Hector Vila: AI governance looming large

Governance has dominated our discourse since at least 2016. We’ve been wrestling with the distribution of rights and responsibilities among different participants; rules and procedures for making decisions; the systems for monitoring and enforcing compliance; and the methods for balancing the interests of different stakeholders.

Data centers, which house large numbers of networked computers, servers and storage systems that process, store and distribute massive amounts of data out of sight, and out of mind, and feed the devices that run beneath our lives consume a lot of energy, … (read more)

Artificial Intelligence is a confusing term because it encompasses quite a lot. Take for instance cruise control in your car, that’s artificial intelligence, as is the autopilot on airplanes that keep flights safe and timely.

We’re halfway into the fall, 2024, academic term, and chatter suggests anxiety about the future of education and artificial intelligence.  That AI will replace human teachers entirely. Students using AI tools are always cheating. Learning to use AI isn’t … (read more)

Since I have been writing about higher education in these pages, it’s incumbent that I address the current campus protests against the agony in Gaza.

One day, a young first-year student comes up to me and says, “Yo, brotha Hector, why can’t you take me under your wing?”

There is a wide boundary between the teacher and the student, found most profoundly in colleges and universities. It is thick with emotional distance.

If we are to consider the place of love in our work and world, we need to be able to respond to what is coming at us, what affects us, what vies for our very being.

In the two culminating courses of the recent fall term, where the focus was on delving into profound and demanding experiences to foster expressive exploration, I deliberately opted to center my final discussion on love.

In his column today, Middlebury College Professor Hector Vila writes a probing piece about how the humanities might be an antidote to the anxieties of today’s era; how love and the concern for each other might counter our society’s obsession with the ills … (read more)

Premature deaths produce an intense, unyielding force of overwhelming sadness. This is where we find ourselves at Middlebury College.

At Middlebury College, students in my courses “Writing to Heal” and “The Rhetorics of Death” grapple with a profound incredulity: we couldn’t have anticipated the world’s swift descent into such darkness.

The Women Deliver Conference has a powerful history, though in many places in the world, not least of which is the U.S., women’s rights are being challenged. 

Fifth in a series I took a walk away from Kagugu, best known for its large, gated houses, a pleasant area in the quiet of early morning, and headed towards the other extreme — mud houses, dank alleys, women along the red dirt street selling small green pe … (read more)

I’ve never sidestepped the realities of students’ lives, no teacher can, and shouldn’t — I could, however, work alongside students to locate their lived experiences in an academic setting, exposing them to the language of exile, and thus initiate an explo … (read more)