Williams Record: Computation Op-Ed

There was an interesting period in the last academic year (2025-26) where nearly every Williams Record op-ed article focused almost nonstop on the developments regarding AI. I had attempted to throw my own hat into the ring for some time, but didn’t settle on a good article idea until after the semester ended, so this article will likely release sometime in the fall, when the Record is open for submissions again.

I have substantially rewritten this article a few times; it was initially written on June 11th and I continued working on it intermittently roughly up until August 22nd.

For those of you who didn’t go to Williams: we have QFR (Quantitative Skills Requirement), WS (Writing Skills) and DPE (Difference, Power, and Equity) requirements to graduate. This is my proposal to add yet another skill class to graduate. I deliberately kept the phrase “computation” vague because being more specific prevents the audience from pattern-matching it to whatever they think it should mean, which is exactly what I want.

Centering Computation

It’s common to enter Sawyer or Paresky and see a sea of laptops staring back at you. Despite our collective dependence on computers for much of our academic and professional work, how much time is devoted in non-CS classrooms to engaging with how we can best utilize them?

The word computation refers to the skilled application and creation of software towards solving problems. While some classes are bringing the study of it to many disciplines, such as STAT 161, GEOS 290, and PHYS 210, I believe centering engagement with computation in our curriculum would be extremely beneficial for students of all majors, and that this would be best accomplished by adding a new computational skills requirement (call it the CSR).

However, that does not mean I’m advocating for everyone to be dragged kicking and screaming into CSCI 134; instead, I believe people should leave college understanding the computational tools of their profession, and important ones exist for every major Williams offers. The existence of a CSR would force each department to think carefully about what the technological “tools of the trade” looks like for their students and design courses to help ensure their students leave the College already prepared to use them. Courses like studying sound design & mixing for music majors or data mining & corpus analysis for history majors would allow graduates in those fields to leave already prepared for a world where they will use these tools every day.

More fundamentally, the CSR acknowledges that since liberal arts education is training to think, we must recognize that the limits of our thinking don’t stop at the skull. Technology is an extension of the mind; the more students can control and understand the tech they use, the more empowered they will be by the power computational mastery grants them. We are living in times where the powerful derive their strength from our collective ignorance about how exactly their technology works and what it does to us; without training students to see what technology can do to them and how to control it, they will be powerless to stop it from being wielded against them.

Williams has a unique opportunity to be the first in the country to emphasize giving students greater knowledge and agency over the technology that governs modernity. Centering it in everyone’s education at the College with a CSR is the first step in ensuring that computation’s power remains democratized, which is how we ensure society rules technology and not vice versa.