For the Digital Vanguard Fellows
The sovereign AI story is already national news.
Four Fellows. One sovereign mission.
This is where it started: Abigail Covington, Kenya Capehart, Oluwatomiisin Ajayi, and Takiya Eastmond, alongside the DIT leadership backing them. Every issue of this dispatch is written for the world you're building toward, not the classroom you came from.
Morgan State is building its own AI to become a "complete smart campus"
The clearest outside account of Obsidian yet: how it works, why Morgan is one of the only universities in the country running a truly sovereign AI system, and what a $63M MacKenzie Scott gift has made possible. Dr. Summers on the record: "The university will learn from itself."
Read →Data Literacy Is Key to AI ROI for Higher Education
Why Morgan's approach to AI leans as hard on people as it does on infrastructure. Dr. Summers explains the real bottleneck: "This isn't about knowing how to use a spreadsheet or read a chart. Those are table stakes." Morgan is now one of the only universities on Google's Research Technology Leaders Advisory Board, alongside Stanford, Yale, and Johns Hopkins.
Read →Will AI Replace College? Not So Fast.
A national higher-ed columnist naming Morgan State by name as one of the institutions already answering the "AI-first university" question, not theorizing about it. Useful context for how the outside world is starting to talk about what you're inside of.
Read →Morgan State's sovereign AI push, covered locally
The Banner's local angle on the same story. Flagging honestly: this is a subscriber-supported outlet and the article may be metered for non-subscribers, worth knowing before you share it further.
Read →Four milestones, in the last two weeks.
"An Emerging AI Powerhouse": Morgan scores 198/300 on the first evidence-based AI ranking of American higher ed.
AI Campus Index, a new independent ranking that scores universities purely on deployed AI systems (not press releases or self-reporting), gave Morgan State a 198/300, a score that "rivals institutions ranked 150 spots above them" on the traditional US News rankings. The piece names Obsidian directly, quotes Dr. Summers ("The university will learn from itself"), and highlights CEAMLS' nearly $18.5M in AI research funding, Morgan's spot in Amazon's Machine Learning University faculty consortium, and a $1.8M Georgia State National Institute for Student Success investment in Morgan's AI-enhanced tutoring. The report's core finding: "the prestige hierarchy and the AI integration hierarchy are not the same hierarchy," and Morgan is proof of it.
Read the full piece →Dr. Summers shared the stage with Google to talk AI-ready graduates, on Google's own platform.
At Google Cloud Next 2026, Dr. Summers joined a panel titled "Bridge the Gap: Scale AI Readiness with Google Certifications," alongside Google Cloud's own Head of MSI Strategy (Anwar Miller) and Group Manager of Cloud Learning Services (Natalie Van Kleef). The session covered Google's no-cost Career Launchpad program (1,400+ institutions already using it), the newly-launched GEAR agentic training track, and real numbers from Google's TMCF partnership with HBCUs: 6,000+ students informed, 418 accepted into the 2025 cohort, 95% of participants say they'd recommend it to peers. Morgan wasn't in the audience, it was one of three voices setting the agenda, alongside Google's own strategy and learning leadership.
View the session →The Fellows building alongside you.
Seven houses. One craft each.
- Sovereign AI, in your words: after reading the Technical.ly and EdTech Magazine pieces, how would you explain Obsidian to someone outside DIT in under 60 seconds? That's an executive-presence skill, not a trivia question.
- The advisory board detail: Morgan sits alongside Stanford, Yale, and Johns Hopkins on Google's Research Technology Leaders Advisory Board. What does that signal about the caliber of work you're being asked to do here?
- Your guild, named for what it is: pick one article above and identify which guild house would actually own that problem if it were Morgan's to solve. Defend your answer.
- The bigger stakes: the DVF deck says 101 other HBCUs are watching what Morgan builds. After this issue, what's one thing you'd want another HBCU to copy, and one thing you'd warn them not to.