Students at Saint Joseph’s University are making their mark in the sustainability world through participation in a new United Nations-supported initiative called SPIN. The student-run branch of the UN’s Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), SPIN aims to raise the profile of sustainability in business and management education.

Participating students traveled to the SPIN pilot initiative in New York City in October, during which they received a tour of the UN headquarters, heard from a number of speakers in the sustainability world and witnessed the rollout of a global report about green jobs. 

Catie Jones, BS ’27; Lauryne Lane, BS ’26; and Mariana Arnabar, BS ’26, attended the event alongside advisor David Steingard, PhD, associate professor of management, and were inspired to bring their passion for sustainability back to campus. Since then, the students have been working to get SPIN off the ground at Saint Joseph’s.

“PRME is really focused on educating students for action in the future,” Jones explains. “We’re planning conversations with people from different universities to see how they’ve been engaging in sustainable practices on their campuses.” 

Jones, who is also on the executive board of the Green Fund, a student organization that seeks to implement sustainability initiatives on campus, sees the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as in alignment with Saint Joseph’s larger mission as a Jesuit university. 

“We’re educating students, but we’re also trying to get them ready for the world,” she says. “All of this really fits into the global conversations about how universities can help climate change and how sustainability is made possible on these campuses.” 

Steingard, who serves on the steering committee for the North American chapter of PRME alongside Vana M. Zervanos, EdD, the associate dean of graduate programs for the Haub School of Business, sees the connection between SPIN efforts and the University’s recent adoption of the Laudato Si’ initiative.

“Pope Francis was there on the day the sustainable development goals were launched in the United Nations,” he says. “There’s this beautiful connection between what PRME is and what we’re looking to do on the ascent to becoming a Laudato Si’ university.” 

Steingard continues, “What this initiative does is show students that the University and the business school are taking these deeply held, foundational Jesuit values — men and women for others, care of the whole person — and creating partnerships that actually do this in the real world.” 

In March, students involved in the initiative traveled to the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, for the Lang Sustainability Conference. There, they engaged in three days of panels, discussions and competitions with the goal of fostering connections between schools and spotlighting sustainable business practices. 

“It offered educational enrichment, networking with other students and companies in the sustainability space, and an opportunity to work collaboratively across cultures and nations,” Steingard says. “They had the opportunity to think about sustainable and innovative solutions to the pressing global challenges outlined in the SDGs.”

Artificial intelligence has been touted as a society-altering force on par with electricity and the internet. Machines and applications, supplemented by artificial intelligence algorithms, can now perform tasks and operations at speeds wholly unattainable for human beings. With this mind-bending potential comes uncertainty and its close relative: fear. 

No field nor industry has been untouched by this boom of AI progress. In higher education, questions have arisen about the relevancy of homework, tests and how to best prepare students for the world outside the classroom. What good are these staples of education if AI chatbots erase the need for manual learning? Saint Joseph’s University is taking steps to educate its faculty on the impact AI can have on the classroom, as well as on the ethical implications of AI.

Four professors were asked: How are AI tools impacting the disciplines within the liberal arts grounded in human inquiry? What are the pros and cons of AI from your disciplinary perspective?

Though each echoed that sentiment of uncertainty around AI, each also saw opportunities for positive impact.

Jeffrey Hyson, PhD

Assistant Professor, History

The computational and analytical powers of artificial intelligence certainly have great potential for historical research projects involving massive quantities of text or data, though human scholars still need to do the essential work of identifying significance and providing context. When it comes to generative AI, however, most historians are much more wary and uneasy of this new technology. As the CUNY professor Angus Johnston, PhD, has put it, a tool like ChatGPT “isn’t a thing-knowing machine, it’s a thing-saying machine.” When AI apps “answer” historical queries, they’re just generating a series of words that follow patterns from the texts they were trained on, rather than producing a “right answer.” Despite repeated updates, these apps routinely commit factual errors or cite nonexistent publications, making them highly unreliable for research purposes. 

Many historians also question the ethics of generative AI, since these tools have been trained on copyrighted material without permission or compensation of the original authors. The massive environmental costs of generative AI also raise serious questions about its sustainability in an age of climate crisis. But perhaps most fundamentally, generative AI offers an image of “knowledge production” that mistakes the product for the process. When our students rely on ChatGPT to write their papers, they are skipping over the whole purpose of the assignment: thinking critically, solving problems, finding connections, turning thoughts into prose. History, like all of the liberal arts, is hard work — but the work is how we learn. Letting generative AI do that work isn’t really doing history.

Madhu Mahalingam, PhD

Professor of Practice, Chemistry and Biochemistry

As exemplified by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2024 — awarded for the development of AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts complex protein structures and enables the building of new proteins — generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools are already playing a big role in pushing the boundaries of knowledge in chemistry. GAI refers to any artificial intelligence application that uses algorithms to analyze large amounts of data and predict outputs based on user prompts. In order to achieve such scientific breakthroughs, students in the discipline must develop critical thinking, problem-solving, scientific inquiry and communication skills. These outcomes are developed with the help of a laboratory component in each area of the discipline. GAI could be beneficial if integrated as a “scaffold” for these learning outcomes through effective prompt engineering. 

The promise of AI for education lies in its potential as a personalized tutor, enabling all students to achieve better outcomes. AI is already being integrated into the workplace. AI literacy is therefore essential for both faculty and students in all disciplines. This implies understanding the full scope of potential benefits and problems including AI hallucinations – an instance of AI producing an incorrect or inaccurate response to a prompt as well as academic integrity and accountability for student learning. Further, if faculty are limited to using the free versions to ensure equal access to all students, it could lead to a suboptimal AI interaction compromising the learning experience.

Steve Rossi, MFA

Assistant Professor, Art

AI definitely provides potential benefits in the realm of the fine arts. Artists use AI as one tool among many others for art-making purposes. The determining factor for anything to be considered art is the artist’s intent; whether or not it is engaging work is for the audience to decide. By that measure, AI-generated outputs can definitely be considered art. Human-crafted art will always stay relevant since the experience of viewing art is essentially about human connection. Even in AI-generated art practices, a person is still providing the prompts to shape the output, and it is the artist's intentions, their background experiences and sensibilities, that are determining the prompts. 

That said, in the commercial arts — in the realms of graphic design, illustration and animation, for instance — AI-generated content poses a much different question. In the commercial arts, the information and message is the focus, rather than the artist’s intent. AI tools have the capacity to radically alter entire commercial art industries and have already begun to do so.

Jenny Spinner, PhD

Professor, English, Writing & Journalism

AI is a tool. It’s not a replacement for critical thinking, for curiosity, for in-depth research and reporting. It doesn’t have emotional intelligence, which is such an important part of being a journalist, of developing deep listening skills when talking to sources. 

Journalism professors have to give careful thought to their learning objectives and decide which AI tools might help, or interfere, with those objectives and outcomes. That determination might differ from class to class. It will certainly differ from professor to professor. 

Last semester I showed a class how AI can be used to help do an AP style check. But, we were just using the free version of ChatGPT. It did okay. It wasn’t perfect. For it to be the most useful, you still need to have a rudimentary knowledge of AP style so you can determine when ChatGPT is wrong. We also had to feed it the Hawk Style Manual (our internal style guide) for it to get closer. 

For now, in the classroom, I focus on AI for what I have determined to be efficiency tasks, helping to write headlines and cutlines, helping to clean up style, transcribing interviews, etc. [My students and I] are learning together.