The Templeton Institute (TI) promotes and strengthens transformative activities in engineering and computer science within a liberal arts educational environment. The TI is a hub for innovation, a place for teachers, scholars, learners, and practitioners to come together to work collaboratively and find support through resources and expertise necessary to take risks, foster integrative thinking, encourage problem-solving, and promote discovery.
The TI's current multi-year theme is "Artificial Intelligence." We have recently hosted campus-wide lectures by major scholars working on topics of AI and society, including Francesca Rossi, David Chalmers, D. Fox Harrell, and Vauhini Vara, and have staged a faculty panel to explore the various ways that Union instructors are experimenting with Generative Artificial Intelligence in their classrooms. Additionally, we value investigations of the intersections among the liberal arts and engineering and computer science. Part of our recent TI programming has included, for instance, a film screening of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023), which we contextualized through a multidisciplinary faculty panel interrogating the film with faculty representatives from all four of Union's divisions. Along with these signature events, the TI has also partnered with faculty and staff to stage a diverse range of interdisciplinary events across campus.
Driven by our changing world, the TI serves in these and related ways as an epicenter for integrative and innovative teaching and learning opportunities centered around key contemporary problems and their myriad connections to engineering, computer science, and the liberal arts. These opportunities enable a range of perspectives to come together around a common theme, attracting students and faculty with diverse backgrounds.
