A brief personal note to set up this week’s issue: As some readers may know, when I’m not writing Fresh Press, I’m a graduate student at the University of Montana, where I’ve also taught classes on writing composition and served as a teaching assistant in my environmental studies department. In other words, given that it is 2025, I’ve seen firsthand the somewhat awkward ways in which artificial intelligence is colliding with the academic experience on campus — both as a student and an instructor who sometimes has to grade clearly AI-generated material. And as a journalist and environmental researcher, it’s probably no surprise that I’m not a huge fan of generative AI technology.
So, with those personal disclaimers at hand, it is with some trepidation that I report that both flagship Montana universities are already working to implement artificial intelligence — intentionally, cautiously, they say — at multiple levels of the student, faculty and staff experience, through courses, initiatives, research activity, and training. The University of Montana, for example, has launched its own generative AI client, Amplify, which grants access to a variety of popular AI models like ChatGPT and Claude. At Montana State University, there’s already more than $20 million in AI-related research grants. The goal, leaders from both institutions say, is for the whole university community — if not the whole state — to have access to this technology should they choose to use it.
And last month, the day before UM and MSU faced off on the gridiron, the Board of Regents approved preliminary plans from both schools to develop artificial intelligence institutes to coordinate research and the rollout of AI technologies on campus.
At UM, the somewhat sci-fi sounding Center for Human Centered AI “will connect faculty and staff across different disciplines — education, business, computer science, humanities, health, and the creative arts — to develop shared approaches for integrating AI into teaching, learning, and research,” according to the university’s proposal to the regents. The proposal does not ask for additional funding, instead “drawing on UM’s current faculty expertise, administrative capacity, and digital infrastructure.” (Maybe I’m a cynic — definitely, I’m a cynic — but this sounds suspiciously like more work for faculty, staff and researchers for the same amount of money.)
At MSU, the planned Institute on Artificial Intelligence “will be a comprehensive research, teaching, and workforce development effort to enhance discovery in research, equip and empower students to understand AI, and enable greater access and dissemination of knowledge for Montana related to AI,” according to MSU’s proposal. That institute does come with a price tag, hundreds of thousands of dollars for new research activity, visiting speakers and research fellows and faculty and staff pay.
“We believe that AI is going to have far-reaching enough impacts on how we teach, what we teach, how we do our work, what industry needs, that it justifies the creation of a center to organize this work at the university,” UM President Seth Bodnar told the regents. “The center is the right thing to plan for given what we believe will be the wide-reaching impact of AI.”
You can see the proposals here and here.
The regents approved the proposals (technically “requests to plan”) despite some lingering concerns that the universities were putting the cart before the horse — that they’re developing capacity to further proliferate AI on campus without addressing some of the big nuts-and-bolts concerns about assessment and academic integrity.
“When we had our September board meeting, what really stood out to me was already every professor in every classroom can see that AI is coming at them fast, because suddenly a course that two years ago was a C average is now an A- average,” regent Loren Bough, the body’s vice chair, said during the meeting. “Big surprise. Students already refer to classes as ‘chatable’ if they can get a good grade on it.”
He said he hoped to see the universities deliver concrete classroom policy. But the university officials said that classroom policy is just one dimension of this project.
“Students already refer to classes as ‘chatable’ if they can get a good grade on it.”
The universities need to make sure “that we’re developing new assessment mechanisms that are rigorous and accurate valuations of what students are learning,” MSU President Brock Tessman told the regents. But he emphasized the potential for AI to “create more opportunities in the classroom for teaching” and research, for “operational efficiencies” in, for example, the admissions and financial aid offices, and of course, for job training — employers, the administrators said, want to hire people with AI skills.
(Here’s a potentially relevant piece of information: Did you know that almost all of the regents are private sector executives?)
At UM, the push to integrate AI has been underway for at least a year. In 2024, the university’s Flagship Fund supported several internal efforts to study AI technology. Late that year, with financial support from Montana-based tech consultancy Craton, the university launched its FUTURE Project, a three-phase initiative to “thoughtfully explore AI’s role in teaching, learning, and work — while keeping human values at the center.”
That initiative is now in the implementation phase, and we’re seeing the results: In addition to its own generative AI platform, Amplify, the university in September launched a sort of AI clearinghouse, the aptly named umontana.ai, with guides to AI initiatives and tools on campus. It marks “a new era of AI” at UM, the university says. The university is also soliciting feedback on a draft of its new “AI Commitment.”
“Our strategy is anchored in the enduring commitments of higher education: critical inquiry, intellectual rigor, transparency, and respect for human dignity,” it reads. “Guided by these values, we will demonstrate how a public flagship university can lead the nation in aligning artificial intelligence with the public good. At UM, the promise of AI is clear: when it strengthens human creativity, it strengthens our mission.”
But, as Bough — who voted for the proposals, to be clear — pointed out, no amount of curation or education will change the fact that students can already access AI tools without the university’s mediation. And while, for example, the University of Montana has added generative AI to its plagiarism definitions, guidelines for use vary widely across departments and disciplines.
(As I deal with constantly assessing the provenance of student work, I reflect somewhat wistfully on journalism school, where misspelling a name was an automatic F and plagiarizing could get you kicked out of the program. UM, on the other hand, now says: “From an information literacy perspective, a blanket ban on AI tools is not an effective strategy for preventing plagiarism in your courses or for preparing students to enter an AI-integrated society. The best way to prevent misuse of AI tools is to maintain an open dialogue with your students and demonstrate/guide appropriate use.”)
There are other concerns with AI: Many of the companies working in that space are taking on massive amounts of debt to build AI tools, while at the same time accounting for huge chunks of domestic GDP growth — raising fears of a bubble. Then, there are the environmental externalities: running prompts uses water and power, and data centers are proliferating across grids nationwide, where the increased demand is offering a lifeline to costly, highly polluting coal and gas-burning power plants while driving up rates. (As a son of the ever-dry state of Arizona, one of the country’s largest data center markets, I’m particularly worried about these environmental dimensions, in addition to wanting to keep my job in the knowledge production business). You can keep following this rabbit hole to lithium mines in the global south — you get the idea.
Data centers are making an impression in Montana, as well, and not always a positive one. Northwestern Energy, the state’s main power utility, has signed letters of intent to offer up to 1,400 megawatts of power to three forthcoming data center projects by 2030, per the Missoulian’s Dave Erickson, almost twice the company’s current retail load. The state’s utility commission is also allowing Northwestern to keep the terms of those agreements private, much to the chagrin of environmental advocacy groups. At the same time, the Legislature is offering property tax incentives to would-be data center developers, reducing the potential public benefit.
UM has its own data center with a variety of green technologies at work, Zach Rossmiller, UM’s chief information officer, told the Regents at a meeting in September. But of course, even the “greenest” data center still uses water and/or energy resources somewhere down the line — if not on site, then at the power generation station.
And there are ethical issues — not just with student work, but with the transmission of information more broadly. Rossmiller warned that if the university system doesn’t harness the technology, the consequences to civic discourse will be severe. (Haven’t they been already?)
“I cloned our president’s voice in three minutes, and it sounds pretty identical,” Rossmiller said. (He’s talking about Bodnar here, not Donald Trump, just to be clear). “Then I used another tool that took a still picture of him, used his voice, and made him move around. And I created a deepfake of our president. What worries me the most is we will be in a world where deepfakes will control the narrative.”
But, despite all these concerns, the universities have made clear that stopping AI use at the gates isn’t possible, if doing so was ever even desirable. So: Welcome to the future of higher education in Montana.
