Questions of how to best usher Harvard into the AI age have been simmering at the University for years, ever since the Faculty of Arts and Sciences released its first guidelines for classroom AI use in 2023. But the issue has boiled over with the start of the fall semester. Harvard leadership—including President Alan M. Garber and Danoff dean of the College David Deming—have encouraged students and faculty to embrace the technology, implementing new guidance and warning that failing to adapt to AI comes with the risk of being left behind. But backlash within the University community, and outside of it, is growing louder. Here are the latest developments:
New guidance, new tools
Over the summer, the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard issued new guidance for faculty on how to design their classes to be AI-adaptive, including ideas for tailoring assignments and policies to the course content itself. While stopping short of explicit directives or requirements, the Bok Center encouraged instructors to include AI policies on their syllabi detailing the AI tools students might be interested in using, and their acceptability in the context of their courses. The Office of Undergraduate Education’s current guidance requires faculty to post their AI policies on their Canvas sites.
Harvard is also working AI directly into the curriculum and operations. The College added a required AI module to its first-year Expository Writing class this past spring and announced access to Anthropic’s Claude for affiliates; this summer, it introduced an AI chatbot to advise incoming students on their course schedules.
Embracing AI
In his Memorial Church address on the first day of classes of the 2026-27 academic year, Garber—who had encouraged graduates last spring to embrace the possibilities of AI—said he was “convinced” that with the help of AI, advances in knowledge will take place more rapidly than ever before in human existence. The same day, Deming sent an email to students, writing in favor of “actively encouraging AI usage where it can deepen learning.” In the letter, he also offered initial thoughts on how instructors could AI-proof their assignments, including shifting away from take-home exams and “the acceptance, or even encouragement” of AI in writing-based courses.
“We would all benefit from getting out of the AI-detection business because it damages trust between faculty and students,” he wrote.
Survey says
Harvard faculty, though, are less convinced overall that AI is good for the classroom. Two-thirds of the 463 faculty who responded to the Crimson’s annual FAS survey this year said AI has had a negative effect on their classes—a sharp increase from 42 percent in 2025. Nearly 90 percent of faculty respondents reported that they had received coursework from students that they knew or suspected was AI-generated. The findings followed a Crimson survey from the spring in which over one-third of students admitted to using AI in a manner that violated course policies.
The backlash
Concerns about AI on campus, meanwhile, have grown louder in recent weeks, breaking the Harvard containment zone to become a national topic of discussion. In August, MIT released a report warning that AI is causing “cognitive surrender” among students and disrupting campus culture. “As a community, what should worry us most is that many uses of AI deprive students of the opportunity to learn,” the report reads.
Last week, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an op-ed by University of California, Irvine philosophy professor Anastasia Berg titled “The Ivy League’s Surrender to AI Is Insane.” The essay takes issue with Deming and Dartmouth president Sian Leah Beilock, who have both made comments characterizing AI’s impact on learning as inevitable and irreversible.
“The idea that preparing students to succeed in an AI-saturated world requires reimagining college as an AI incubator is not a sign of technological acumen, but of tech illiteracy,” Berg writes. “An LLM is not an aircraft requiring years of training to operate.”
Then, on Wednesday, Woods professor of American history and professor of law Jill Lepore penned her own op-ed in the Crimson, painting Harvard’s leadership as “oblivious” to the concerns laid out in MIT’s report. Lepore cites a range of research showing that reliance on generative AI leads to less critical thinking and lower test scores, and warns against the loss of opportunities for collaboration and teaching that could come with using AI for tasks currently carried out by humans, like research.
“The machine conversation is not free,” Lepore writes. “It comes at the cost of our common life together as teachers, learners, and researchers, colleagues, mentors, and friends. Not to mention, supervising student researchers is our job.”
Still, in his letter to students, Deming emphasized that Harvard’s philosophy—and actions—surrounding AI are still evolving. AI adoption “will require extensive consultation and input from faculty, staff, and students, both because faculty have the expertise to judge what is best for their class and because this is a fast-moving landscape and no one has all the answers,” he wrote.
