Fall 2026 TCU Magazine Sits With the Machine
A finished paper used to mean something.
It meant a student had sat with a question long enough to arrive somewhere. The paper was evidence of the sitting, and the evidence has stopped being reliable.
In the Fall 2026 issue of TCU Magazine, Corey Zapata-Smith reports on the proliferation of AI from inside this collision of learning and technology, from classrooms where faculty are rebuilding assignments from the ground up, from a lab where an AI model is learning to predict which hospitalized children will need intensive care, from a data center where sixteen new processors have changed what TCU research can reveal to the world.
“We could have celebrated AI or shared another warning about its risks,” editor Caroline Collier said. “We weren’t interested in those stories. Instead, we found people working through AI’s complexities by teaching with it, building with it and arguing about what it costs. Nobody knows yet how this ends. That uncertainty is the story.”
Also in This Issue:
Written Into the Land
In Guthrie, Texas, the Four Sixes Ranch has spent 150 years taking its inheritance seriously. Now, with Taylor and Nicole Sheridan among its owners and a national profile powered by Yellowstone, the ranch is attempting something harder: becoming a modern Western lifestyle brand without betraying the heritage it grew from. TCU fashion design and merchandising students and faculty are helping it figure out what authentic growth looks like.
Where the City Meets the Wild
Fifteen miles from campus, 3,600 acres of prairie, marsh and river bottom sit inside the Fort Worth city limits — four times the size of Central Park, and visited by only a fifth of the city’s residents. A five-year partnership with the city turns the Fort Worth Nature Center & Refuge into a living laboratory, drawing on faculty from across TCU as the region loses roughly 50 acres of natural space a week.
The Sacred Speaks
John Price ’01 (BS ’07) had a record deal, a beret and a Fort Worth Weekly citation for best rock star attitude. Then came a custody fight he won as a single man in his 20s and a therapist who leaned in one afternoon and asked whether he’d been drinking. Today he is a highly regarded Jungian psychotherapist and host of a popular podcast that invites listeners to ask life’s most important questions and then sit at the feet of the masters of spiritual thought.
The List
As a TCU student-athlete, John Booty ’98 wrote down his life goals. Then came a 10th-round call from the New York Jets and eight seasons in the NFL. Nearly 40 years later, he is a sports analyst in Washington, D.C., and coaches members of Congress on a football field. He is still working through that life-goals list.
“It Chose Us”
When a family member began struggling with mental health as a teenager, Jim Lykes ’89 and Kate Lykes ’92 found themselves inside a community far larger than they had imagined. What followed: a career change, years of advocacy and an endowment supporting TCU’s Counseling & Mental Health Center.
The University Press and the Future of Literary Fiction
Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler published his latest novel, Twice Around a Marriage, through TCU Press. He opens the hood on the craft of writing and makes an argument about where literary fiction may need to live next.
