This semester, Pomona College is navigating a rapidly evolving artificial intelligence landscape. The college is currently deciding whether to i
mplement BoodleBox AI, a collaborative platform built for higher education, and has also formed a committee to address AI’s role in students’ and faculty members’ lives.
According to BoodleBox’s website, the “workspace” has a smaller carbon footprint than standard AI virtual assistants. It claims to aggregate information from popular AI chatbots to assist college students and professors with common academic tasks.
Pomona introduced BoodleBox to some faculty members last spring. According to a Pomona spokesperson, the college is now deciding whether to release BoodleBox campuswide.
“The pilot program’s goal was to better understand practical use cases, adoption and support needs, and to gather feedback that will inform decisions about potential broader, campus-wide support,” the spokesperson said in a statement to TSL. “The College’s ITS Department is currently analyzing that feedback.”
BoodleBox advertises that it helps students with coursework, including reading comprehension, reviewing peers’ work and collaborative assignments, while faculty can use its built-in bots for syllabus creation, email revision and grant proposals.
Mary Paster, a linguistics and cognitive science professor at Pomona, said she did not like BoodleBox when she tried it and is skeptical about AI in academia.
“I didn’t go in thinking I was going to like it, but I was just curious,” Paster said. “I found it kind of offensive. It’s a wall of buttons and [there are] things I feel a professor should do for their class and not outsource to a machine.”
Echoing a similar sentiment, Tendo Lumala PO ’28, Associated Students of Pomona College vice president of academic affairs, said AI use might devalue professors’ work.
“If you decide to be a teacher, a professor, you spend your entire life being like, ‘I kind of want to help these kids,’ and it’s almost like cheapening the work,” Lumala said.
According to Paster, BoodleBox also offers discussion prompt generators, including for Socratic seminars. She said this defeats the purpose of Socratic learning, which is to center student-led discussion.
“[I thought] the whole point of the Socratic method is it’s dynamic and you can’t just have a list of questions up front,” Paster said. “I just found that really depressing.”
Lumala additionally expressed concern that the money the college would spend on BoodleBox could be better allocated elsewhere.
“There are a lot of tools hidden around this college that are ostensibly for the help of faculty and their curricular processes, but they’re not very well used,” Lumala said.
Through a growing committee of self-nominated faculty and administrators, Pomona plans to address broader AI concerns both in the classroom and after graduation.
“The committee’s charge is twofold: to explore how artificial intelligence impacts teaching and learning, and to consider how the College can best prepare students for a world in which AI is increasingly pervasive,” the Pomona spokesperson said in the statement to TSL.
Feng Xiao, an associate professor of Asian languages and literatures who studies AI-supported language learning at Pomona, emphasized that AI literacy in general is a “must” for students, regardless of personal opinions on its role in the classroom.
“It doesn’t matter whether you like [AI in the classroom] or you don’t like it,” Xiao said. “I think we need to understand this technology enough and its potential impact on higher education in general.”
Paster said the committee is necessary to develop a cohesive AI policy down the road.
“I think people are kind of adrift right now,” she said. “Individuals are just making decisions about [what] kind of AI policy they want to have for their class, and without having any guidance from the institution or really any collective agreement about how we want to approach it.”