This academic year in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, we’ve celebrated a new teaching initiative called Teach Together which brought together faculty and new ways of thinking about the collaborative possibilities of teaching.  To this was added an exploration of the way metacognition can inform our teaching and students’ understanding of their own learning.  We simultaneously continued the dialog on the potential of Big Data for faculty and students while recognizing the challenges as well as the possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI).

These concurrent conversations brought us back to the role of liberal education for students who will have to navigate work and life in a fast changing landscape as well as for higher education which must nimbly seek the very best ways to adapt to circumstances while delivering on promises to provide a path to better critical thinking, understanding of systems, innovation, and cultural competency.[1]

In the 1960s, my mentor Wayne C. Booth wrote an influential essay entitled, “Is There Any Knowledge That a Man Must Have?”  While we would still acknowledge the important nature of his essay’s exploration, now we would not even frame the question in his title in quite the same way ― we would bring to our framing the lessons of inclusive language.  We share his appreciation for liberal education, but now look at the ‘deep immersion in a discipline’ for which he advocated as a necessary partner to connecting that knowledge to other disciplines.  We share his desire to find our place in the world, but we also find ourselves problematizing his notion of seeking to understand ‘artistic beauty’ because our times have more thoroughly decoupled the idea that art’s purpose is necessarily to produce the beautiful. 

Ours is a time of rethinking, applying new and multiple lenses, and responding to rapid changes in everything from technology to the environment that ask something new and different from not only the sciences, but also the social sciences, arts, and humanities.  We used to strive to produce a cultivated individual.  Now we seek a widely acculturated change agent with experience in the world of working in multidisciplinary teams.

On the eve of completing the second decade of the 21^st Century, we ask a different thing of the thinking person, and we recognize that our human experiences and unique talents are exactly what sets us apart from our technology and are the reasons we will not cede our place in the world to our creations.

 

^[1] For a fuller discussion, see Joseph E. Aoun, Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (The MIT Press, 2017).