Reclaiming Purpose

Foreword

For years, we have watched higher education's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century foundations strain against the weight of modern learners whose lives, expectations, and futures no longer match the world for which our institutions were built. As a result, public confidence has waned, governments have intervened where they have seen internal leadership wanting, and concerns about affordability and value have signaled to many students that college is not for them.

For more than a decade, I have worked alongside Paul LeBlanc to confront these issues. In reform efforts, policy initiatives, and our work at the American Council on Education (ACE), we have wrestled with how best to help higher education meet the needs of individuals and society. We have tried to be equally skeptical both of desires to return to “the good old days” (whenever those were) and of the overwrought promises of various innovations to usher in a new era without fuss or friction.

Reclaiming Purpose seeks to provide readers with a careful and inspiring view of how the purposeful use of artificial intelligence (AI) can simultaneously free higher education from the limiting structures of the recent past and restore ideas and challenges that have informed higher education for centuries. Simply put, it posits that AI can recenter and reinvigorate a system that has too often confused transmitting knowledge with transforming learners.

At the heart of this work is a deceptively simple insight: higher education's ...