335: How AI is Changing Academia with Dave Marchick, Dean of the Kogod School of Business

Dave Marchick is the Dean of American University’s Kogod School of Business and a seasoned leader with experience across the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. He spent over a decade as Managing Director at The Carlyle Group, where he served on the management committee and advanced the firm’s sustainability and diversity efforts. In government, he held senior roles in both the Biden and Clinton administrations, including leadership positions at the State Department, the White House, and the Development Finance Corporation. Dave directed the Center for Presidential Transition during the 2020 cycle and later launched the Transition Lab podcast and co-authored The Peaceful Transition of Power. A dedicated advocate for civil rights and historical preservation, he has served on the boards of the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the National Park Foundation. Dave holds degrees from George Washington University, the LBJ School at UT Austin, and UC San Diego.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• How Dean Dave Marchick is helping to infuse AI across the curriculum at American University’s Kogod School of Business.
• The resistance and cultural shifts required to get faculty on board with AI adoption.
• How students are learning to prompt, critique, and collaborate with AI from their first semester (and how it’s reshaping classroom dynamics).
• Why professionalism, communication, and negotiation are now prioritized as “skills of the future”.
• How Kogod is thinking about measuring the real-world impact of AI education beyond the classroom.
• Lessons from U.S. presidential transitions and what they reveal about leadership during critical moments.

Resources:

• Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work Newsletter: https://aiandwork.beehiiv.com/subscribe 
• Connect with Dave on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-marchick/ 
• AI fun fact article: https://www.psu.edu/news/campus-life/story/cheat-thon-contest-explores-ais-strengths-and-flaws-higher-education 
• On what it was like to co-author a book with ChatGPT: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bob-rogers-ai-expert-physicist-author-and-ceo-of-oii/id1476885647?i=1000606108950 
• Other episodes mentioned in the show:
  • Episode with George Sivulka [Hebbia CEO]
  • Episode with Tom Wheeler [Former FCC Chairman and author of Techlash]
  • Episode with Chris Caren [Turnitin CEO]
• Read Dave Marchick’s book: The Peaceful Transfer of Power: An Oral History of America’s Presidential Transitions