The Purpose of Liberal Arts Education in the Age of AI:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 322 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Christa Acampora

Host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest Dr. Christa Acampora

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

[00:00:32] Introduction of Guest Christa Acampora

Drumm McNaughton: My guest today is Dr. Christa Acampora, the Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. Christa’s leading a transformative vision; how to integrate AI into UVA’s curriculum while ensuring that students graduate with the key skills needed to be successful in their careers and in the world.

An accomplished scholar with international recognition and distinction, Krista specializes in modern European philosophy, moral psychology, and aesthetics, and she joins me today to talk about the purpose of liberal arts education in the age of AI.

Christa, welcome to the program.

Christa Acampora: Thank you, Drumm.

Drumm McNaughton: I am looking forward to our conversation. We’re going to talk about the purpose of liberal arts education in the age of AI, and liberal arts has gotten a bad name recently. I’m not sure why it has, but before we get into that, give us a little bit of your background. I really enjoyed reading about what you’re doing and who you are.

Christa Acampora: Fantastic. Well, thanks again for the invitation. Drumm, I’ve really been looking forward to this myself.

[00:01:46] Acampora’s Academic Journey

Christa Acampora: So I’m a philosopher, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how universities actually work and what they’re for.

Drumm McNaughton: You could be studying this one for multiple lifetimes and I’m not sure we’d get an answer.

Christa Acampora: Philosophers like big, hard questions.

[00:02:08] Lessons Learned at CUNY 

Christa Acampora: But I taught philosophy for nearly 20 years at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. CUNY’s one of the largest and most diverse public universities in the country, and perhaps even in the world. And if I had 200 students in a room for my introductory class, I could count on more than two dozen first languages.

There we were reading together the whole of Plato’s Republic, not just excerpts, and that is where I think I learned what an education is for.

[00:02:45] Leading Through Crisis

Christa Acampora: But my next stop was Emory University, where as deputy provost, I got to lead the university’s strategy and budget, and was running academic operations across the university and its academic health center through the pan- pandemic. And that’s where I think I learned how a university holds together and what it owes the people in it. And now I have the privilege of serving at the University of Virginia, leading one of the largest and most comprehensive colleges in American higher education. It’s where I get to explore answers to those big questions about purpose and build the evidence for realizing it, not just making a case for.

Drumm McNaughton: Interesting.

[00:03:32] What Is Higher Ed Really For?

Christa Acampora: Yeah, and I think underneath all of it is that big one question, what is higher education for? And I’ve come to think that we’ve been answering it in higher education a little too narrowly, and that the answer matters more now in an age of increasingly capable AI than it ever has before. So I’ll take a first pass at it.

[00:03:57] Formation Over Job Prep

Christa Acampora: I think the purpose of higher education is human formation, making people capable of authoring their own lives and helping to govern a free society. Preparing them for good work is part of that purpose, but it was never a substitute for it.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, I can certainly tell you’re a philosopher. We look at big questions.

[00:04:23] Sector Challenges Today

Drumm McNaughton: Before we start delving down into those bigger questions, higher ed right now, and my listeners have heard us say this before, it’s got multiple challenges going on. Declining perception of the value of a degree, early entry into careers, political polarization, enrollment cliff, all sorts of those things. How does that– how do they factor into the purpose of higher education? With these things, are these just symptoms of a bigger problem, or are they something they’re coming up to raise our awareness of how we need to change?

Christa Acampora: Well, absolutely. I think it’s information that the sector simply can’t ignore. The question about change and what needs to change, I think is part of the conversation that we need to have. There’s no doubt that confidence in the sector has fallen, and we absolutely have to take that seriously.

But I think if we look closely at what people are doubting, there is something important from, for us to take away from that. And it’s not just consolation that we already had the right answers which we’re very good at doing that, but I don’t think, I don’t think that’s the answer.

[00:05:46] Cost Versus Value

Christa Acampora: Almost every question that goes to the decline in public confidence asks some version of the question about whether a degree is worth the cost, and that’s a question about price and debt.

It’s not the same question as whether the education was worth doing, and that, I think, is something to poke at a little bit further. If you ask people about their own education, then the picture looks different.

[00:06:21] Polls and Employer Views

Christa Acampora: Last fall, in a Gallup Lumina poll, three-quarters of current students and seven in 10 graduates said their degree was worth the cost.

And among bachelor’s students, 93% said the investment was worthwhile. So the same students who say that the price isn’t fair are still saying the thing itself was worth it. And so I think they’re distinguishing cost from value.

Drumm McNaughton: And I agree with you. I have a good relationship with the woman who does these studies, Courtney Brown there at Lumina. She works with Gallup quite a bit. She also brought up something along those same lines, if we’re talking about value, is the employers, 70 to 80% of employers think graduates are getting the right skills.

Now, is there room for improvement? Absolutely. But this crisis of confidence that we’ve got, are we asking the right questions?

Christa Acampora: I think you’re really onto something there, Drumm. The price question is very different from the value question, and answering the value question is not something that I think we in the sector should assume is inherent and obviously true, and it’s also not something that we should simply assert.

I think the onus is on us to demonstrate the evidence, and increasingly in an age of AI, I think we’re going to have to demonstrate that not just to the public, but also to our students, because we need to be recruiting them into their own learning, into their own education. That’s not necessarily something that we’ve done.

Depending on the institution type that you’re at that might not be among your highest talking points.

Drumm McNaughton: It’s also interesting because political polarization impacts this. This is one of the big, big things that have come out, the enrollment cliff. But when someone is looking– someone whose parents are making $40,000 a year and they take a look at the price tag for a college education, which in one year exceeds that $40,000 a year, and they look at going into debt, they don’t have the frame of reference to say, “Hey, if I go out and get the degree, I’m going to be making $60,000 a year.” They just don’t understand that. They haven’t had that experience. So going into debt is very scary for them, and that’s why I think a lot of them go, “Nope, not going to do this,” whereas it could help.

That’s one side of it. The other side of it is how do we as educators show the value and show the actual cost that it’s going to be? And I don’t think institutions are doing a good job with either of those.

Christa Acampora: Right.

[00:09:49] Truth in Pricing

Christa Acampora: And you’ve really hit the nail on the head there, Drum, I think with the, the family who is contemplating the stark reality that their basic household income maybe doesn’t even cover the cost of simply of a year of education for a young person they’re trying to support. Looking at that price tag and truth-telling in pricing is certainly something that has risen to the public’s attention, to the sector’s attention, and it might be one of the positive outcomes of some of the not insignificant turbulence that the sector’s experienced over the past, n-not just couple of years.

Really, it’s been building for decades. And I would expect that we’re going to begin to see increasingly pressure around accuracy in price so that students and their families and their supporters have a clear understanding of the… of the true cost for them of attending.

[00:11:03] Outcomes Beyond Earnings

Christa Acampora: I also think that we need to ensure that the public has access to good and robust actual information about outcomes for college graduates.

So at the same time that the, the public doubts about the cost and the price, we still know that college-educated young workers fare better than those who don’t attend college. And they not only fare better then entering the workforce, but over a lifetime. And the outcomes are not just that they have more money in their bank account.

They have a greater health and wellness, greater mental health outcomes. They actually live longer. And so we have to also make sure that we’re providing clear-eyed access to those real data.

Drumm McNaughton: Let’s take this a step further.

[00:12:07] Changing Student Demographics

Drumm McNaughton: Higher education, at least at the undergraduate level to what’s called a traditional student, 18 to 24 year old. But, right now the non-traditional, the older student is becoming more of the traditional. With that, there was three purposes for higher education: prepare you for a career, transform you, and do civic education, the Clark Care model of higher education. Things are changing now. They want more workforce development in there. Great.

[00:12:44] AI Meets Liberal Education

Drumm McNaughton: Now introduce AI into the equation, and a lot of the jobs that we’re, quote, “preparing for student- students for” are not even in existence. So how do you define AI through a liberal arts lens?

Christa Acampora: So artificial intelligence is a lot of different things. It’s a, it’s an umbrella term for a lot of different technologies.

[00:13:14] AI as Output Machine

Christa Acampora: The ones that are drawing the most significant attention, at least at this particular point in time, are the large language models, which are remarkably good and increasingly more successful at producing outputs, competent outputs.

Sometimes the outputs are more, are better, the products are better than some of the people around us and certainly better than some of our entering students. And I think observing that fact and enabling students, bringing them into observing that fact themselves can help to refocus us that it– We were never about creating good output makers, and this just makes sense from thinking about even back when we were most interested in, or at least talking about producing transferable skills.

We were never about producing good outputs, but we did set up a system that rewards students for competent output production. And now that AI is capable of doing that, it allows us to ask ourselves deeper questions about what was the purpose all along.

Drumm McNaughton: Yep.

[00:14:47] Bloom and Higher Skills

Drumm McNaughton: I liken it back to Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Christa Acampora: Mmmm.

Drumm McNaughton: Where you’ve got understanding and knowledge as your lower levels. You’ve got analysis and one other in the middle, and then you’ve got synthesis and evaluation in the upper levels. AI gives you knowledge and understanding. So what we’re needing to do is swap over how we approach using this knowledge.

How do we analyze it? How do we utilize it? And these are the type of skills that AAC&U talks about with critical thinking, data analysis, drawing conclusions, et cetera. To me, that’s how higher ed in an AI age and liberal arts needs to be more focused.

Christa Acampora: Absolutely. And so I think AI hasn’t broken education. It’s just dissolved a substitute that we mistook for it, and it’s forcing out into the open a real question, and that is what is an education for?

[00:16:01] Learning to Adapt

Christa Acampora: And you can see employers arriving at a similar place from the other direction. So the World Economic Forum recently surveyed global chief people officers this year, and the top priority wasn’t training people in specific skills.

It was redesigning the work itself, and the constraint they named most wasn’t supply of talent, it was matching. Finding people with judgment who can adapt.

Drumm McNaughton: Agreed.

Christa Acampora: So a Federal Reserve economist looked at the graduate data. He put it plainly, “The durable value of a degree is the ability to learn and build new skills, and that matters more as AI accelerates, not less.”

So it’s that ability to learn, becoming a learner, becoming someone who is curious, capable, interested, eager to connect, eager to understand, can be moved by wonder. These are distinctively human capabilities and helping people across all kinds of ages because human beings can learn for all their lives.

Drumm McNaughton: We hope.

Christa Acampora: That’s the purpose of an education.

[00:17:26] Veterans as Learners

Christa Acampora: I recently had a fantastic experience. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Warrior Project, but it takes service members who are either continuing with their service or have concluded their service and supports them in transitioning into institutions of higher education.

And the, the organization has partnered with some, some truly phenomenal universities. And so you get– you encounter people who are wanting to access higher education from 22 years old to 56 years old, a full spectrum of learners. And the way that they come at questions certainly comes from a different set of experiences and opportunities that they’ve had, but the thirst for the opportunity and the possibility remains very much the same.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes. Yeah, that’s a great example. Thank you, Christa.

[00:18:34] Practical Liberal Arts Value

Drumm McNaughton: I want to get into a little bit of the rubber meets the road, the value proposition. AI gives knowledge, but it’s important that we transform the capacities into capabilities. How do… let’s go down and get into the real practical perspectives of why a liberal arts education is important.

Christa Acampora: Sure. I’ll come at it from the high level again, but then I want to be responsive to that question about specifically what does this look like and also what exactly is it that we’re promising? So the deeper aim, I think, is a transformational experience, as we have discussed. It’s about developing human agency, judgment, and civic capacity.

It’s about cultivating wisdom, which is not knowing the answer in advance, and developing a level of comfort in that fact of not knowing the answer in advance, but also then the capabilities of moving beyond that in situations that in fact can’t be scripted. A machine can hand a student some information and even the semblance of some wisdom, but it can’t supply the substance.

And again, I think that’s because producing the output was never really the purpose. I also want to focus on what I think AI could cost us if we’re not careful.

Drumm McNaughton: Excuse me, I’m going to interrupt you here. It seems to me like going that path, you’re teaching people how to think, how to look at a problem critically, how to use discrimination and judgment, and not having the answer is okay, but having the faith that you will in fact get to the answer if you move down a certain path.

Is that what you’re saying?

Christa Acampora: Absolutely. And, lots of people say it is about teaching them how to think, not what to think, and I think that for sure is important. The thinking part of it is interesting, and I really love you’ve got so much experience talking to hundreds of people about this, and I imagine that the subject of critical thinking is something that you’ve addressed in lots of different contexts on your show.

Whether or not we teach thinking, I think is a serious question that we have to ask ourselves. It sounds good to a philosopher. It sounds right. Sounds exactly like what we should be doing. But I do think there’s something we’ve missed and something that we’ve overlooked, and it is what I’m going to try to help my colleagues think about quite seriously with me in the coming year.

[00:21:54] Making Thinking Visible

Christa Acampora: And that is this: when we say we’re teaching students how to think, and the broad, capacious ways that this gets expressed across the disciplines, the fields, the professions, are we helping them observe the moments when that happens? And are we helping them define and articulate the features of human thought that are so important and powerful?

Because if we’re not helping students identify that and that growth in themselves, we might not be able to recruit them into their own learning.

Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. Good, very good point. I was talking with another gentleman who does online education mostly for adult learners, and one of the things that they do at– Just happens to be the University of Florida. No competition there, really. SEC. Wait a minute, isn’t UVA part of the SEC now? I’m sorry. Anyway, in thinking about this, they go into a course and there’s course learning outcomes, is what you’re supposed to do.

Now we’re starting to get to the real practical stuff. What they do is get people to write a paper on the course learning outcomes as their final paper and say, “Okay, what did I learn and how did I learn it in this particular course, and how did I apply it?” And that brings that full circle back to being able to observe your own learning.

It may not be in the moment, but it’s like, “Oh yeah, we got this.” Does that make sense to you?

Christa Acampora: It absolutely does, and I think it, that reflection piece at the end, the reflection and digestion is it’s a really powerful way of assessing at the end of a course. I do think that the sector of higher education specifically needs to do this work, but it probably means we also have a lot to learn from the broader sector of education, which maybe is not how we usually think about these things.

And that is giving name to the dimensions of human thinking that we can capture. We may not always teach to them explicitly, and that’s, I think, is something that we need to name and own. We have to meet the student as an individual because it is about their individual formation, and we have to teach them about how to recognize, how to identify what are the capacities that they have to think, to imagine, to wonder, to empathize and connect, and then recognize the moments when they’re getting attached to capabilities for judgment, discernment, discrimination in the way that we talk about it in terms of understanding, as you just mentioned.

That’s the learning that we need to be teaching students to recognize in themselves and to understand is the most valuable thing that they can acquire during their time at the university.

Drumm McNaughton: And to me, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a liberal art education, a STEM education, these skills have to go across all of them. My listeners have heard me say multiple times, I went to the Naval Academy. I was a physics major, but we had multiple liberal arts courses throughout there. I took political science, I took law, tort law, multiple, multiple courses that made me think about subjects differently other than here’s the formula that I need to solve this physics problem or this math problem or whatever.

It made me think on a different way and a broader scale. And to me, that’s the purpose of education, is to learn how to think, to learn, the transformational aspects of it.

Christa Acampora: Absolutely, and you you’re right on the mark there, Drumm. It’s not just the liberal arts that do this. All, all learning done well centers on precisely that.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes.

[00:26:36] UVA First Year Experience

Drumm McNaughton: So what are you doing at UVA that makes this so special for your students and your faculty for that matter?

Christa Acampora: Absolutely. So, we are supporting our faculty and our students in all kinds of ways. There are two things I would point out as concrete and specific examples of that, Drumm. The first is our first-year undergraduate student learning experience. This is not just a seminar for first-year students on how to go to college.

These are substantive courses. Students take them in series, so they take four of these courses across an academic year. They are only taking these courses with fellow first-year students, and they’re small for a large public university. They’re small classes on the order of 35 students or so. And each of them is organized around a big question, and these are big human questions.

They happen to be questions that the liberal arts and sciences themselves focus on most specifically, but to your point, they’re found in all kinds of professional fields and human endeavors, such as what is truth and why does it matter? What is beauty? How do we deal with complexity? And so introducing students into the wonder and discovery of the liberal arts by connecting with them as a learner right from the very beginning.

[00:28:12] Commonplace Book Tool

Christa Acampora: And we also utilize an instrument, a pedagogical apparatus, if you will, to help students catch those moments, as I was just describing. It’s called The Commonplace Book. Commonplace book was a, I guess an artifact of the second century, collects thoughts and ideas and questions that a student might have.

So it’s not just a keepsake, and it’s not just a diary. We’re trying to teach students how to capture and reflect on their own learning through that. So that’s example one.

[00:28:51] AI Literacy Action Lab

Christa Acampora: Example two is an AI literacy and action lab. This came to life as a joint venture from the college and the library here at UVA, where we’re supporting our faculty in teaching and students in learning somewhat differently.

So through the lab, one of our English professors rebuilt an entire writing course around AI and the feedback that it could and couldn’t get. And the lesson wasn’t use the tool, and it also wasn’t “ban the tool”. It was that some learning objectives are served well by AI and some are perhaps collapse under it.

And we need faculty who can tell the difference and design for it. So the AI literacy and action lab is a place where students are able to encounter, in a critical way, the ways in which AI can serve their academic purposes and their learning purposes, as well as how to evaluate its outcomes.

Drumm McNaughton: Interesting. That reminds me of a course at American University, Kogod School of Business. It’s a marketing course, and there is no textbook. The professor gives them AI prompts, and they have specific tasks that they need to do that are applicable real world, like developing a marketing plan, being able to evaluate the outputs from the marketing plan, what’s happening.

It sounds similar to what you’re talking about. It’s using AI, but not for just knowledge. There’s an application there as well.

Christa Acampora: Absolutely. It– that, that sounds like a fantastic course. In a similar sort of vein, I have a chemistry professor who’s using AI in a similar way to give students the experience of tapping into and discovering the scientific method by using AI and the feedback that they get from it, rather than simply giving them the specific protocols or steps.

So students are, in some respects in that class, discovering the scientific method, but for themselves.

[00:31:18] Course Design With AI

Drumm McNaughton: So in, wrapping this up How does AI change the thought process that goes into developing a course and assuming that the outputs of the education are to train students on not what to think, but how to think?

Christa Acampora: So I do think that we can’t ignore AI. It’s not going away. Our students are using it every day and not in ways that we should necessarily assume is suspect. I once a week gather students around my dinner table for a full table conversation. We do it in a tradition that here at the University of Virginia we call Jeffersonian dinners.

And so I get to hear from them directly, firsthand, their experiences with AI and how they’re thinking about it, and they’re genuinely concerned and eager to understand the ways in which AI contributes to their own learning and ways in which it can be an impediment to it. So I’ve observed students themselves tell me that, “Oh, AI is great for X,” and usually it’s in a biology class and helping them practice do they know how a different part of the body works and can they describe it, and it can give them immediate feedback.

So it’s like a, a tutor of sorts. It’s strengthening their knowledge. But they’re understandably also very anxious about judging the quality of AI outputs and also accusations that perhaps their use of AI is impermissible in some sort of way. So I think we have to give students real educational experiences with these tools so that they’re developing literacy about how to use it, even as the tools themselves are very likely to be changing.

We observe even in just a couple months’ time, changes in those capabilities. But the critical skills for assessing them, those are durable or at least somewhat lasting, and we owe it to our students to help them make those connections.

Drumm McNaughton: Well thank you. That’s a, a great summation for all this, so thank you so much.

[00:34:03] Three Takeaways for Higher Education Presidents and Governing Boards

Drumm McNaughton: As we always do, we wrap up with our two questions. Three takeaways for presidents and governing boards. What do they need to keep in mind with respect to a liberal education? Not liberal arts, but a liberal education in the age of AI.

Christa Acampora: First I think we have to stop thinking about higher education in terms that are crumbling underneath us when we talk about transferable skills. We’re competing with a machine that now performs those tasks, and we’re conceding that the output was the point. I do think that leaders and governing boards need to come to understand that the purpose of education is about formation, both for the individual, but also for society.

The very same features that form a capable individual are the features that are forming a capable civic, set of civic and social conditions. So that’s critical. We can’t lose sight of that. And I also think we need to keep two things separate that keep getting confused. The public’s doubt is about cost, and cost is a real problem that we have to fix, and transparency of the actual cost, but that’s not the same as value.

I do think that our leaders in particular need to make the case and with confidence, not apology about that value proposition. And then I’d say we have to make the formation visible. The value that I’m here championing today was always real, but not necessarily visible, and our failure has been leaving it to reveal itself years later to a lucky few.

We need to focus on the pedagogy and the instruments that let a student see herself grow capable. And we need to provide that early and often. That’s the difference between assuming our worth and demonstrating it.

Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Thank you. Great takeaways.

[00:36:18] What’s Next and Closing

Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for you?

Christa Acampora: Ah, well, what’s next for me is turning this from an argument or a set of philosophers’ talking points into some evidence. And so it’s easy to assert that education forms people harder. More important is to actually demonstrate it, as I suggested a few minutes ago, to build proof that a family, a legislator, and a skeptic can see.

So I’m focused on making formation visible at scale, on gathering the evidence that the case deserves, and on continuing to write and think in public about what higher education is for at exactly the moment when the question has been forced open. I came to this as a philosopher, and it’s the question I most want to keep answering.

Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Well, Christa, thanks so much for being on the program. I’ve enjoyed our conversation very much, and I wish you all the best going forward.

Christa Acampora: Thank you so much, Drumm. I really appreciated it.

Drumm McNaughton: Take care.

Christa Acampora: You too.

Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today, and a special thank you to my guest, Dr. Christa Acampora. Christa, thanks for being on the show. I enjoyed our conversation very much, and I look forward to the next time our paths cross.

To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. See you next week.