does it mean to be human, how do we make meaning out of life when we don't have to work as much?

SPEAKER_00 39:05

I know Jared is just itching to jump in this conversation because we had a very similar one this morning.

SPEAKER_02 39:10

I mean our our PhD in religion over there.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

You know, we've spent decades what is the nature of humanity? Yeah, what does it mean? And we've we've spent decades of built everything built around human labor and what is that job and that career I'm gonna have. Um, when I it's kind of like what happens when we retire. People don't retire because they don't know what they're gonna do. Right. And so we're good, it's or how their life will have meaning. How their life is gonna have meaning if they're not working.

SPEAKER_02 39:39

So wrapping it all up. Yeah. What keeps you up at night and what excites you about getting up and going after it in the morning?

SPEAKER_01 39:50

So what keeps me up at night is I can't tell my grandchildren what it's gonna be like when they grow up. I I have no idea. Yeah, and the other thing I think that keeps me up, that's really personal, but the other thing that keeps them up is can we move fast enough as an institution? Uh I I feel a real sense of urgency. I'm really worried about taking th two and a half, three months off in the summer. Well, I don't take off and you don't take off, but the the opportunity to engage with faculty kind of comes to a stop.

unknown 40:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

And that's just the nature of in our culture. Which I've said before, uh, no other industry does not have to be a good thing. No other industry does they will get back with you in front of you. So my concern is our faculty had a sense of urgency these three months, these four months this semester. I think that sense of urgency is going to be more stressful in August when they come back. Because I think the technologies and the tools are gonna have progressed even more.

SPEAKER_02 40:44

We need to do like they do in elementary school, give them here's some things to do this summer.

SPEAKER_01 40:48

Summer eating. Yes. Please try to use some of the tools over the summer. Actually, somebody said something about that this week. Yeah. I mean, on the on the on the uh the call I had earlier, um, is what can I do over the summer? Somebody actually asked that question, so that's a that's a good thing. All right, so what's what's really exciting? What's the oh man, I you know, I can't wait to have Rosie in my house, actually. Um What's really exciting for me is I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be here when I'm just gonna be able to walk into my house or I'm just gonna be walking around. I don't know what's gonna be. It's either my glasses or it's gonna be just something plugged into my ear. And I'm just gonna be able to ask the question to the ether apparently and get an answer and explore any topic I want to explore. You know, I don't know why this isn't working, you know. Tell me why it isn't working. Um, I want to know about quantum mechanics or I want to learn how to my vegetables to grow better. This is just gonna have all those answers at your head. But so the the key there is to be curious and to have the questions.

SPEAKER_02 41:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

That's the the key is to have enough questions to be able to stay busy.

SPEAKER_02 41:53

Which has always been the thing, right? Yeah it's the questioning. Yeah. Wherever we've been in the the history or or technology, it's the question that guides us. It's the question, it's what if?

SPEAKER_01 42:08

What what what if there is life out in the universe somewhere? What if we could actually build colonies on the moon? Can we actually put data centers in space? And can we get, can we put data centers in the ocean? That these companies that are doing those things now, I've been just fascinated by them. Um they're driving, I mean, we've got a whole generation of kids now re-interested in space. And I remember being about, you know, very little, and my mother getting me up to watch when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon and it was in the middle of the night. So that was a big deal if I got out of bed to go watch something. And so um, and all that faded away for decades. And now we're interested in space again. That's that's what we're gonna be doing. We're gonna be solving really bigger problems because we have some some technology that's gonna help us, because we can. We can ask questions we never could ask before and and and have a colleague and of sorts to help us figure out those answers. You've got me excited. Yeah, I mean, you know, if it's you can either wake up worried about a dystopian future, like or you can wake up thinking, you know, Star Trek's right around the corner and beam me up, Scotty, and let me let me go, you know. Uh and I'd much rather wake up thinking like that. Make it so. Yeah, make it so.

SPEAKER_02 43:29

Make it so, number one.

SPEAKER_01 43:30

Nobody has to be hungry. No, nobody has to be hungry. We've got we've got good clean energies. Let's solve all those things. We get to live to be I I I believe that I believe my grandchildren will have the opportunity, if they stay relatively healthy, I believe they can live to 150. I believe medicine will keep them alive a lot longer.

SPEAKER_02 43:50

Well, there you go. In 45 minutes, we have solved world hunger and aging. There you go. So I I think we'll close with that. Thank you for being here. This has been a great conversation. It was fun. Thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you for joining us on Uncharted State. We hope today's conversation sparks some new ideas about the future of higher education. Hit follow so you never miss an episode. You never know what uncharted territory we'll explore next.