James March-April 2025 web - Flipbook - Page 85
PK Do you feel that the General Assembly is doing a good job regarding
working on what they call guard rails
for AI?
AC We have worked with a legislative
committee and have organized workshops. We are planning to do a workshop in the Capitol later this year and
work with committee chair Sen. John
Albers. I’m impressed with my conversations with him.
We need to protect ourselves from
the worst damage that can be done
without excessive overregulation. Too
much regulation, too soon, could stifle.
So, the Albers committee is looking
at what legislation is being adopted
elsewhere and what other legislation
we might need to protect ourselves.
PK What is your policy on campus
free speech and what are the guardrails and guidelines? The University
of Georgia had to deal with that last
spring and there were arrests of demonstrators who got out of hand.
AC This is an area that I think Georgians
should be proud. These are difficult topics, but when you look at the whole of
what happened in 2024 our universities
handled that very well— and it all starts
at the top. We have a University System
Board of Regents and chancellor that
made our commitment to freedom of
speech very clear. And we’ve been
working on this by doing our homework and having new rules
We established rules on how to
practice your First Amendment rights.
Freedom of speech is not as complex
as people think it is. In fact, there’s a
third-party organization called FIRE
(Foundation for Individual Rights in
Education) which originally gave us
a “yellow light” in assessment. We
were kind of minimal, not great. But
we worked with FIRE by asking how
do we become great? Now we have
a “green light.” We were ranked 97
in the listing for freedom of speech
rights. Now I think we’re in the top 20
in the country.
There are limits, though. For example, we didn’t have to dismantle any
encampments because our police chief
would not let anybody pitch a tent. For
another example, you cannot interrupt
a class or a lab or impede everybody
else from learning. You also cannot
make a huge amount of noise outside
of a classroom building. These are
common sense rules. I can tell you that
in general I’ve been very proud of our
students and how they’ve handled this.
PK Let’s turn to a big issue for parents
and students: college affordability.
How does Georgia Tech addresses
this concern?
AC When you compare how much the
state supports their public universities
and then how much tuition the universities charge, there is a clear inverse
relationship. Georgia now is in the high
public investment, low tuition quadrant of that chart.
We’ve had a series of elected
officials and governors who invested in
higher education and therefore we’ve
been able to have only minimal tuition
increases. I’ve been here for six years
with only one tuition increase. People
should appreciate the fact that an instate student today can pay less money
than they did six years ago. If you
adjust to inflation, it is probably less.
There was even a special appropriation from the state two years
ago. It was a good budget year, and
the state decided to invest. Georgia
Tech was the highest in the University System so from one year to the
next students got a cut of $1,000. In
Georgia, we should be proud that this
is a state invested in education which
keeps tuition as low as possible. And
all of that is without accounting for
the HOPE scholarship program.
PK There is more online learning now.
So do we need more bricks and mortar
on a campus as we look to the future?
Is that something that you as a president are interested in?
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