AI Approach

Our Approach to AI at BUA

Artificial intelligence is now a permanent reality of our world. At BUA, we recognize both the opportunities and the challenges AI presents. On the one hand, it offers powerful new tools to enhance creativity, efficiency, discovery, and learning; on the other, it raises serious questions concerning integrity, equity, ethics, privacy, and human development.

Our response is grounded in our mission and our core values – inquiry, knowledge, independence, belonging, and joy. We remain committed to teaching students how to think for themselves, cultivate intellectual independence, and form judgments rooted in critical reasoning—capacities that no technology can replace. We cannot allow AI to undermine our students’ ability to produce and recognize exceptional writing and, in the language of our mission, “read deeply and think critically.” At the same time, we need to examine AI’s potential to improve the way we deliver on that central promise. And, as our mission calls on us to help students “engage meaningfully in our community and beyond,” we have a duty to prepare them to encounter AI mindfully and ethically, equipping them with the tools to decide if, when, and how they wish to use it.

To this end, BUA has launched a series of initiatives to deepen our shared understanding of this technology; better appreciate the benefits and drawbacks of integrating AI into our community; clarify expectations for its use during this nascent phase; and begin to chart a way forward:

• An AI Working Group that studies and shapes school policy.
• Faculty participation in the New England AI Collaborative, where schools share best practices.
• Engagement with Boston University’s AIDA initiative to learn from cutting-edge research.
• A faculty and staff summer read devoted to AI in education.
• A series of all-school meeting speakers addressing the implications of AI.
• Classroom pilots with AI tools where students and faculty explore their potential for learning.
• New AI-resistant assignments across disciplines.
• A default policy only allowing student use of AI without permission and citation, supplemented by a “stoplight” policy that provides students with clear, simple guidelines for when AI use is encouraged (green), allowed in a limited way (yellow), or prohibited (red) on assignments.

By combining discernment with experimentation, BUA seeks to model what it means to live and learn in an age of intelligent technology: not to be swept along by it, nor to retreat from it, but to engage with it mindfully. We will continue to move forward in ways that are measured, intentional, mission-aligned, and transparent.