Lindenwood: Our Last Stop On The AI Tour, And The Question Is Answered

Stanford. Wharton. Kellogg. Harvard. Ross. Kelley. Duke. Columbia, twice. Wharton again. And now Lindenwood.

If you haven’t heard of Lindenwood, you’re not alone. It’s a private school in St. Charles, Missouri, founded in 1827, a touch under 200 years old. A popular AI matchmaking system, Boardy, pointed me to James Hutson, Lindenwood’s director of AI-enabled academic transformation. I’d been meaning to get to the smaller schools, so I said yes.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I got was one of the most impressive conversations in the series. Hutson came to AI through art history, business, virtual reality and game design, a field that has used AI for decades, and he has published hundreds of pieces about how institutions adopt the technology, or don’t. Lindenwood requires three AI touch points in every degree, 40 hours a year of AI training for every faculty and staff member, and a PhD in applied AI launches next fall. It took him three years and three provosts to get the policy through legal. He got it through.

Which brings me to why this is the last interview in the series.

The series began at INSEAD, where I spent well over a decade on computer-aided strategy, first with the primitive logic we called AI at the time, later with generative AI built in. I wrote about that work in Harvard Business Review. When I took the idea to Marc Ethier, editor in chief of Poets&Quants, as a series on what business schools are actually doing with AI, he was enthusiastic.

Ten interviews later, the answers have converged. Judgment over tools. Teach the thinking, not the prompt. Keep the human in the loop. School after school, the thinking is sharp and, increasingly, the same. (See links at the bottom of the page to each story in the series.) When a small school in Missouri is as far along as schools that charge $100,000 a year and admit almost nobody, the question of what business schools are doing with AI has been answered.

So, we close this series here, on a high note. Next up is a new one, built on the name of this publication: Poets one week, Quants the next. Economists, philosophers, and futurists alternating with finance, accounting, and the quants themselves. More on that soon.

P&Q: Tell me briefly about yourself and what Lindenwood is doing.

Hutson: We’re much more nimble than the larger institutions bound to state funding, because we’re private. I’m the director of AI-enabled academic transformation at Lindenwood University, and I oversee three things.

The first is our AI programming. We have certificates in human-centered AI for both matriculating and non-matriculating students, a bachelor’s in applied artificial intelligence, and a master’s in human-centered artificial intelligence, which is the biggest. We found early on that Gen Z despises AI, and it’s very difficult to get them on board with training of any kind. But people already in industry, looking to move laterally or who have been displaced, understand the value. So nontraditional students make up the lion’s share. We’re also launching a PhD in applied AI in fall 2027.

The second is the Applied Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center. I’ve done institutional research since 2021 on how AI was already being used across institutions, academic and industry, in every department and functional unit. Then we started writing our own algorithms with other faculty and testing what they would mean on the ground, with studies in everything from web design, 3D design and composition to art history, management, finance and biology. I’ve published more than 280 pieces on the topic, including several books on institutional adoption, or institutional inertia, as I like to call it, because we’re not moving fast enough, if at all. The center is where we filter all that research: working with edtech startups, validating instruments, looking at what’s coming next, and upskilling.

Every degree here has to embed three touch points on how AI is used in that industry. We’re in phase two now, and all faculty, students and staff have a mandate to upskill, with 40 hours of AI professional development a year.

The third is a skunkworks project we started a year and a half ago: a for-profit arm of the center that upskills businesses, usually small and medium-sized ones. We do AI assessments, figure out where they are and what each department needs, and offer à la carte training. That’s our AI Essentials work.

P&Q: I think of a continuum from most objective to most subjective. On one side of the bell curve is accounting: do not be creative with your accounting. On the other is strategy, and just beyond that are the arts. How did someone with an arts background become so interested in AI?

Hutson: To follow up on that, I wrote an article on AI in the boardroom, on replacing board members with AI because it’s more objective and has no agenda. Albania now has an AI serving in its government.

My father was an artist so I went to art school. When I graduated, I decided I wanted to teach rather than practice, so I got a master’s and a PhD in art history and followed the traditional academic path. In 2010 I set up a program here, since there wasn’t one, chaired it, and grew it to about 300 students. In 2016 I became assistant dean of online and graduate programs, and the joke was that there weren’t any. Coming from art history, I had no idea how to do that, so I went back for a business degree to understand the business side. I built 25 programs, and five are now award-winning.

In 2019 my boss told me to look at this VR stuff. Most virtual reality experiences were built in game engines, so I got a master’s in game design to force myself to learn physics engines. I got grants and headsets and set up an XR lab. Then COVID hit, and we built simulations for student-to-student and student-professor interaction. I created VR Champions, people from every department who embedded immersive experiences in their teaching, because we thought distance learning might never end.

Then we restructured, and my new boss made me a department head. My 2021 annual performance review said: go forth and do this artificial intelligence stuff. So, I rinsed and repeated. Modeled on VR Champions, I created AI Ambassadors from every part of the institution and had them study how AI was already being used in their areas. I’ve now published with more than 100 collaborators internationally.

I was finishing eight studies in fall 2022 when ChatGPT soft-launched. Everyone in academia went down for the long winter’s nap, and I kept waking up in cold sweats with panic attacks. This makes knowledge cheap. That undermines our entire business model. And let’s be clear: we’re not in the business of education. We’re in the business of selling credentials, and it takes a credentialed human to credential another human. I kept sending emails, and people said I was being alarmist. When we came back in 2023, 3.5 Turbo came out and ChatGPT hit a million users, and I knew it wasn’t going away. Since I was already doing studies, I went back for another PhD.

P&Q: Most of the schools in this series are M7s and Ivies. Lindenwood is far smaller, but it’s doing as much as the giant schools, arguably more.

Hutson: Because we’re smaller, more nimble and private. Our president, John Porter, is an ex-IBM executive, very proud of it, and he thinks in terms of P&L. We can institute policies faster. That said, it took me three years to get here, through legal and three provosts. Every time I moved the needle on AI policy and employee use of the tools, someone left: our CIO, who was working with me, then the provost, then the next provost after nine months. Each time I had to restart with legal. It began in 2023 and finally got through legal on December 6, 2025. I remember the exact date because we were headed to an all-faculty meeting.

The Yales and Harvard’s have very strong faculty senates. In all my research, when faculty have strong control over academic policy, there’s more inertia. Less gets done. That’s why I created the AI Strategy and Governance Committee under the President’s Council, not the faculty council. No faculty member will ever vote for someone else to tell them what to do in their own class. Not in a million years.

The argument that got it through is simple. Every college says it’s preparing students to be accountants or chemists. If that’s true, look at the job postings and the skills employers want. Those now include AI skills. If you’re honest about preparing students, they need AI skills specific to their field.

P&Q: What did legal push back on?

Hutson: In summer 2023 the provost, Bethany Alden-Rivers, asked me to write an AI policy, since my main research colleague, Dr. Dan Plate, and I had been researching AI since 2021. There wasn’t much in academia then, but industry was fairly consistent: a stoplight method, which most faculty still use in their syllabi. Green is publicly available data, yellow needs consideration or anonymization, red is restricted. I submitted a very reasonable policy in June 2023 while we were planning staff training for the summer. It went to legal, and HR said stop. Stop training. Don’t talk about AI until legal reviews this.

Legal came back with a draconian version. Faculty read it as: use the tools and you’ll be fired. Legal had little academic precedent to work with, so they took the most restrictive, risk-averse position. No training, no discussion, employees forbidden to use the tools, and no distinction between public, anonymized and sensitive data. That stayed in effect until December 6, 2025. The dean who first told me to start AI research in 2021 became provost that August, and she pushed it back through legal. Look up our employee generative AI use policy on our website now and it actually says permissive. We want people to experiment and make mistakes, because the tools change all the time.

P&Q: (Harvard Professor Clayton) Christensen predicted that half of colleges are doomed. Will AI hasten or slow his prediction?

Hutson: People tell me there’s no reason to get a college education anymore. So, let’s go back: what is college? One of our former VPs noted that college was never solely about education. It’s also a sorting mechanism, a vetting process that tells employers whom to hire. There’s the social aspect too. Surveys show only a minority of Americans still believe a college degree is very important, but the notion remains: my son, my daughter is going to college. It will take a few generations to kill the idea, because it was never just about education. It’s about credentials. If you just want education, go to Coursera or edX and learn Python. If you need the credential, you need a credentialed human at an institution that can grant it.

In the short term, AI won’t have the impact people expect on higher education, because other market forces were already hastening the demise before 2023. Parents and the public are questioning the value. Last fall NYU passed $100,000 a year in tuition. Think about recouping $400,000 and the job you’d need to do it. So, you’ll see, and we already see, departments closing that aren’t directly aligned, by CIP and SOC codes, with vocations seen as profitable enough to recoup a four-year degree. And will the four-year degree survive at all? Many are already moving to three years, like the Irish and European models.

Colleges are closing. Two years ago, the metric was that a tuition-driven college with fewer than 100 students and no large endowment was at the highest risk of closing within a year. I was staggered that colleges with 100 students even exist.

AI will eventually reshape what we expect of higher education, but people overlook the other historical factors and what they actually value in a degree. Only a few colleges shape the public’s imagination of higher education, the ones you’ve been naming, Harvard and Yale. That picture, the structure and the expectations, will change radically, and sooner than half of colleges disappear.

P&Q: At an Austin founder event I met a young man with an insightful algorithm for balancing a business’s internal and external forces. I wrote a draft for my Substack and sent it to him. He wrote back that it was all ChatGPT. I told him I use it for grammar and typos, but I was a news reporter, and I’ve written bestselling Harvard cases my whole life. If it reads like an LLM, it’s because LLMs copy people, not the other way around. There was real hostility there. Why are younger people so hostile to AI, and what can we do about it?

Hutson: There’s nothing we can do about Gen Z, unfortunately. I call them the lost generation. They were told that if they followed the rules, worked hard, didn’t cheat, got a computer science degree and learned to program, they’d get a six-figure job. Instead, they had higher unemployment than some fine arts majors. They feel lied to, cheated, jilted, and in reality, they were. We still haven’t found a way to get them onto the first rung of the ladder.

They see AI as taking something from them. In my studies I hear soulless, cold, unfeeling, theft, stolen, over and over.

You pointed out the big misconception among academics and students alike, which I’ve published on several times: they think it’s all or nothing. Either you type a prompt and it writes the article, or you write everything yourself. In fact, there hasn’t been purely human writing for decades, just as there hasn’t been purely human art since Photoshop. Think of going from typewriters to word processors. A machine intermediary has been there all along. It became invisible because it became expected, just as we now take for granted that we carry an external brain. How many phone numbers do you have memorized? I have two. As a kid I had about 30. That’s not a valuable skill anymore, so I offload it, and I can know and do much more.

I expect that generation to always feel bitter about the technology. Across hundreds of studies, about 40% of the population will never convert. It goes deep into psychology, into who we think we are and what we value about human creativity. But this will become as commonplace as spellcheck. In a few years, “did you use ChatGPT?” will seem a ridiculous question. It’s in every Word doc and every Google doc. It finishes your emails. You’ll have to work hard not to use it. People didn’t understand when I first said that, and now I hear it daily.

P&Q: I asked my one reference, my daughter. We moved to France when she was a child, when I was at INSEAD, and she went to the Sorbonne. She had offers from schools she thought were better, but people told her to go to the Sorbonne: you’re American, you’ll move home, and the only French school Americans know is the Sorbonne. Choose the brand. Now she’s working at a bank, her first job. When I asked about AI, she said she isn’t hostile, but when she has a question at work, they tell her to ask the chatbot, and she’d rather ask a senior person, someone who knows how things are done and gets to know her. She misses that. So, it’s not AI per se. It’s losing connection with other people, often older people. What do you make of that, for education and everything else?

Hutson: Funny you mention the Sorbonne. I had an art conservation student choosing between two schools, and I told her to go with the Sorbonne. The other was actually the better university, but people had heard of the Sorbonne. Name recognition absolutely matters.

On connecting in person: our social media marketing professor, Andrew Smith, and I wrote a book on next-gen digital marketing in the age of AI, looking at marketing to different generations. With Gen Z, even before AI, COVID accelerated a nostalgia for life before smartphones. They have a love-hate relationship with technology. They romanticize the 90s. When I ask incoming students what they’re streaming, it’s older shows going back to the 90s, Friends, Seinfeld, the first season of Grey’s Anatomy. They’re sometimes shocked by the homophobic references, but they all say the same thing: no smartphones, everyone just living their lives, actually talking to each other. They also know that to have a social life, they need a smartphone and social media.

Your daughter isn’t in the minority in wanting human connection. We found that if you market to Gen Z using AI, you must do it ironically, sarcastically, almost mock it, like a lot of recent commercials. They long for connection, yet getting them to physically show up to games, student events and clubs is like pulling teeth. There’s a dichotomy between what they say they want and what they do.

They’re absolutely the hardest generation to teach AI skills to right now, the 18 to 27-year-olds. Younger kids who grew up with it don’t show the same resistance. Our policy requires all students, faculty and staff to become AI literate and move toward AI fluency, with minimum training hours on AI and pedagogy, and three touch points in every major: how the tools work, how they’re used ethically in the field, and a capstone applying them, say, at a bank like your daughter’s, automating work tellers used to do by hand.

People our age are coming back for degrees by the hundreds. Yesterday a grad student told me he’s a few years from retirement after 30-plus years in IT, and he’s getting this certification to stay relevant. Our generation knows why that matters. Theirs just says nope.

Your daughter is obviously smart, and you taught her well. Networking, physical connections and social capital will matter more than ever, because that’s how you know what someone actually knows. There are very few other ways to judge someone’s real skill and knowledge. Social capital will be one of the main reasons you still go to college.

P&Q: Any final thoughts?

Hutson: Schools evolve out of necessity, and three types will survive. First, the Ivies, with endowments big enough to weather the storm and name recognition, like the Sorbonne. The traditional four-year, one-campus experience will become a luxury only the elite can afford. We’re pretty much there. An average middle-class family, even with two incomes, can’t afford to send one or two children to four years on campus with room and board. The elite will keep giving their children that experience, and the social capital and cohort connections that come with it.

Second, the massive online giants, the Western Governors and SNHUs, which undercut everyone. When you just need a credential quickly and cheaply, the institution’s name matters less.

Third, a few holdouts declaring themselves islands with no AI: blue books, handwritten notes, banned devices. Some are already doing it. AI will accelerate a very interesting bifurcation in education.

But if colleges want to be honest about preparing graduates for the future, and they aren’t teaching these skills, they aren’t being honest about their value proposition.

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Michael Olenick, JD, is a former INSEAD research fellow and founder of VSTRAT.ai. He has spent four decades building AI and expert systems; his research has been used at INSEAD and, before then, cited by Congress and media on how to resolve the 2008 era financial crisis. Michael currently lives with his partner, Anastassia, in Austin, Texas.

This is the last in a series exploring how business schools are integrating AI into teaching and research, one school and one faculty member at a time. See also:

AI In Finance: Wharton’s New Lab Explore The Opportunity & The Risk

Columbia’s AI Playbook: Teach The Thinking, Not The Tool

Better Prompts Or Better Judgment? Columbia Bets On The Latter

At Duke Fuqua, Using AI To Strengthen The Bonds Between Humans 

At Indiana Kelley, “AI Is,” Not “AI Will”

Training Students To Leverage Increased Cognition (Michigan Ross)

Rebuilding The Role Play (Kellogg)

Learning Requires Friction (Wharton) 

The Deck Is Dead (Stanford)

We Teach MBAs To Apologize About The Best Tool They Have (INSEAD)

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