Faculty Senate endorsed the newest artificial intelligence policy being considered for Belmont University on Monday.
The AI policy, which was introduced for consideration at the last meeting, was questioned this week as staff brought forward concerns regarding the lack of clarity in the policy.
The policy aims to give campus-wide guidance for the usage of AI which is still being discussed, edited and implemented by the Belmont Policy Review Committee.
“We may not be looking at the absolute final finished product yet, though I think we're quite close with what I sent you earlier today,” said Faculty Senate president Mark McEntire.
Though it's still unclear what an endorsement from Faculty Senate actually means for impacting policies sent to the committee, they discussed the policy and raised some concerns.
“I don't think there's any official definition for what an endorsement by the faculty senate means,” said McEntire. “It's a little bit of an awkward vote, because we may not all be voting on exactly the same idea of what an endorsement means.”
Senators discussed concerns for a clear outline for how to detect and deal with infractions from students.
“The biggest thing that this policy needs to answer these speak to is use of AI by students,” said senator Dustin Rumbaugh. “It specifically says the academic misconduct committee is responsible for planning written guidelines... but they're increasingly seeing students come to these adjudications with attorneys and they feel not equipped to handle it from a legal perspective.”
The policy is still subject to updates not only through discussion by the Belmont Policy Review Committee but in the future as technology changes and updates are deemed necessary.
“There is a plan to create another resource besides this policy that will come sort of under the heading of best practices,” said McEntire.
The endorsement ultimately ended up passing in a vote of 25 ayes, 1 nay and 2 abstentions.
Provost David Gregory also discussed freshmen enrollment numbers remaining stagnant based on reports.
“It's flat. It could be like many schools and going down, but it looks like it's flat, but with a trend to go up,” he said.
Gregory doesn’t think that this is following a pattern and believes part of the reason may be because of the delay in the FAFSA deadline.
“The reason that concerns all of us is because that fits the revenue for next year's budget. So with the operations and especially new personnel requests. We really want to see that grow,” he said.
This delay has also pushed back the submission of larger financial awards to students for this year.
“We're trying to be very intentional about where we apply discounts the Deans now all have scholarship dollars to apply to that to try to drive that up in each of your respective colleges,” Gregory said.
Gregory also noted that the library will be reorganized under the provost’s office.
Faculty Senate will meet again on Feb. 24.
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This article was written by Braden Simmons