New Prez Steers Gateway Into AI Age

by Paul Bass

Gateway hired a human named Shiang-Kwei Wang, not a chatbot, to lead New Haven’s community college into the AI era. She’s working to make sure thousands of graduates enter jobs they’ll be able to keep, too, when the chatbots threaten to render them moot.

Wang is positioned to do that: She came into the job as Gateway’s president as a national expert in how to use artificial intelligence in the classroom (how “to integrate technologies into the curriculum to support students’ learning, to enhance the teaching and learning,” in her words).

In her new job Wang is seeking to ensure Gateway’s approximately 9,000 students can navigate fast-paced AI changes when they graduate from the two-year program into New Haven’s solid working-middle class jobs of the future in hospitals or bioscience labs or lawyer’s offices or auto repair shops.

Wang, a 53-year-old Taiwanese native, has begun her second semester as president of the downtown-based community college campus. (Which we used to call “Gateway Community College.” The state renamed it “CT State Gateway” campus after consolidating the state’s 12 branches.)

Wang’s academic research focused on science and math education and “pedagogical best practices.” She made presentations to faculties on instruction using tech like AI.

On Thursday she spoke on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program about how she’s incorporating that experience into running Gateway.

She’s working with faculty on both how they use AI as well as how they guide their students’ use of it — including the limits of AI, such as its tendency to “hallucinate” (i.e. make stuff up).

She described a teacher guiding students in researching high rates of diabetes in the Bronx (the New York City borough where she happened to serve as chief academic officer of Hostos Community College). The students would need to know, for starters, that they can’t trust that each research paper AI summarizes or links to is real or valid. They need to figure out how to assess those papers independently.

A key is to view AI not as a rent-your-brain “tool” but as a cognitive tool to help humans think more, not less, Wang said.

The nuanced uptake: Community colleges specialize in training people for specific jobs, for trades. To do that in the AI era, community colleges need to develop student skills more often associated with squishy humanities courses.

“The value of the college is not really just educating students about certain knowledge. It’s helping them how to assess, evaluate, collaborate, being creative, doing teamwork,” Wang said.

She cited 3 “Cs” to summarize the needed skills for navigating AI: Collabortaion. Communication. Creativity.

The “industry partners” helping to fund community college tracks emphasize those skills even as they seek students with practical hands-on training.

For instance, a growing track at Gateway is automotive repair. That takes place out of Gateway’s North Haven facility. The auto industry needs more skilled repair people for increasingly complex vehicles. So Honda, GM, Subaru donate cars to Gateway’s program and take on students as interns.

That North Haven facility has maxed out at 200 students and 75 vehicles, Wang reported. So Gateway is working with the state to reclaim a building from its former Sargent Drive campus on Long Wharf (now owned by state colleges and universities system). She looks to move the auto repair program there to make enough room for 300 to 400 students.

Those students will need to master specific software and hardware involved in fixing today’s Civics and Corvettes. They also need to be ready when that software changes — using those 3 Cs as well as the fourth C Wang mentioned, cognition.

The same holds for Gateway career tracks for aviation and railroad workers, nursing aides, as well as radiology and bioscience lab techs.

As well as paralegals. Wang is working on developing a degree program to guide people toward that job. Law jobs are at risk with AI able to perform more research and brief writing. AI’s tendency toward hallucination will also require human participation even if that form of participating evolves, Wang argued. “Self-training is extremely important. You have to learn what kind of AI tools you can use to enhance your job.”

Is Wang worried about her job? Will Gateway’s next campus president be a digital avatar?

Wang doesn’t worry about that.

It’s hard to picture (at least for now) an AI tool scanning a room of business and government and nonprofit leaders and donors, connecting with them, hearing their suggestions, enlisting their support, pitching campus strategies, crafting new ideas that don’t already exist in the raw materials fed to large language models.

Wang offered one word to describe what she can offer Gateway that Anthropic’s or Open AI’s or Google’s robo-administrators can’t: Leadership.

Click on the video below to watch the full conversation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” with CT State Gateway President Shiang-Kwei Wang. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of  “Dateline New Haven.”