From the President

For three years now, professors have adjusted their teaching, and adjusted it again, to adapt to a global pandemic, remote instruction, and a student population whose actions and expectations have changed. What fresh new hell was this?

Beckie Supiano writing about ChatGPT in The Chronicle of Higher Education on April 5, 2023

ChatGPThas already made history as the fastest-growing app in the world, recording 100 million users just two months after its launch in November 2022. As of the end of March 2023, the ChatGPT website had been visited nearly 2 billion times. At Menlo College, some professors fear that ChatGPT will rob their students of chances to think for themselves. Others enthusiastically embrace ways to incorporate generative artificial intelligence (AI) into academic life. To death and taxes, though, we can now add another certainty in our world: chatbots will impact teaching and learning. We all need to figure out how to respond. This issue of Menlo College Magazine shows that our faculty and staff—and our students—are already finding ways to harness the power of AI. They are also showing us how to think about the greatest disruption to learning in our lifetimes.

The irony is that colleges and universities are commonly referred to as intellectual ivory towers—places where people are happily cut off from the rest of the world. Perhaps that was true in the 19th century, but as the history of Menlo College attests, from our founding in 1927 just prior to the Great Depression, through the Covid-19 era, and now in the ChatGPT era, there is no separating the rest of the world from our classrooms, or more generally, from life on our campus. As should be true for educational institutions everywhere, we absorb, and as appropriate, reflect back the global society of our time.

Even as we grapple with the many changes taking place in our lives, we’re moving Menlo College forward. We opened Arrillaga Hall this past fall. Our academic deans, and our full-time and part-time faculty alike have brought forward proposals for curriculum redesign. New courses have been added to expose our students to topics that are at the forefront of the fields of business and psychology, such as digital sales, CRM technology, research methods in psychology, business analytics, and appropriate to this issue of the magazine, an introduction to ChatGPT. We’ve expanded the number of our majors to ten and created six minor degree options. We’re about to launch two new graduate programs. And our athletic programs continue to enjoy terrific success in so many ways—including most recently two 4th-place national team titles, two national individual titles, and fourteen individual All American titles. All of those accomplishments were realized despite the environmental effects we endured this semester that caused flooding, power outages, and other disruptions on campus (seeing our teams practice by flashlight in a dark gym was a first!).

I speak from ten years of experience as an Oak when I say that when you get to know some of the bright young people who are creating their futures here, your heart grows. You’ll find plenty of evidence of that in this issue of our magazine.

Steven Weiner Menlo College President