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.

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; it was published in the September 23rd issue which is available here.

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 Library or Paresky and see a sea of laptops staring back at you. Despite our dependence on computers for much of our academic and professional work, how much time outside of computer science classes do we devote to actually understanding this technology?

I believe that centering engagement with computational skills in our curriculum would be extremely beneficial for students of all majors. “Computation” refers to the skilled creation and application of software towards solving problems. While some departments, including statistics, geosciences, and physics, are incorporating it into their curriculums, we should go a step further and create a computational skills requirement (call it the CSR) that would apply to all students.

I’m not advocating for everyone to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into CSCI 134, but I do believe that students should leave college understanding the computational tools of their profession. The existence of a CSR would challenge each department to think carefully about what the technological tools of the trade look like for their students, and design courses to help ensure their students leave the College prepared to use them in their careers. This could include courses in sound design and mixing for music majors or data mining and corpus analysis for history majors.

More fundamentally, the CSR would acknowledge how technology extends the mind. The core of a liberal arts education is training students to think; we must recognize that the limits of thinking are not the limits of our mind. The more students can control and understand the tech they use, the further they can take their ideas. The CSR would challenge students to grapple with the metacognitive challenges of modernity.

We are living in times where the most powerful and influential derive their strength from our collective ignorance about how exactly their technology works and what it does to us. If we do not train students to see what technology can do and how to control it, they will be powerless to stop it from being wielded against them.

The College has a unique opportunity to be the first liberal arts college in the country — and one of the first institutions in higher education ­— to give students greater knowledge and agency over the technology that governs modernity. Centering these powerful skills in everyone’s education through the implementation of a CSR is the first step in ensuring that computer science’s power remains democratized, which is, in turn, how we ensure society rules technology — and not vice versa.