Introducing New Special Advisor to the Provost

Sent: March 3, 2025

From: Vincent J. Del Casino, Jr., Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce that Dr. Sandy Hirsh has taken on a new role in the Office of the Provost – Special Advisor to the Provost on AI Curricular Initiatives. This position is funded as part of a generous gift from the Adobe Foundation, which has been one of SJSU’s strongest partners. In this capacity, Dr. Hirsh is not building curriculum—that is the purview of faculty, departments, and programs—but creating a space for critical dialogue about the place of AI education in our curriculum. Dr. Hirsh’s role is to bring colleagues together to not simply “embrace” AI but to ask how and in what ways SJSU will critically reflect on what AI means for the future of higher education.

Dr. Hirsh is a nationally recognized leader in library and information science, having helped expand degrees and programs in the SJSU iSchool at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels. She has authored multiple articles and books on subjects of import to the place in which we find ourselves, an inflection point that demands we ask how technology and our interactions with technology is affecting how we learn, interact, and educate. Her latest edited volume, Library 2035: Imagining the Next Generation of Libraries, which revisits the Library 2020 version of the book, asks how and in what ways are our primary repositories of information—libraries—are going to change and be changed by what is going on in the world around us technologically. The rapid changes in technology, the volume argues, is “making it challenging for libraries to manage the explosion of generated content today, alluding to the increased complexity libraries will face in managing content and collections in libraries in 2035. It is almost unimaginable.” And, yet, we have no choice but to imagine that world and engage it in a way that will help us navigate the complexity that is here now and will come. Dr. Hirsh is well placed to bring colleagues together because of her experience working with and through these new technologies.

The rapid changes wrought by the expansion of artificially intelligent systems on education also cannot be understated and some faculty at SJSU have already built programs and courses that advance our understanding of AI as a set of technologies. Other faculty have brought AI into the classroom in different ways, using new educational technologies to advance digital and creative literacy and create new adaptive learning systems that help students personalize their education. Other faculty have taken up the very important clarion call to critically interrogate how AI intersects with everyday social, political, and environmental life in ways that can be both emancipatory as well as deeply problematic. As we continue to develop as a campus, we must elevate all these lines of flights so that we can continue to develop pedagogies, programs, and strategies that are grounded in our campus commitment to equity and inclusive excellence. Put differently, even as the world rapidly changes around us, we cannot simply acquiesce to the fact that AI is “here to stay,” we must understand how through our collective work we can continue to challenge what AI means in the diverse experiences of our students and communities.

As part of this role, I am asking Dr. Hirsh to bring together faculty from across the campus in an advisory capacity to help inform our wider campus conversation about the role of AI in our curriculum and how we might best think about educating students across the myriad ways in which technological change is impacting our lives. I have chosen Dr. Hirsh because of her passion for interdisciplinary work, her strong track record of building collaborative teams, and her understanding that we can be both techno pessimists and techno optimists at the same time if we remain grounded in our shared institutional values. This work parallels the efforts taking place in the broader AI Advisory Committee but is more focused on curricular efforts—mapping the collective work and helping us translate that work for our students into coherent educational frameworks. The effort is but one part of a much larger conversation, which is taking place across the campus through student programming by Associated Students, co-curricular efforts in Career Services, and Academic Senate conversations in collaboration with various administrative units across campus.

There is more to come. In the meantime, I look forward to our ongoing work together as we navigate the rapidly changing spaces of AI, machine learning, and human-centered approaches to technological change.

Sincerely,
Vin