Hill comes to the Georgetown university after serving in academic and strategic leadership roles at William Jessup University, according to a news release from ACU. Her time there included advancing digital transformation and helping develop artificial intelligence-enhanced learning models.
Community Impact sat down with Hill to discuss the Christian university model, AI, the school's offerings and plans for the future.
Tell me about Austin Christian University's modern Christian university model and what sets the school and its offerings apart from other schools in the Central Texas area.
Here at Austin Christian University, one of our benchmarks is Kingdom-builders. And so we're working on that in a lot of different ways. We have partnerships with world-class entrepreneurs. We're also building up our students in ways where they can actually participate in practicums and accelerator projects with industry leaders, with entrepreneurs, with companies. And so we're building that. They get to be able to be in the trenches. They are able to have an idea. They're able to build on that idea. And this begins when they come in as freshmen all the way through to seniors. So this is one of our distinctives here at Austin Christian. Also we have a holistic model, and so part of the holistic model is not just the academic, but it's the professional development. It's also the spiritual development. And so we look at helping our students from a holistic manner across the board in several different ways.
As the new provost for a relatively new school, I'm curious what you hope to keep building on and also what new things are you hoping to bring to the table?
I'm just delighted that the Lord has led me here for a time such as this, and we are building behind the scenes. So "get better every day" is one of the things that we help our students do, and we're doing that as well. From the academic side, next week we have [the Association for Biblical Higher Education], which is a biblical accreditor. They're coming. We're in the process of accreditation, and they will be going through everything that we're doing—our policies, our procedures, our faith integration—so that we can reinforce that strong biblical worldview. That's one of our major initiatives for this year. Another thing is we have our first class graduating in the spring, so we're excited about that. Launching the new building as well. So we are literally and figuratively building in all different capacities, whether it's academic, whether it's an actual building itself, whether it's partnership development—we're focusing on really getting that outreach out there.
So initially, we began this process with Southeastern University. So we were able to partner with them, and we have an accredited business degree that we're able to offer right now. But we've gone deeper with that. So on our biblical side, we are going through and we're getting specific biblical accreditation on what we're offering with our theology courses and our different biblical Christian worldview and leadership courses. But we are looking at other ways to expand what we're doing on the accreditation side and being able to custom build our own curriculum, and that's in the phases. We have some exciting developments that are coming, but you'll be able to hear about that in the fall of 2027.
Can you expand a little more on what kind of offerings you currently have for current and prospective students, and is there anything planned in the future for offerings that you have?
So right now we are focusing on offering ... the bachelor in business administration to students. We are accredited through Southeastern University, but what we're working on the back end is expanding that with entrepreneur focus, and so we will expand those offerings with leadership, with ministry, with entrepreneurship, even technology, so having the focus with AI, cybersecurity, those pieces. So we're developing those, and we're working with entrepreneurs to custom-build our courses so that we have a real-life perspective that students can learn from and partnerships that are already in the community that we can get them tied into for jobs, internships, projects, all different types of things that we're already doing here.
Prospective students along with current students and staff attend a Preview Day event at Austin Christian University.Adrian Gandara/Community Impact
Can you tell me more about your experience in artificial intelligence and what role you think AI plays in Christian higher education?
I was one of the first developers of an AI platform with faith integration for all of higher education. And so I was able to build one of the first models that integrated faith and learning, being able to use an LLM and then build off of it to create an AI agent to be able to help students understand a biblical worldview. And in that process, I learned I was not only a professor, a curriculum writer, but also a student in my own course. And so I learned some of the things that you can do well and some of the things that you need to do, especially from a due diligence standpoint, and that's vetting. We really need to vet AI. So I created a model. It's a biblical-based model for how to vet AI in Christian higher education. And I was blessed to be able to share that at Baylor for their AI symposium in faith and learning a few months back because what I found was a lot of people don't know how to take those biblical principles and be able to apply them and use this new technology, understand that there are issues with it. You know, it does hallucinate. You do need to check if you're using scripture. You do need to check what version of scripture. You need to vet it. And so those are some things that the Lord placed on my heart to share with other people.
Is there anything else that you wanted to share today?
I'm so excited for what God is doing here. When you think about the vision of this land being dedicated decades ago and just the belief and the faith in what God would do here and the ability to step out with partnerships with Celebration Church, with Southeastern University to launch it quickly and then all of our our board of directors, our donors, our community partners, all the people that have come out to support us, to support our students, and then to see how God is just placing our students for kingdom impact. It's so exciting to see what God is going to do in this next era, and we're looking for those that want to come and sow and partner. And we're just excited for the vision that God has given us for the Kingdom-builder university throughout the globe for the glory of God.
