From Knowing to Being: Reclaiming the University's Purpose in an AI Age

“The university’s purpose is not to compete with the machine at its own game—speed, scale, calculation, and data recollection—but to transcend it by dedicating itself fully to what the machine can never replicate: wisdom, judgment, and the capacity for love, empathy, and meaning.” — Paul LeBlanc, Tanya Gamby & George Siemens, from Reclaiming Purpose: The University in an AI World

By Van L. Davis, Ph.D.

This week, I had the opportunity to read the new book by Paul LeBlanc, Tanya Gamby, and George Siemens, Reclaiming Purpose: The University in an AI World. It has me thinking a lot about the purposes of higher education, the role of colleges and universities in an AI world, and what it means to be human. It also makes me wonder what the connection might be between LeBlanc’s work and Paulo Freire’s and Parker Palmer’s on the spirituality of education—and what it all might imply for digital learning.

LeBlanc argues that we need to rethink the role and design of higher education in the face of artificial intelligence. What makes his argument unique is the critical transformation we need to make: from focusing on the epistemological to the ontological, from knowledge (something that AI can increasingly create) to what it means to be human.

As LeBlanc writes, there is a “growing conviction that the epistemological focus of education centered on knowledge—what one should know and how we know—would shift to more existential and ontological questions of being, how we think about being human, in community, and in the world where we will coexist with knowledge machines far more powerful than we are.”

I found myself nodding in agreement with LeBlanc. Higher education has been trying to make the transition “teacher as expert to teacher as curator of human connection” for the last couple of decades but seems unable to do so. LeBlanc spends the bulk of the book detailing how we can make such a transition, focusing on the role of AI in creating precision learning that then allows faculty to refocus their attention.

What Does It Mean to Be a Curator of Human Connection?

In 1923, Martin Buber wrote I and Thou, where he argues that there are two types of relationships: I and It and I and Thou. The I and Thou relationship is genuine; we engage with the wholeness of the other person and see them in their entirety. In I and It relationships, we see the other person as someone or something to be observed and used, a collection of characteristics.

We see these ideas echoed in the pedagogical works of bell hooks, specifically her 1994 book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, where hooks writes, “To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn… To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.” For hooks, learning only occurs within community, and it is the teacher’s responsibility to create that community.

Although LeBlanc does not directly reference Buber’s or hooks’s work, it’s easy to see the connection. For LeBlanc, if faculty are to become curators of human experience, they must enter into a relationship with their students where they think of them as a You rather than an It.

How Do Faculty Become a Curator of Human Connection?

Folks who know me have probably heard me speak of Paulo Freire’s work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In it, Freire outlines two diametrically opposed models of education:

1. The teacher acts as a banker, depositing information in their students, or as Freire puts it, the teacher’s task is to “‘fill’ the students with the contents of his narration… it turns them into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher.”
2. The teacher and students are in dialogue with each other. In this relationship, “The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn, while being taught, also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.”

This is all underscored in Palmer’s 1983 book To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey. Much like LeBlanc, Palmer argues that the aim of education is “knowing, teaching, and learning.” Although he doesn’t directly reference Freire or Buber, Palmer also emphasizes the role of relationship in learning when he writes: “Good teachers also bring students into community with themselves and with each other—not simply for the sake of warm feelings, but to do the difficult things that teaching and learning require.” According to Palmer, essentially, the teacher becomes “a mediator between the knower and the known. The way the teacher plays the mediator role conveys both an epistemology and an ethic to the student, both an approach to knowing and an approach to living.”

What Does This Mean for Digital Learning?

LeBlanc suggests that AI gives faculty the bandwidth to develop the whole student. It creates time for faculty to be in relationship with students, freeing them from the epistemological demands of teaching (the transmittal of information) to the ontological development of the whole person. AI becomes a super TA, ready to assist students 24/7. As a result, faculty can spend classroom time on developing those human traits that are even more critical in an AI age:

• Critical thinking
• Problem-solving
• The ability to navigate conflict
• The ability to develop relationships

AI becomes a tool wielded by faculty to accelerate community development and relationship building in the classroom.

At a time when AI is often associated with a dystopian future and the demise of higher education, I find LeBlanc’s optimism refreshing. He outlines a future where we can help our students be truly prepared for the coming seismic shift in society and the workforce, where we develop “flourishing human beings [as] the answer to an increasingly broken system of learning in an increasingly broken world.”

Because at the end of the day, this AI age will require us to help train and develop students who understand what it means to be human in a world where super-intelligent machines will be prevalent.