The University in the Age of AI: Rebuilding Trust, Truth, and Teaching with Kavita Bala | Ep 42

At a moment when higher education faces accelerating technological disruption and intensifying public scrutiny, Cornell Provost Kavita Bala argues that universities must do two things at once: defend their truth-seeking mission with renewed clarity, and reimagine how they teach, research, and engage society in an era shaped by AI, polarization, and declining trust.

Today, John Tomasi welcomes Kavita Bala to discuss Cornell’s approach to fostering a durable culture of open inquiry based on idea exchange, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement. Drawing on her experience as an AI researcher and Cornell provost, Bala explains how the “two-sided coin” of technology requires a university that integrates STEM and humanities to address issues like algorithmic bias and public trust.

The conversation also discusses Cornell’s recent shift toward institutional restraint. Bala explains Cornell’s approach to expressive activity and campus programs that foster dialogue, such as the Center for Dialogue and Pluralism (CDP) and a new Arts & Sciences course on Disagreement.

In This Episode:

💥 AI as both opportunity and destabilizer in higher education

💥 Declining public trust in universities—and in science

💥 Cornell’s land-grant mission and bidirectional knowledge exchange

💥 Institutional restraint and departmental speech norms (including dissent reporting)

💥 Expressive activity policy and time/place/manner principles

💥 Student dialogue-building via CDP and the course “Disagreement”

💥 Viewpoint diversity through research design

💥 “Any person, any study” as a living institutional ideal

About Kavita Bala:

Kavita Bala is the 17th provost of Cornell University and a professor of computer science, bringing deep experience across research, academic leadership, and entrepreneurship. Before becoming provost on January 1, 2025, she served as the inaugural dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and previously chaired Cornell’s Department of Computer Science. As dean, she helped secure the naming gift for the Bowers College, expanded faculty capacity, and advanced major initiatives in AI and interdisciplinary computing.

Bala’s scholarship spans computer vision, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence, with contributions to image understanding and the modeling of complex materials, including work on recognizing styles and object attributes. She also co-founded the visual search startup GrokStyle, which was later acquired by Facebook. Her honors include being named an ACM Fellow and receiving the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award. She earned a B.Tech. from IIT Bombay and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from MIT.

Follow Kavita Bala on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kavita-bala-052409/

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