Lunch & Learn Ticketed Events

Generative AI has arrived on our campuses, and the conversation around it too often falls into predictable camps—breathless enthusiasm or outright prohibition. But the educators and students navigating this shift every day know the reality is far more complicated.

This ticketed lunch convenes a diverse panel of faculty, administrators, and thought leaders for the kind of honest, nuanced dialogue the moment demands. Together, we’ll wrestle with questions that resist tidy answers:

• Should AI literacy be an explicit learning outcome—and what would that look like across disciplines?
• What do we owe students in helping them understand not just how to use these tools, but what’s at stake for their learning, their integrity, and the society they’re entering?
• How do we honor disciplinary differences, where AI may be a powerful collaborator in one context and a threat to skill development in another?
• And how do we craft policies that are transparent about uncertainty rather than performatively decisive?

This is not a session designed to sell you on AI—or warn you away from it. It’s an opportunity to sit with the tension, share emerging practices, and think together about how to move forward with both courage and care.

Buffet lunch included.

What would it look like if colleges and universities took caring seriously—not as a vague aspiration, but as a deliberate, structural commitment?

Grab a boxed lunch and join colleagues and authors Kevin McClure and J.T. Torres for an informal, conversation-driven session exploring that question from two complementary perspectives.

In The Caring University, McClure challenges institutions to move beyond rhetoric and examine whether their policies, cultures, and resource decisions truly reflect care for the people within them. In Teaching, Learning, and Caring in Higher Education, Torres turns the lens toward the classroom, exploring how faculty can cultivate interdependent learning environments where care is not a distraction from rigor, but a condition for it.

Together, these books offer a bold claim: Care is not soft. It is strategic, demanding, and essential—for students, for faculty, and for the future of higher education.

Whether you’ve read every page or are just beginning to explore these ideas, come ready for thoughtful dialogue with the authors and fellow attendees—the kind of generative conversation that rarely fits into a hallway exchange.

Buffet lunch included.