California State University, Chico has announced that artificial intelligence will serve as the central theme of its 2026-27 Book in Common program, a campus-wide initiative designed to spark shared intellectual conversation among students, faculty, and staff. The selection reflects a growing recognition among higher education institutions that AI literacy has become as foundational a skill as reading or mathematics.
The move fits into a long tradition of universities using common reading programs to address the defining challenges of their era. In earlier decades, campuses grappled collectively with the environmental movement, the digital revolution, and questions of social justice through similar initiatives. That AI now occupies this space signals just how thoroughly it has moved from the realm of specialist research into everyday public life.
The roots of that journey stretch back to the mid-twentieth century. Alan Turing's landmark 1950 paper posing the question 'Can machines think?' planted an early seed, and the formal birth of AI as a discipline is typically traced to the Dartmouth Conference of 1956. For decades the field cycled through periods of excitement and disillusionment — the so-called 'AI winters' — before the deep learning breakthroughs of the 2010s brought machine intelligence back to the forefront of public consciousness.
Today, tools built on large language models have made AI encounters routine for millions of people, amplifying the urgency for broad-based education rather than specialized training alone. By embedding AI into a shared campus conversation, Chico State joins a wave of colleges and universities rethinking general education requirements to include critical engagement with algorithmic systems, their capabilities, and their societal implications.
The selection underscores a broader lesson from the history of transformative technologies: the institutions that fare best are those that prepare their communities to think critically about change, not merely to absorb it.