Ohio State requires AI education for all undergraduates, sparking faculty debate
Ohio State University will require every undergraduate to develop competency with artificial intelligence tools by graduation, starting with the Class of 2029. The university announced the AI Fluency Initiative in June 2025 as part of a push to embed AI education across all 180+ undergraduate programs, regardless of major.
The initiative, launched under former President Ted Carter's 10-year strategic plan, reflects a broader shift in higher education. A September 2025 UNESCO report found that only 19% of 400 surveyed American and international universities have formal AI policies in place, while 42% are still developing frameworks.
Ohio State's approach differs in speed and scope. Rather than months of task forces and planning, the university moved quickly to implementation. Ravi Bellamkonda, now Ohio State's president, said at the program's launch that AI Fluency will prepare students to be "bilingual" in both their major field and in how AI applies to that area.
How the program works
The initiative centers on six learning outcomes. Students should be able to explain foundational AI concepts, evaluate AI benefits and limitations in their field, assess the quality of AI outputs, use AI tools for specific goals, design AI applications within their discipline, and explore ethical and societal implications of AI use.
More than 1,300 instructors-from graduate teaching assistants to tenured professors-have participated in training through the Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning. Individual programs have either created new courses or updated existing ones to support AI applications.
Shereen Agrawal, executive director of Ohio State's Center for Software Innovation, said each program "thoughtfully considered and developed a plan to embed these learning outcomes in their major pathways in ways that are specific to the discipline."
Faculty enthusiasm meets skepticism
Some professors embrace the initiative. Vince Castillo, an assistant professor of logistics, labeled his classroom "Amsterdam for AI" after ChatGPT's public release in late 2022. He encouraged students to use the chatbot transparently in their work and created his own chatbot for logistics courses.
"It's like a rocket without fins. It will lead you if you let it," Castillo said of AI's trajectory. "Education here is more important than ever."
Megan LePere-Schloop, an associate professor in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, praised the initiative's approach to embedding AI across all majors, not just STEM fields. "There are plenty of uses for generative AI in higher education beyond just trying Gemini," she said.
But others view the pace as reckless. Education writer John Warner called AI Fluency and similar programs "hasty lurches into an uncertain AI future" in an essay published in Inside Higher Ed. He questioned whether working with AI is truly equivalent to learning a new language and what "fluency" actually means in this context.
Justin Reich, a comparative media studies lecturer at MIT who studied education technology for over a decade, took a sharper stance. "We don't know how to teach about or with AI and we might not for a long time," Reich said. He warned that institutions should experiment "with a great deal of humility" to avoid embedding bad practices that are difficult to remove later.
The humanities problem
Faculty in literature, history, and philosophy face particular challenges. These fields center on reading comprehension, critical analysis, and written argumentation-tasks that AI chatbots can now perform.
Jill Galvan, an associate professor of English who teaches Victorian literature and 20th-century fiction, has not authorized AI use in her courses. She said she's observed a marked increase in brazen AI cheating since the initiative launched.
"I was more depressed than ever last semester," Galvan said.
She described AI-generated writing as "bland, graceful slop. There are no relationships between the sentences." Rather than fight the technology directly, Galvan redesigned assignments to emphasize logic and critical analysis over summary and reflection. She also encouraged students to use physical textbooks and take handwritten notes.
The results surprised her. Nearly all students maintained the tech-free approach and reported greater engagement. "The humanities are the humanities for a reason," Galvan said.
Jared Gardner, an English professor and Ohio State's University Senate secretary, summed up the dilemma: "I feel like I'm being asked to teach driver's ed, but the students have already been off-roading for three years."
Unresolved questions remain
Even supporters acknowledge gaps in the initiative. Agrawal said educators are "seeing AI being used in ways unintended for the learning outcomes," leading to academic misconduct cases and students offloading critical thinking to machines.
Bellamkonda identified faculty readiness as the biggest challenge ahead. "At the surface, this sounds like a student effort," he said. "It's actually a faculty effort. The faculty have to be comfortable because students know more about AI sometimes than the faculty do."
He proposed clearer guidelines: courses should be coded as "No AI," "AI-friendly," or "AI-limited only in certain sections" so students understand expectations and avoid inadvertent violations.
The university is developing "academic roadmaps" showing how undergraduates will build AI skills within each major and plans additional faculty training and resources. Bellamkonda described the rollout as a three- to four-year process, not an overnight shift.
Castillo, despite his enthusiasm for AI, cautioned against over-reliance on the technology. "It's pretty obvious when students use AI to write something or create a spreadsheet on Excel," he said. "Ninety times out of 100, it lacks context. Students need to see the shortcomings."
Ohio State is not requiring AI Fluency in every course or mandating that all faculty incorporate it into teaching, though the university has documented positive examples of AI use in humanities courses.
A majority of U.S. teens use AI chatbots for schoolwork, according to Pew Research Center data. About six in 10 said they use chatbots to cheat at least somewhat often-a reality that no institutional policy has fully solved.
For more on integrating AI into education, see AI for Education and the AI Learning Path for Teachers.
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