One of those may soon be Columbia.<\/p>\n
News of the potential partnership comes after more than two years of escalating tensions at Columbia between students, administrators, and the federal government. The university has spent years at the center of controversy after controversy: expulsions<\/a> of pro-Palestinian student protesters, a string of police raids<\/a>, and demands from the federal government.<\/p>\n People at Columbia\u2019s Teachers College are testing Sway in order to potentially integrate it into the conflict resolution<\/a> curriculum and \u201cbridge-building initiatives at Columbia,\u201d DiBella said. He said there\u2019s also been interest from other teams at Columbia in using Sway for the fall 2026 semester and onward. Simon Cullen, an assistant professor at CMU and the other developer behind Sway, told The Verge that the company is also in touch with Columbia University Life.<\/p>\n Sway places an \u201cAI Guide\u201d in every chat that \u201casks tough questions to improve student reasoning.\u201d The tool also \u201csuggests a rephrasing\u201d for language it deems disrespectful. One example debate topic laid out in Sway\u2019s intro video<\/a>: whether or not the US \u201cshould prioritize Palestinian rights and stop sending weapons to Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n Columbia did not provide a comment by publication time, even after being granted a request for more time to respond.<\/p>\n A screenshot from a Sway YouTube video explaining how the AI tool works. Image: Sway<\/p>\n \u2018A pattern that Columbia repeats\u2019 <\/p>\n Columbia is making sweeping changes as part of a $200 million settlement with the Trump administration that\u2019s ostensibly meant to combat antisemitism on campus \u2014 a settlement that restores Columbia\u2019s access to up to $1.3 billion<\/a> in federal funding. The school has to provide staggering amounts of data<\/a> to the Trump administration, enforce \u201cstrict rules against disruptive protests,\u201d and \u201cstrengthen oversight of international students.\u201d And on top of that, Columbia said it would commit<\/a> to work with organizations to \u201cto create constructive dialogue\u201d on campus. It\u2019s likely that the potential partnership with Sway AI falls under that category for Columbia.<\/p>\n It\u2019s one instance of many when it comes to the university throwing money at student disagreements in an attempt to solve problems without friction, according to Columbia sources who spoke with The Verge.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a pattern that Columbia repeats, where our conversations are evacuated of politics and history and context,\u201d the Columbia source, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, told The Verge. They added: \u201cColumbia, as a place of scholarship and study, excels at framing the nuance and politics of these issues. What the administration is trying to do is frame these as \u2018difficult conversations,\u2019 evacuated of their rooted context, both at the university and globally.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s pretty much the trustees trying to put out fires in my opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n One place for such conversations is a group called Student Leadership Engagement Initiative (SLEI), billed as a way to facilitate dialogue<\/a> between students and senior administrators, which had seven meetings last fall and seven last spring. It involves more than 70 students that are hand-picked by deans of students (and paid thousands of dollars each, per the Columbia source) to come together and \u201cexplore differences in points of view,\u201d according to the website.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s pretty much the trustees trying to put out fires in my opinion,\u201d the Columbia source said, adding, \u201c[Otherwise], you would never see trustees drop that much money per student to come to meetings to meet with senior administrators \u2026 It just seems like they were trying to throw money at it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the constants of the last two years at universities like mine has been a crisis response-style approach to political controversy, dissent, and protest,\u201d Joseph Howley, associate professor in Columbia\u2019s Classics department, told The Verge. \u201cWhat we have are approaches from the world of corporate crisis response, policing, and law enforcement being directed at disagreement and dissent as if they are problems to be solved rather than fundamental values to be cherished.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Looking for magic bullets\u2019 <\/p>\n Sway\u2019s Cullen has said publicly<\/a> that the tool is tied to the US intelligence community when it comes to part of its funding and research. Sway also received recent funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Snyder Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the Tools Competition, and Carnegie Mellon University itself, DiBella said.<\/p>\n DiBella said that Sway will share anonymized data with the public and the intelligence community, but not transcripts or specifics. \u201cAll the data that we share is public, so there\u2019s not any specific data-sharing pipeline with the intelligence community,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The reason for the intelligence community\u2019s involvement is that they fund DiBella\u2019s own postdoctoral work, he said. They \u201chave a bunch of these postdocs that they fund each year to carry out basic scientific research that might be of interest to the intelligence community,\u201d DiBella said. \u201cThey fund basic research that could be of interest to them, but it\u2019s entirely unclassified, unconfidential research and there\u2019s no specific data that\u2019s shared with them.\u201d<\/p>\n He also said that though the company does not share student transcripts nor answers with instructors, it does share with them each student\u2019s score on a five-question \u201cunderstanding quiz\u201d they take after participating in a discussion, which gauges how well they understood the logic of the discussion.<\/p>\n When asked about Sway, the Columbia source said, \u201cI don\u2019t trust Sway would approach this with any understanding of international politics, of power, and it would just be about making people feel better. That really frustrates me, as it\u2019s a common move at Columbia.\u201d<\/p>\n In Sway\u2019s early empirical studies, the team tested users on the topic of whether the 2020 election was \u201cstolen.\u201d But debates like this spur the question: Is it really productive for dialogue, in cases where one side is proven to be wrong, to merge closer together or to \u201csway\u201d one person closer to a view based on misinformation? In which cases is moderation between two opinions decidedly not good \u2014 and who decides that?<\/p>\n \u201cWe are in a political moment where everyone is looking for magic bullets.\u201d<\/p>\n Sway\u2019s \u201cunderstanding quiz\u201d measures success based on a rotation of survey questions given to students in groups of about five questions. They include whether the student found the discussion valuable, whether they now had a better opinion of someone on the opposing side, whether they think the arguments presented by the other side are better than they did before the discussion, and, crucially, whether the discussion caused them to change their mind about the topic of discussion.<\/p>\n \u201cClose to 50 percent actually say they changed their mind about something in the discussion,\u201d DiBella told The Verge. Though he said that alone isn\u2019t a measure of success because \u201cit might be that they changed their mind in the direction of falsity rather than the direction of truth.\u201d Ultimately, he said the Sway team isn\u2019t trying to get students to change their opinions but is looking to get them to be open to arguments from the other side, with less hate involved.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter having these discussions, students do become less confident in their own views,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cThey\u2019re getting closer to each other. They\u2019re becoming more malleable. That\u2019s actually why we used the word \u2018sway\u2019 … We want their opinions to be more malleable to allow for the capability of changing your mind.\u201d<\/p>\n The potential Sway partnership is not the only way Columbia is reportedly using tech to screen or shape students\u2019 convictions. The university is also reportedly<\/a> using Schoolhouse Dialogues, a tool offered by Sal Khan of Khan Academy\u2019s nonprofit, to pair high school students with opposite viewpoints on controversial topics, then rank each other\u2019s \u201ccivility\u201d \u2014 and Columbia could use that feedback in its admissions decisions.<\/p>\n To Howley, who has also taught a course on AI labor and knowledge work, there\u2019s an influx of groupthink about \u201cthe magical promise of AI\u201d that university leadership isn\u2019t immune to.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of the people at the very top, who \u2026 do not do the work of knowledge, creation, or education, have convinced themselves that this kind of software is a magic bullet, and we are in a political moment where everyone is looking for magic bullets,\u201d he said. \u201cIt all just couldn\u2019t be more disconnected from what I think of as \u2014 sorry to sound hyperbolic \u2014 the sacred charge of a university.\u201d<\/p>\n 0 Comments<\/a>Follow topics and authors<\/strong> from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.<\/p>\n Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n PlusFollow<\/p>\n See All by Hayden Field<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.<\/p>\n PlusFollow<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/sway-ai.png\"\/)
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