Alex Williamson, Fordham Now; Fordham Offers Certificate Focused on AI Ethics
"As new technologies like artificial intelligence become increasingly embedded in everyday life, questions about how to use them responsibly have grown more urgent. A new advanced certificate program at Fordham aims to help professionals engage with those questions and build expertise as ethical decision-makers in an evolving technological landscape.
The Advanced Certificate in Ethics and Emerging Technologies is scheduled to launch in August 2026, with applications due April 1. The 12-credit program provides students with a foundation for understanding not only how technologies such as AI work, but also how to evaluate their social and moral implications to make informed decisions about their use.
A Long History of Ethical Education
The program’s development was guided by faculty in Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education, which has been a part of the University community for roughly three decades. According to Megan Bogia, associate director for academic programs and strategic initiatives at the center, the certificate program was developed in response to a growing need for ethical literacy among professionals working with new technologies—whether that means weighing questions of bias in AI-driven hiring tools, navigating privacy concerns in health data, or understanding the societal effects of automation.
“As technologies rapidly advance and permeate more deeply into our daily lives, it’s important that we simultaneously build up the fluency to interrogate them,” said Bogia. “Not just so that we can advance a more just society, but also so we can be internally confident in navigating an increasingly complicated world.”
Flexible Options for a Variety of Fields
Students will complete courses that examine ethical issues related to technology, as well as classes that provide technical grounding in the systems behind it. One required course, currently under development by the Department of Computer and Information Science, will cover artificial intelligence for non-specialists, Bogia said, helping students understand “all of the machinations of LLMs—large language models—so they can be fully informed interlocutors with the models.”
Other courses will explore questions of moral responsibility and social impact. Electives such as “Algorithmic Bias” and “Technology and Human Development” will allow students to dig more deeply into specialized areas.
Bogia said the program—which can be completed full-time or part-time, over the course of one or two years—was designed to be flexible and relevant for students across a wide range of fields and career stages. It may appeal to professionals working in areas such as business, education, human resources, health care, and law, as well as those in technology-focused fields like data science and cybersecurity.
“These ethical questions are everywhere,” Bogia said. “We’ll have learning environments that meet students where they’re at and allow them to develop fluency in a way that’s most useful for them.”
She added that Fordham is an especially fitting place to pursue this kind of inquiry.
“As a Jesuit institution, Fordham is well-positioned to be concerned and compassionate in the face of hard problems,” said Bogia.
To learn more, visit the program’s webpage."
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