Wabash pursues $5,000,000 AI grand from Lilly Endowment, finds AI expertise close to home
The following is the first installment in a series by The Bachelor focusing on artificial intelligence at Wabash College. This first article focuses on a grant Wabash received from the Lilly Endowment and the long-term strategy of the College.
In the future, the invention of artificial intelligence will likely be regarded as the most historically significant development of the 2020s. In a span of less than four years, AI has gone from science fiction to a ubiquitous, seemingly inescapable feature of modern life. Nearly every aspect of modern human life is now impacted by AI, and higher education is no exception. While the rapidly changing AI landscape creates much political, economic and social uncertainty, Wabash is taking steps to stay abreast of these technological changes.
From the moment that the first homework assignment was completed with ChatGPT, the College has kept a close eye on AI and its implications — both for the education that students receive and the position Wabash occupies in the broader higher education landscape. Wabash has several strategies and advantages that position it well in a world with AI. Financial assistance from outside the College and expertise from within the faculty combine to place Wabash on the cutting edge of liberal arts colleges that must reckon with the existential uncertainty AI creates.
Wabash is currently applying for a grant from the Lilly Endowment that is intended to assist Indiana colleges and universities navigate AI issues. According to the Lilly Endowment, the Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education initiative (AIHE) exists to help these schools “consider more fully the challenges and opportunities that artificial intelligence presents,” and “develop new or enhance existing strategies to improve their students’ educational opportunities and outcomes and their preparation to prosper in the workplace and life in a future that will be increasingly shaped by AI.”
Announced in the Fall of 2025, the AIHE grant is administered in two phases. The first phase is a planning grant, which gives colleges and universities a smaller sum to help apply for the much larger second grant installment, the size of which would be proportional to a school’s enrollment. As of December 2025, Wabash secured a planning grant of $125,000, which is now being used to research and develop a grant proposal that could earn Wabash up to $5,000,000.
“Higher ed institutions in the state of Indiana are really fortunate to have a partner and an advocate like the Lilly Endowment,” said Dean of the College Todd McDorman. “Right now, we’re in an information gathering phase where we’re surveying staff about their use and attitudes toward AI and what sorts of resources and support would be helpful. We’re also talking about ways we can get more information on student perspectives. We’ll use that information to formulate the grant.”
McDorman identified three pillars that he wants the grant to impact. The first is the continued integration of AI into a thoroughly liberal arts education. The second is professional development for faculty and staff. Thirdly, the grant would also go to support Wabash’s technological infrastructure that would be increasingly overwhelmed by the increasing demands of AI.
“I think our approach reflects where many liberal arts colleges are, as they are trying to figure out how to preserve their traditional nature, but also learn from AI,” said McDorman. “Our approach might be a little different than a large state school, just as our overall educational orientation is different than a large state school. I think we’re a little ahead of the curve in some ways. We’ve had an AI taskforce this year, we have a lot of faculty discussions, teaching and learning about AI. But in other respects, we’re figuring this out like the entire sector is.”
While the College seeks to leverage the AIHE grant to integrate AI into its liberal arts education, the focus is still on delivering a quality education that prepares young men for the realities of a changing economic landscape. While the steering committee for the grant proposal is still framing concrete metrics to measure the grant’s success with, potential indicators of success include institutional access to powerful AI tools, increased engagement with AI in course curriculum and more experiential learning opportunities with AI.
The steering committee charged with writing the grant proposal has a diverse cross-section of faculty and staff, including Professor of Philosophy Matt Carlson. Carlson has quickly become Wabash’s de facto resident expert on all things AI, which may seem counterintuitive to some who would expect a professor of computer science to fill this role. As an academic, he has wrestled with the sobering philosophical implications of AI deepfakes and misinformation.
“I think my background in philosophy puts me in a pretty unique position,” said Carlson. “On the one hand, I have research on some real dangers of AI. So I have a paper about deep fakes, for example, that’s a few years old, but I’m sad to say that I was completely right in all of the problems that I raised in that paper.”
While Carlson’s academic engagement with AI already confirms his expertise, he has added to his AI bona fides with some recent consulting work. Carlson recently consulted at Microsoft, using his deep knowledge of formal logic to help large language models (LLMs) communicate not just with humans, but with each other.
“What we did is relied on my background in formal logic and the philosophy of language to effectively create a mini-language for AI agents to communicate with one another that’s very stripped down and simple,” said Carlson. “It’s efficient, but also a human being can look at it and understand what they are actually saying.”
Wabash is lucky to have Carlson on the faculty, producing cutting-edge research on the philosophy of artificial intelligence. However, the College is even more fortunate that such an expert has expanded on his academic credentials with serious industry experience — literally helping to create AI tools. With his theoretical and practical expertise, Carlson is a tireless advocate not only for faculty perspectives, but the value of the liberal arts in the age of AI.
“It’s easy to start to think that we’ve got to do things differently, [that] we need to move into the future, we can’t be stuck in the past. I think it’s wise to resist that temptation,” said Carlson. “Many of the skills that are going to be most valuable for people as AI becomes more and more common are the kinds of skills that you get in a liberal arts education like Wabash — skills in asking really good questions, skills in making good judgments in situations of contradictory or incomplete information, skills in collaborating with other people. These are things that are incredibly valuable that AI is not very good at, and maybe never will be very good at. I genuinely think that the age of AI in education is a huge opportunity for places like Wabash because we offer something really unique and special that larger institutions just can’t do.”
2026 marks the end of an era for Wabash; the class of 2026 was the last to be admitted to the College before the explosion of ChatGPT and generative AI. Yet the 2026–2027 academic year will also mark a new beginning, as it is the first year that every current class of Wabash students entered the College knowing how to use AI. ChatGPT and other LLMs are going nowhere, and though attitudes on AI range from apocalyptic to utopian, the blunt reality is that it will take hard work from all corners of Wabash to navigate these changes successfully. With institutional support from all corners, however, Wabash will continue to fight not simply to adapt to AI, but to adapt AI to the needs of the College and its students.