CAMBRIDGE — Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth announced a new curriculum emphasizing AI integration alongside moral, civic, and ethical education during a panel at The Washington Post's "Building America Summit." Kornbluth and Arizona State University President Michael Crow participated in the panel titled "The Next Generation," which was moderated by Washington Post reporter Zachary Goldfarb.

Kornbluth stated, "In our new curriculum, not only are we leaning into basic STEM fields. We really feel we have to resurrect some of the old, moral and civic and ethical educational goals much more strongly because we want all these kids that are learning to be leading-edge technologists, to come at it from a moral, civic and ethical perspective." She added, "We really want students to be able to use physical AI. We want our students to still be able to build things, but use AI as an augmentation tool." Kornbluth also said, "We're putting a big emphasis on things like teamwork. So, [students] need to be able to use these tools and come together towards goals, because you could imagine a situation that AI becomes your buddy instead of your study group. We don't really want that to happen."

Kornbluth remarked on the demand for strong AI knowledge in the field, stating, "It's because the students are all coming with business experience and the demand out there in the field for them to have really strong AI knowledge is very high." She said, "Education is the best pathway to economic mobility." Kornbluth highlighted the historical role of scientific inquiry, stating, "Many of the things we have in our everyday lives, whether they be medical advances, technological advances, a lot of these things came from 30, 40, 50 years of scientists just trying to figure out how things work."

According to Kornbluth, traditional subjects are not outmoded by AI. "I do not think that any of our traditional subjects are now outmoded [by AI]. It's how you approach them," she said. She also discussed the financial aspects of groundbreaking research, explaining that it is difficult to make revolutionary discoveries without government funding. "It is very difficult to make a groundbreaking discovery that's going to revolutionize human life because you want to do that. You really have to be figuring out how things work and traditionally that sort of research in this country has been funded by the government because it does not have an immediate return," Kornbluth said. "We're really trying to figure out what the funding stream is going to be going forward."

Kornbluth cited advancements in medical treatments as an example. "[Treatments] started with injections of insulin saving people and now it's automated pumps and CGMs [Continuous Glucose Monitors]. The next phase is going to be an actual functional cure, which is stem cell implantation—masking the cells so they're not rejected by the immune system. But it takes a lot of basic work to be able to get there," she said. "That [diabetes] is just one area. You can extrapolate that to cancer therapy." Regarding immunotherapy, she stated, "Immunotherapy is just in its infancy—it doesn't work in every possible kind of cancer at this point. But all of the modifications that are being done now in basic science laboratories through to pharmaceutical companies and biotech are making it more and more broadly applicable so that pancreatic cancer is not absolutely a death sentence now."

MIT offers free tuition to students with parental incomes under $200,000. Twenty percent of MIT's class of 2029 were first-generation students. The MIT for America initiative aims to expand access to calculus in under-resourced high schools nationwide. Kornbluth stated, "MIT has spun out north of 30,000 companies. The economic impact of MIT on this country is equivalent to the 14th largest GDP in the world. We are having a huge impact on the economy and we're producing the next generation of talent."