AI Ethics and Research

Posted on March 2, 2026 by Ishaan Barrett

Image generated by Google Deepmind. Aside from this image, none of the text or content of this article has been AI-generated or refined.

In a little over five minutes, Adam Aleksic’s Ted Talk about social media, language trends, and AI software completely changed my relationship with writing. It’s no great secret that the tools Aleksic is talking about—Sora, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others—have dramatically changed the way we approach everyday tasks, from writing simple sentences, to gathering information online. But the rise and fall of linguistic trends and the inherent ways we train programs like ChatGPT and Claude invite a lot more questions than answers. Aleksic is incisive in his critique about AI and the way these tools, often trained using social media posts and other freely available online media, falsely inflate consumer trends and language behaviors. He points to popular fads driving consumer spending and new colloquial words that have entered our vocabulary almost without our noticing. I think Aleksic’s talk offers a lot to the everyday social media and ChatGPT user; but it also means that the pervasive use of AI—from image generation to text editing—must be examined and questioned deeply. I contend that there is no better way, nor perhaps important realm, to examine the concept of AI ethics than in research. From the mundane to the complex, from text generation to data analysis, AI is finding a foothold in academic research. Yet, our ability to determine where and how to use it seems to be limited, especially when students and our academic work in the University is concerned. 

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The Science Core and the Humanities

Posted on February 23, 2026 by sc5184

Hummingbird and Passionflowers, Martin Johnson Heade, MET

When I arrived at Columbia, the Science Core was the course requirement that I most dreaded. As a prospective English major who had loathed physics in high school, the prospect of squandering three class slots on the sciences felt annoying at best and extremely frustrating at worst. To make matters worse, the other students I knew who did take Science Core–satisfying courses in my first couple years of college weren’t keen on them; the way they described it, the classes consisted of vast amounts of memorization of facts that they weren’t particularly interested in.

I let my first two years at Columbia pass without enrolling in any science classes, but when my junior year was approaching I decided that it was time to bite the bullet, especially since I would be abroad in the spring. I spent a while looking carefully at the different options, trying to find something with content that I would find at least somewhat interesting. I eventually settled on a class called “Human Origins and Evolution,” the introductory course for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology majors. I remembered high school biology as a dreary time filled with memorization of terms that had all since been forgotten (except, strangely, for the definition of mitochondria). Still, the theory of evolution seemed interesting enough, not only for the way that it explained who we were but also for the effect that it had had on religious belief.

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In Search of an Original Contribution

Posted on February 16, 2026 by cw2770

The author at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C.. Here I am reading a 500-year-old Quechua grammar, and looking for something new to say about it.

When I began the senior thesis process, my seminar instructors made it clear that my project should address a “gap in the scholarship” in order to make an “original contribution.” This terrified me. I had serious doubts that I, at the undergraduate level, could find any holes or unaddressed questions in the work of the scholars I respected. Of course there were mysteries to be solved about 16th century Latin America, but it seemed incredibly unlikely that I would be the one to identify them, let alone solve them. 

I took some solace in the fact that all my fellow thesis-writers seemed to feel the same way. In talking with my friend and fellow Rose fellow Sagar Castleman, who has done research on originality in Oscar Wilde’s poems, I also came to see that this feeling is pervasive enough to be an object of study in itself– e.g. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. Genre-wise, a senior thesis is pretty far afield from Romantic poetry, but I started to think about my mandate of an “original contribution” along the same principles that were laid out by Bloom and relayed to me by Sagar. I was facing, essentially, the same predicament as these poets: what could I possibly say that hadn’t been said before?

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A Trip to Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum

Posted on February 9, 2026 by jbk2191

Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (courtesy of the museum’s website)

Last spring, while studying abroad at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, I decided to pay a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum—one of the largest remaining monuments to Britain’s history of violent subjection and extraction of cultural artifacts from imperial territories. The site, named after Augustus Pitt Rivers, an English soldier, aristocrat, ethnologist, and avowed racist, is home to hundreds of thousands of masks, spears, pieces of jewelry, clothes, guns, figurines, works of metallurgy, and until recently, a collection of shrunken heads and other human remains.

Gruesome stuff. But it’s a stunning collection. So much cultural history, packed in a mind-bogglingly dense but entirely intelligible space. My hour-long visit was a fertile mixture of discomfort and reticent awe. 

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Five Tips for Pursuing Humanities Research as an Undergraduate

Posted on February 2, 2026 by sc5184

Portrait of a Young Man, Bronzino, the MET

  1. Choose a topic you’re interested in. People often talk about the importance of choosing a research topic that you’re passionate about. Passion can be helpful, but I think that curiosity is even more important. The first research project I pursued was about Oscar Wilde’s poetry, which wasn’t something that I had always loved—in fact, a key part of my project focused on why Wilde’s poems failed. But I had a research question about these poems that I was very curious about. Neither before, nor during, nor after my project did I feel any real aesthetic or emotional attachment to these poems, but my scholarly interest in them continued to increase the more I learned about them. This curiosity was the driving force of my research, and I think it can be an even stronger motivation than passion.

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Research and Higher Ed in Crisis

Posted on January 26, 2026 by cw2770

The Suzzallo Library of the University of Washington, Seattle (image courtesy of Zoshua Colah from Unsplash)

Somewhere between the libraries, laboratories, classrooms, and faculty offices on campus, something in the university has gone quiet. The buzzing of intellectuals at work and the powerhouse centers of academia tackling their pressing challenges is harder to detect, and if you’re anything like me, you probably have a reasonable guess as to why. The broadening crisis facing universities is putting the funding mechanisms for academic research under strain, threatening to halt the medical, social, and public interest work of higher education. Ever since Columbia became caught up in the middle of this crisis, the swirling questions about how we ended up here have only increased. But I struggle to understand, in many ways, how the looming issues surrounding federal funding and the leveraging of government research contracts were ignored. History has a lot of teach us about the way the government has supported the expansion of university-level research since the turn of the 20th century; the growing dependence on these funds only grew following two world wars and the rise of global, nuclear technology. I want to be quite clear in surfacing the foreseeable nature of the challenges that universities like Columbia are facing at this present moment, not only so that we might understand our circumstances in greater depth, but also so that we might do something to fix the precarity of academic research that seems to weigh on every corner of the nation today.

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“Why Bother?”: An Answer Found in Fieldwork

Posted on January 19, 2026 by cw2770

At the beach in Sisal, Yucatan, after a full day of language documentation work (credit: Sarah Bryden)

“Why do you study Maya?”

This is a familiar question for me, given that the language is not commonly taught in the United States. I have a standard answer: I study linguistics at university, I’m curious about languages that are different from English, and Yucatec Maya is a fun and fascinating case study. Usually this answer is met with nods and smiles, but on this day my interlocutor– a taxi driver in the Maya-speaking region of Yucatan– frowned.

“What I mean is,” he clarified. “Why do you study a dying language? Why bother?”

My profession of curiosity and enthusiasm suddenly felt very hollow. I had been asked variations of this question before (often in the form of inquiries about the “usefulness” of learning Maya), but never so directly. I was in Yucatan that summer as an envoy of US academia, where the importance of studying endangered languages is widely discussed; I had never faced such a point-blank question about the value of my research. A bit shaken, I said something semi-coherent about the link between language and culture, and my hope that language documentation work can prevent language loss. I left the taxi with new self-doubt. Why couldn’t I explain my motivations? If I couldn’t put my motivations into words, was I wasting my time?

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From Literature to Philosophy: A Guide for the Perplexed

Posted on January 12, 2026 by cw2770

Mycenae, legendary home of Agamemnon (credit: Joseph Karaganis)

Literature Humanities, the centerpiece of Columbia’s Core Curriculum, opens with Homer’s Iliad—an immediately absorbing epic of grand scope, jam-packed with irresistible characters (Patrokles anyone?) and dozens of pages of gripping interpersonal drama. Sure, some students might have their patience tested during the infamous “Catalogue of Ships,” which interrupts the story’s momentum to shout-out the various tribes who contributed to the Achaean war effort (although as a proud Arcadian and Laconian myself, I was glad to hear that my ancestors could muster up sixty ships each). But the point stands: for most students the Iliad is fun to read—and the same can be said for the rest of LitHum’s syllabus. The Odyssey (especially as filtered through Emily Wilson’s spirited translation) is a breezy trek through the sun-kissed Mediterranean; and while the Aeneid isn’t for everyone, I remember finding its tale of dispossession and national rebirth impossible to put down. It goes without saying that the second semester—bookended by Claudia Rankine, St. Augustine, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison—is no less entertaining than the first. Even if you weren’t required to read these books for class, you would be (or at least should be) doing so anyway.

Contemporary Civilization, the moral and political philosophy course that follows LitHum, is a little different. Without prior training in Classical Greek history or political theory, the first couple of readings can make for a hard slog—Plato’s Republic has its moments (the Allegory of the Cave and Myth of the Metals stand out), but don’t get me started on Aristotle’s Ethics, not to say his Politics. Aristotle was possibly the greatest and certainly the most influential Western philosopher of all time, but his unpolished and only posthumously collected lecture notes do not make a great impression on the average STEM major.

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Dante, the “Neutrals,” and Us

Posted on January 5, 2026 by cw2770

Detail from The Last Judgment, Luca Signorelli, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

For many freshmen, the most difficult Literature Humanities text to connect with personally is Dante’s Inferno. This was certainly the case for me. Many of the other second-semester readings—To the Lighthouse, Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare—are easy to feel invested in: we all know Mrs. Ramsays and Mrs. Bennets in our lives, and we all want to know what will happen to Othello or Lear. And even the older and denser books, like Homer’s epics or the Confessions, still deal very much with the world of humans: it is hard not to feel moved by Augustine’s pained descriptions of his conflicting desires, or the moment when Hector says goodbye to Andromache for the last time. But the Inferno is different from all these books—its two protagonists are difficult to connect with personally, and it’s easy to feel somewhat confused by the vast array of characters who they meet in Hell, all being tortured in ways that often seem unfair and cruel.

Many people are quick to point out that much of what makes Dante great is the beauty of his poetry, which is lost in translation. This may be true. But there is also a lot to be obtained from the Inferno in translation. And although the book may take place in another world, it is filled with remarkable insights into this human one that still ring true today. One problem, however, is that the speed with which the book is rushed through in Lit Hum can make it difficult to fully appreciate these insights, and the text can end up seeming like a blurry catalog of thirteenth-century people who Dante disliked.

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“Insistent Problems of the Present”

Posted on December 29, 2025 by cw2770

Image of “The Thinker” statue in front of Philosophy Hall and St. Paul’s Chapel during wintertime (image courtesy of Unsplash and Ariel Tang).

For most students, the familiar phrase “the insistent problems of the present” is a common throughline within and beyond classrooms dedicated to the Core Curriculum. It is both a critical tool in positioning the origins of the curriculum itself, and somewhat of a guiding principle to steer the development of the Core today. To give a bit of background though, the notion of “the insistent problems of the present” was rooted in the founding doctrine behind Contemporary Civilizations, the first class that marked the beginning of the Core at Columbia College. The website for the Core argues that this “first college general education program in the United States” came about during a time of “global crisis, social reform, and widespread debates about the aims and methods of higher learning.” Contemporary Civilization was thrust into this world as a “bold experiment” towards John Dewey’s vision of “progressive education.” 

All of this might be true. It is hard to position oneself squarely in the mindset of Columbia scholars and teachers from 1919 when the Core was founded, but I think it is reasonable to grasp the general mission behind the Core. However, a lot has changed in the 106 years since the start of the Contemporary Civilizations. Of course, I’m talking about the sweeping global and national changes that have occurred since, but also the way that higher education itself appears to be in the crosshairs of current political scrutiny. The “insistent problems of the present” that were imagined more than a century ago are decidedly different, and it begs the question: what should the Core do for us today? What work—internal to the classroom or beyond it—can (or should) it accomplish right now? I argue that the Core and the larger project of liberal arts education is charged with confronting its own limitations and using that self-critique rethink higher education. Not radically per-se, but the Core must now contemplate more than it ever has before the way knowledge is produced, shared, and applied in a world far more divisive—and unequal—than the one it was born into.

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