Madeleine Johnson | February 16, 2026

Davidson College’s AI journey mirrors a challenge facing higher education nationwide: how do you govern a technology that evolves faster than traditional institutional structures can adapt?

I arrived at Davidson in July 2025 as an AI Innovation Fellow, joining an initiative that was finally finding its footing about 2.5 years after the biggest shift in how we interact with information in a generation. The launch of ChatGPT happened on a November day during my sophomore year at the University of Rochester, though I didn’t start hearing about peers using it until junior year and didn’t hesitantly try it myself until senior year. It’s safe to say that every undergraduate student in college now and going forward has been at least familiar with generative AI throughout their entire collegiate experience. Very soon, students who’ve had access to AI all through high school will arrive on campuses nationwide.

As an institution dedicated to learning, Davidson initially focused on the academic and pedagogical implications of generative AI in its first year of formal exploration. This took the form of a working group composed mainly of people from the Library, our IT department (T&I), the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), and faculty. The college provisioned individual licenses to various AI tools (Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude) and spun up our own AI sandbox for the entire campus through an instance of Amplify, a tool developed by Vanderbilt that provides API access to multiple models.

My arrival coincided with two key decisions: the establishment of a Steering Committee and the selection of Gemini and Amplify as the tools provided to the entire community. The Steering Committee brought together representatives from the Library, T&I, the faculty, and myself, with an Advisory group meeting three times per year. We still maintain individual Claude and ChatGPT licenses for community members whose use cases can’t be completed with our campus tools.

I immediately identified a gap: our Advisory Committee’s composition didn’t reflect the full breadth of how AI would impact campus life. The initial focus on pedagogy made sense, but AI’s implications stretch far beyond the classroom. Over the fall 2025 semester, I expanded the group to include representatives from Sustainability, Athletics, Residential Life, the Career Center, and HR. Bringing these voices to the table fundamentally shifted our conversations. Suddenly we were grappling with how different people and departments engage with AI and have wildly different needs from the technology. An athletics administrator thinks about AI differently than a librarian, who thinks about it differently than someone in facilities management.

This realization led the AI Steering Committee to evolve a more comprehensive AI governance structure: the Collaborative. Headed by senior college leadership, it includes working groups for three domains: Student Experience, Administration and Operations, and Teaching, Learning, and Creativity. Every single department at the college, along with student representation, is embedded in this structure. With the AI landscape evolving as quickly as it is, this framework gives us the flexibility to respond to rapid changes rather than being locked into rigid processes designed for a slower-moving world.

The next few months of my fellowship will test whether this structure can keep pace with the technology it’s meant to govern, and I’m excited to see where this work leads.