Changing Higher Ed · 2026-06-02 · 38 min
At sixteen, with straight A's in math and science, Dr. Karen Panetta's school career assessment told her to sell makeup or be a cook. A male friend with lower scores got engineer or politician. No AI was involved. Just a rules-based system applying gender and biographical filters to two teenagers. That same logic now sits inside AI tools landing in admissions offices and HR systems across higher ed, with one critical difference: AI does not eliminate human bias, it removes the human accountability that used to make bias correctable. In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast , Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. Karen Panetta , Dean of Graduate Education for the School of Engineering at Tufts University and an IEEE Fellow. Panetta lays out a procurement framework presidents and boards can use to evaluate AI tools before signing a contract. She and McNaughton work through the four questions most vendors cannot answer, why IRB principles already give higher ed a working framework for AI, and what happens to graduate research when students ask AI for a unique contribution and accept whatever comes back.
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