President Rebecca Stoltzfus announced the establishment of the Goshen College Artificial Intelligence Task Force on Nov. 28. This task force will lead the implementation of GC’s Lilly grant planning period. According to its charge, the AI task force will “provide broad thinking and compelling ideas for GC’s in Higher Education Phase 2 Implementation and/or Collaborative Grants.”
The task force will be led by Stoltzfus alongside Raj Biyani ’92, who will serve as AI strategy advisor and co-chair. Biyani is currently leading a seminar series that was opened up to GC staff in December. Biyani says that his goal for the seminar series is to “demystify computer science and AI in a way that helps us collectively take GC to even greater heights in the AI era.”For Biyani, the idea for the task force emerged from an important realization. “AI is no longer a future topic, it’s already reshaping how we work. President [Stoltzfus] set up the AI Task Force to bring together faculty, staff and administrators to collectively ask “How should Goshen respond to AI in a way that is practical, grounded in GC’s shared values and aligned with our mission,” Biyani said.
Stoltzfus believes that this is the right time to establish the task force as it is becoming increasingly more prominent in the public eye. “I don’t know how it feels to students, but it is filling my inbox and all of the higher ed leadership meetings that I go to are conversations about AI and how it is changing higher education and how colleges and universities should respond to the risks and opportunities of AI,” she said.
Biyani’s seminars are being recorded and will be released to the public, but in-person attendance is only limited to 20 GC faculty and staff. Stoltzfus says that the reason for this is to “create a lively setting for the seminar and for some of the [question and answer] and audience participation or learner participation to be part of the video too so that people could see what questions people were asking.”
The seminars have provided an educational opportunity for Stoltzfus. “I’m not an expert. I don’t come from a tech field, so I have really enjoyed learning more about the field of AI and its usages and just in conversations on campus, in the president’s cabinet, in the boardroom, in family reunions over the holidays. There’s just a wide variety of assumptions and perspectives and knowledge levels,” she said.
With these varying perspectives on campus, President Stoltzfus noted that “there is a spectrum of caution to risk, skepticism to optimistic embrace. That’s driven by knowledge and probably past experiences and also personality to some extent. So it is not a unified moment in terms of everybody feeling the same feelings about AI and where we might go with it.”
Despite a potential divide, Biyani believes that GC is in safe hands under Stoltzfus’ leadership. “[Stoltzfus] consistently puts GC first and has a naturally inclusive instinct for bringing all constituencies along, even as she moves with speed and clarity. That balance, speed with care and conviction with humility is a rare and beautiful leadership combination,” he said.
The task force consists of 10 members, ranging from administration to professors across different departments, and students will also get to experience the work of the task force first hand during May term, when Biyani will lead an Honors Seminar titled “Under the Hood of AI: The Minds, the Models and the Magic,” which will follow a similar trajectory to the seminar series offered to GC staff.
“There’s no coding and no computer science background required. Instead, students will explore AI through stories, discussion, short reflections and hands-on conceptual explorations. By the end, they won’t just use AI. They’ll understand where it came from, who built it, how it works and what it means for the future,” Biyani said.
Edit 1/15/26: A previous version of this article quoted Biyani saying “conviction without humility” regarding Stoltzfus’ leadership. This was a misquote and has been corrected to say “conviction with humility.”
