HigherEd Series: Can AI Help Higher Education Find Its Purpose Again? With Paul LeBlanc of Southern New Hampshire University

Paul LeBlanc is the former president of Southern New Hampshire University, the largest non-profit provider of online higher education in the country. His new book, Reclaiming Purpose: The University in an AI World, examines how higher education can respond proactively to leverage the rise of artificial intelligence and reconnect to its essential task of helping students discover lives of purpose. 

Hosted by Matthew Rascoff
This episode is part of the Edtech Insiders HigherEd Podcast Series, featuring conversations with leaders shaping the future of higher education.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:

1. How AI could reshape higher education and work
2. Why human connection will remain central to learning
3. The evolving role of teachers in an AI-powered classroom
4. Why human-centered skills and the liberal arts may make a comeback
5. How universities can help shape a better AI future

✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:06:02] How AI is reshaping work and learning
[00:08:39] AI as the next chapter of the digital revolution
[00:24:02] Why human relationships matter in learning
[00:25:00] Rethinking the role of teachers
[00:42:05] Gen Z’s growing AI backlash
[00:49:05] What if AI goes “radically right”?

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Transcript

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[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: Innovation in pre-K to grade learning is powered by exceptional people. For over 15 years, Edtech companies of all sizes and stages have trusted Higher Education to find the talent that drives impact. When specific skills and experiences are mission-critical, Higher Education is a partner that delivers.

Offering permanent, fractional, and executive recruitment, Higher Education knows the go-to-market talent you need. Learn more at hireedu.com. That's H-I-R-E-E-D-U.com. 

[00:00:33] Paul LeBlanc: But they do a very interesting thing. They don't do what we usually do, which is we rethink a system, we apply technology and design everywhere we can, and then we tolerate as much human cost and engagement as we have to, right?

And when I wrote Broken, I interviewed people like Xander Packard, who created Medical One. It was called something different at the time. But he started with a different question. He said, what are the most impactful human interactions and relationships? How do I hold that ground sacred and then use technology to scale the hell out of everything else and make my business model work?

And that's what we in many ways did at SNHU.

[00:01:16] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to Edtech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry. From funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood, K-12, higher ed, and work, you'll find it all here at Edtech Insiders. 

[00:01:32] Ben Kornell: Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar.

And to go deeper, check out Edtech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content, access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and back-channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.

[00:01:56] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to the Edtech Insiders Higher Education Series hosted by Matthew Rascoff. Matthew is an education innovation leader, a Stanford lecturer, and a regular guest on our podcast, whose work focuses on expanding access to knowledge and opportunity through digital learning. In this series, he speaks with leaders shaping the future of higher education.

We hope you enjoy the conversations 

[00:02:20] Matthew Rascoff: Welcome everybody. This is Matthew Rascoff with a special miniseries of Edtech Insiders with a special guest today, Paul LeBlanc, President Emeritus of Southern New Hampshire University and author of a new book on reclaiming purpose. So glad to have you here, Paul.

Thanks so much for being with us and with this audience. And we've got about forty-five minutes together. I would love to hear a little bit about the book, but before we do, maybe you can just bring us up to date on what you've been up to since you stepped down as president of Southern New Hampshire, and you've been doing all sorts of interesting things in the private sector and at Harvard teaching as well.

So give us a little bit of a life update beyond the official bio that we might find from Southern New Hampshire. 

[00:03:06] Paul LeBlanc: Well, thank you so much, Matthew, for having me. First of all, it's always a pleasure to see you and to be in this conversation. And what a time to be having these conversations. I mean, the world is changing so fast in such profound ways, both exhilarating and sometimes terrifying.

So I stepped down in June of '24 from my role at president of Southern New Hampshire University after twenty-one years, so it was a long run and a wonderful run. And I can show you, but I even have the SNHU logo tattooed on my arm as a last final act of loyalty and love. So really proud of the time we had there.

And so for a little while, I headed up a company called Matter in Space. This was SNHU funded, doing this with my good partner, George Siemens, and a really talented team. And we set out to build the spirit of my friend Clay Christensen, a kind of disruptive play, which is: what if we were unencumbered by any constraints?

We had a clean sheet of paper, and we could build a new platform for learning. What would it look like? And that work was going along with lots of challenges and interesting questions and getting some things right and getting some things wrong. And then September of last year, SNHU looked at where we were, and as our funder and sort of control of the board, they said, "You know, we really not sure we do want to commercialize this.

We want to bring it internally and keep developing it within SNHU." So they made that decision, not one I agreed with, but their authority to do it. And George and many of the team are still working on it, and that's happening over there. We can come back to that if you like. But to go to your question, there's sort of three buckets since that, that have emerged.

So one, I'm a visiting faculty member, visiting professor at Harvard Grad School of Ed, and teaching a course this fall on how to invent a new university in the age of AI, and that's great fun, and working on some really great projects with colleagues at Harvard. Second bucket is I have a small team, there's seven of us, and we have a small company that's working on building a platform that would power a new university Matter of Space was just about learning.

This is a broader, more ambitious, uh, play, which is can we stand up a new university? And that's being funded by a global university system based in the UK. And we are actually starting the approval process to-- government approval process to launch a university in the UK, which will look very different.

So again, we may wanna come back to that. And then the third bucket, Matthew, is a series of consulting advising engagements with universities that are trying to figure it out. And the beauty of this is that in those second and third buckets, I get to play in a space that says, "What if we could have a clean sheet of paper?"

And in that third bucket, I get to, how do we work with universities that are thinking about how do we change and evolve in this fast-changing time? So I get a little bit of a sustaining innovation question, if I can use Clay's language, and a little bit of an innovation-- disruptive innovation question with the other-- with my team.

[00:05:51] Matthew Rascoff: What did you see in 2023 that your presidential colleagues across higher education did not see that motivated you to found that company and to jump? 

[00:06:02] Paul LeBlanc: Yeah. So It was easier for me in '23, not in a presidential role, to see and act in ways that I did. And I think probably many of my colleagues were seeing the same thing, but their ability to act upon it was quite constrained.

So I don't want to pretend or presume to have a particular insight, but I am in the camp that thinks with the advent of generative AI, the whole world changes. Like you mentioned, a fire level of change. What I saw in that moment was a couple of things. One is I thought that the whole nature of work would be redefined, changed, and we can come back to what my theory of workforce is and where I think it's going and other competing theories.

The other one I thought was like, we're gonna reinvent learning in important ways, paradigmatic ways, and we come back to that. And the third was, I have a tool now that'll allow me to democratize learning and bring it to places where high quality post-secondary doesn't exist or is not very much within reach.

You may know, Matthew, that when I was at SNHU, some of the work of which I'm most proud was in Africa and the Middle East with refugee populations. I literally just had an email exchange with one of those students who's still in a camp. The average stay in a camp is twenty-one years. So those are the things like the world is gonna change, but especially workforce.

Learning is going to change, and the business models will change, and the technology will change in ways that allow me to reach people who are deeply underserved. So those are the three big drivers of my work since then. 

[00:07:35] Matthew Rascoff: Thank you. That's great. And congratulations on, I mean, the insights and your ability to act on them, because I do think that requires a certain amount of courage.

It's the combination of those two things. It's the knowledge- But 

[00:07:46] Paul LeBlanc: really- 

[00:07:46] Matthew Rascoff: And also the becoming. 

[00:07:49] Paul LeBlanc: Thank you. But it's easy to be courageous when you're not leading a university. Like I don't have to like worry about how my staff and faculty will respond. So I had it easier in some ways. I was freer to have those thoughts, let's put it that way.

[00:08:00] Matthew Rascoff: So I think it's pretty unusual to be a humanist who becomes the president of the largest online university or the largest university period in America And your early work, your dissertation, I think was about the printing press, right? 

[00:08:14] Paul LeBlanc: It was about technologies that- 

[00:08:17] Matthew Rascoff: I mean, you compare AI to the printing press rather than the internet.

You think like it's that level of scale of impact. The printing press brought on the Reformation. It brought on- 

[00:08:27] Paul LeBlanc: It did. 

[00:08:27] Matthew Rascoff: So do you think we have a technological revolution that is gonna bring on political change and economic change on the scale of the printing press, like Reformation-level political change?

[00:08:39] Paul LeBlanc: Hundred percent. And I think it's not AI. It's actually we're in the third chapter of a revolution, a technology revolution that's been going on since the '70s. And here I'm calling on someone who's inspired so much of my work, which is Carlota Perez, who's a Venezuelan British economist who studies technology revolutions.

Highly recommend her work. She's in her late 80s now. We do correspond a little bit by email. And in her study of technology revolutions-- We can talk about that. Let me first answer your question. She would say the digitization, digital computing was chapter one of this revolution. Chapter two was connectivity, and that already those two things changed the world.

You think about the impacts of social media, the internet on commerce, on our politics, and the state of the world today, on the state, you know, impacts on young people and so on. The third chapter is AI, and that might be the most powerful one. That's the one that we can talk about why, but that's already impacting us in enormous ways.

She doesn't argue this. I argue there's a fourth that's being written, which is quantum. And a lot of people-- So who knows how fast or how slow it'll take us to get there. Taken in total, the digital revolution is the revolution. We are in the third chapter of that. And these transitions often take fifty years or more to play out.

This one's taking longer for a variety of reasons. We are early in what is going to be, in my view, in her view, a pretty painful transition time. 

[00:10:08] Matthew Rascoff: And what do you think that looks like? I mean, the book talks about economic change really, primarily, more than political change, but what is the pain? Describe that a bit.

[00:10:17] Paul LeBlanc: So let me, let me frame it as Carlota does kind of generally what we-- one sees, and then talk about this specifically. So in her book, Technological Revolutions and Capital Markets, I think is the title. Very boring sounding title, utterly worth reading. So I'd highly recommend to all your listeners, Matthew.

But what she would say is these transitions are typically they're displacing, right? Like people lose their footing. And the things you typically see, what characterizes them historically, massive wealth inequity, rise of monopolies, rise of strongmen, dictators, leaders, because people start to want someone who says they can make America great again, right?

Fourth would be rise of populism. By the way, stop me if any of these don't sound familiar. Like all of these are out-- happening writ large in the world, not just in the US, but globally. Increase in the number of wars. All of these things are true right now. And what she says, if you look at it historically, is that something finally breaks.

It's often an economic bubble. It's often a-- disasters tied to that revolution. And then the state has to step in and reinsert itself and take control, but not as the state was designed for the old world, but the state reimagined for the new world. That's one. And two, Carlota argues that it has to answer a question anew.

And the question it has to answer is: what does a good life look like for our people? So let me give you a concrete illustration of this, and it's one taken from a conversation with her. If you had told people in the midst of the Great Depression, let's say 1935, when there was population displacement, there was environmental disaster in the form of the Great Dust Bowl, there were breadlines, there was malnutrition, massive unemployment rate wiping out of enormous value in the markets, and so on and so on.

If you had said, "Hey, Matthew, I know it's hard to believe, but in just twenty years, America's gonna be reinvented in ways you'll scarcely believe. There's gonna be this thing called the suburbs, and you're gonna live in your own home, and having a car in your driveway won't be an odd thing. And there'll be this thing called the GI Bill, and your kids can go to college.

You could go to college if you served. We'll have more universities opening up. There'll be whole new jobs that we don't know about today, with something called the Interstate Highway System. And by the way, California, I know you know, you won't believe how cool California is. It's gonna have the aerospace industry, this thing called Disneyland."

Like, right? And if you had said that to somebody in 1935 that this would happen in just twenty years, they would have thought you were insane. Like, what around them could possibly lead to that? And I think we're at that period. We're in a period of enormous strife, enormous fear, enormous backlash. A lot of people believe we're about to go into an economic bubble, that this- 

[00:13:10] Matthew Rascoff: Mm-hmm

[00:13:11] Paul LeBlanc: massive, unprecedented investment in AI is not gonna sustain. I don't know, I'm not an economist. And then we'll probably have some AI disasters. And you certainly see massive fear around security. We've had water systems tested. The Five Eyes agency, which is the informal spy collaborative, has issued dire warnings.

Central banks are calling emergency meetings around this. And a Trump administration, which was absolutely and reflexively against any kind of regulation of AI, is now saying, "Time out. We get to review these new models first, and we're gonna impose export controls," which have never been done on software, by the way.

Export controls were all about hardware. So I think we're in that transition that you described so beautifully. So here's the bad news, and then I want to get to the good news, 'cause my book is, at the end of the day, optimistic, which is that we're in the earthquake, and you have to survive the earthquake, and that's a hard one.

The reality is between '35 and 1955, you had World War II, right? You had massive global suffering before we could come through the earthquake. But if you survived the earthquake, you entered into a new world And on the other side of that world, we've always, always had a new golden age. And I think the questions we ask today about what does a good life look like, and what is the role of a university, and how can AI help drive that new good life, that new world order, are the ones we should be asking even as we struggle through the transition.

Like the conversation we should be having today is when we get on the other side of this, what do we want to see? What do we want it to look like? So one simple answer would be, especially we all feel it in Europe and America right now, we want to live on a planet whose climate's not trying to kill us.

Seems like a pretty basic, the really bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like I want to live in a place that nourishes human life. I actually think that AI may be the one tool that allows us to get there because nothing else we're doing right now is working, right? So just as we're seeing massive breakthroughs in medicine, I hope we see massive breakthroughs in energy, in clean energy, right?

That we can harness AI to help us do that. And the irony, of course, is that it's actually making our environmental situation worse in the short term, and my hope is that it's better in the long term. So these are the things that at the like fifty-thousand-foot level, as a society, we need to be figuring this out.

I'm sorry, this is a long answer to your short question, but I have to say one last thing about this. This is the work of universities. 

[00:15:42] Matthew Rascoff: Yeah. 

[00:15:42] Paul LeBlanc: Like we are in a defensive crouch. We've been felt under attack. We've done it to ourselves in many ways. Universities feel like they're beleaguered, and they are. We are the one entity in society that's built for answering that question of what could it look like on the other side.

[00:15:57] Matthew Rascoff: I want to get to that, but before we do, in the 1930s, there was one thinker who was mapping out that future, and it was John Maynard Keynes, and he wrote the essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, about a kind of utopian future. From the depths of the Depression, he was writing about a utopian future in which technology would change people's lives fundamentally for the better.

His vision for it was that we would work less, that we would put technology to work to give ourselves a sort of aristocratic life. Everybody would have that freedom, and it would allow us to be creative, it would allow us to be exploratory, it would give us intellectual and personal freedom from work.

Your book maps out a very different utopian future around this idea of care and the care economy, and it sounds like you think work is much more fundamental to human identity and there's no goal to cut it out, but it's more about reimagining it and what we do with this human potential. So how would you write economic possibilities for your own grandchild, to whom the book is, is dedicated, your eighteen-month-old grandchild?

Tell us your future for twenty, thirty, however many years out you think this might be. 

[00:17:04] Paul LeBlanc: Yeah. So I don't think-- You've said this, I think you alluded to this in the past, like I'm not convinced that work is the key to our sense of meaning in the world. I'm not sure that isn't the kind of bit of capitalist propaganda to keep us all thinking about work and our jobs.

I think the reality is people find-- derive massive meaning from a lot of things that isn't their work. That said, there is a camp that thinks jobs won't go away so much, but they will be substantially reshaped. And that's a complicated, big, massive trauma to the workforce. So even the most conservative people, that's a conservative view, my-- in the spectrum, are saying this is gonna be a massive change.

On the other end of the spectrum, you've got the Dreesen Manifesto, you've got people like Bill Gates who believe humans don't have to work, so the-- whether not at all or far less. And then I'm in the middle camp, and like Emma... Emma, is that his name? Of the University of Chicago economist who's now at DeepMind.

He's the first chief AGI economist, I think. I've never heard that title before. Alison Pugh at Hopkins. We all argue some version of human-centered relational jobs. We have a slightly different l-lens on that topic. So my thinking about this is that we actually-- we have no lack of need for jobs that we don't want AI to do.

AI won't displace all jobs. In my view, it will displace white-collar jobs. It will do to knowledge economy work, finance work, tech work, what automation did to blue-collar work. So where will all that talent go? I think it's gonna go to those jobs where we want humans to be in the front. Doesn't mean they won't be aided or supported by AI, but I don't want a robot comforting my child, or Simon, when he skins his knee on the playground.

Right? I don't wanna have a robot AI chatbot conversation with my physician when I've had a very scary, terrible diagnosis. I want my mental health counseling. I want geriatric care. We have such a need for these jobs. Healthcare systems are screaming for talent. We need forty million new teachers globally by twenty thirty.

The problem today is that we don't like to pay for those jobs, and we try to sort of, in a very efficiency-minded way, get as many human beings out of the mix as possible. That's one of those great flips that I think will have to happen in this transition. And when you pay people reasonably well and you support them, those jobs make people feel really fulfilled.

Like teachers are called to that work. Caregivers are called to that work. We then burn them out and mistreat them And if you think about the work they do, they lift up other human beings. They make people's lives better, which makes society better. That's a great calling. It's just not what we value today.

We don't value humanity in a sense in our workforce. 

[00:19:47] Matthew Rascoff: So what about Baumol's cost disease, which says that those are exactly the jobs, because they don't have productivity gains, whose costs will always go up faster than inflation, faster than overall costs, and therefore they will always become uneconomic.

At some point, the whole economy will just be teachers and nurses, and there'll be nothing left, and how will we pay for that? 

[00:20:09] Paul LeBlanc: Accountants and social workers, et cetera. So the people who would argue for the abundance manifesto would say, "Not a problem. We are gonna have so much wealth, and you don't have to worry about housing, you don't have to worry about food, you don't have to worry about medicine."

I mean, this is literally the argument that's being made, that we have to start rethinking the economics of productivity efficiency. These are industrial age models, Taylor-inspired models. So that's one notion. Another is that you are now hearing serious conversations about treating AI as sovereign wealth, as a sovereign asset, the way Norway treats oil.

Mm-hmm. So the reality is we start to redistribute wealth in very-- not through taxes, because that preserves the existing system, but through a fundamental... You could argue, I kind of hope this is true, that this is in some ways the end of late-stage capitalism as we've come to know it in the US, that we do in fact towards a different kind of economic model, one that in fact looks closer to Norway.

There are lots of ways of thinking about how we pay for this, and the measure of success may not be efficiency. The measure of success may be quality of human life, quality of human society, right? I wrote about this in my book, Broken. There are scaled systems of care that have overcome Baumol's law, but they do a very interesting thing.

They don't do what we usually do, which is we rethink a system, we apply technology and design everywhere we can, and then we tolerate as much human cost and engagement as we have to Right? And when I wrote Broken, I interviewed people like Xander Packard, who created Medical One. It was called something different at the time.

But he started with a different question. He said, "What are the most impactful human interactions and relationships? How do I hold that ground sacred and then use technology to scale the hell out of everything else and make my business model work?" And that's what we in many ways did at SNHU. 

[00:22:00] Matthew Rascoff: And that sounds like that's kind of your vision for higher education, which has been historically the main focus, I think, of Baumol's cost disease.

I mean, that's-- it's been the target, let's say- 

[00:22:10] Paul LeBlanc: Yeah ... 

[00:22:11] Matthew Rascoff: by critics who point to the way tuition has gone up faster than the rate of inflation. All of our costs seem to be subject to it, but you're making a case that there's actually a huge role for technology to drive productivity in higher education.

That's part of how you drove down costs at, at Southern New Hampshire. So maybe let's turn to higher ed, and maybe you can tell us, it sounds like you think higher ed is going to be the midwife of this new economy, of this new care system. It's going to be the enablers of it. Yet it itself is struggling with these same dilemmas.

Like, what is the role of humans in technology? You could ask that about higher education perhaps more than any other industry. It's asking this question of itself. So how is it going to be the steward of some new system if it, it itself does not have its own house in order with respect to what humans do and what technology does?

[00:23:02] Paul LeBlanc: So in part, no one has their house in order, including most of corporate America, right? Everyone is struggling to think through what is this new configuration of human and machine? Where does it make the most sense? There's a lot of evidence that companies that are deploying AI aggressively are not seeing a right return on ROI.

There's a counterargument that says that's because they're bolting AI on existing workflows, which is like kind of bolting a rocket engine on a buggy. Like, you gotta sort of rethink the whole thing. We can come back to that. So I do think in a couple of ways, Matthew, that are really important, and I'm not minimizing what a challenge it is for institutions to move through this transformation.

A lot of them won't. A lot of them will face-- The headwinds will be too strong. They'll lack political will. I was talking to my friend Alison Bailey, who heads up talent culture at BCG, and she said, "When we look at these transformations, it's ten percent data, it's fifteen percent technology, it's seventy-five percent tap humans and culture."

[00:24:02] Alex Sarlin: And 

[00:24:02] Paul LeBlanc: those are the hardest things to change. So let's not minimize how hard it is, but what could it look like if it started to change? So for me, it begins with the human relationship question. What are the most important human relationships? And I tend to think of the relationship of an educator or a learning coach, I don't want to get stuck on rigidly defined roles, but some human that's working with you are the following.

One is that we know that relationship is sort of the active ingredient in learning, right? So a lot of things go into learning, but at the end of the day, it's the relationship of a student and a teacher or a learner or a tutor or an advisor that really makes it work for that student. Why? Because it's a human relationship that makes you feel like you matter.

There's interesting research by my colleague, Tessa Forshaw, we were just on a call this morning. She's a cognitive scientist at the Harvard Grad School of Ed. And she was saying that the work that's now being done on dialogic tutoring is that people get cognitive overload so quickly. Why? You love having conversations with a human.

How long can you sustain that conversation with an AI tutor? It's depleting, right? So the human relationship is really critical. So I argue in the book that we're gonna rethink the role of teachers, and we're gonna let AI do knowledge transfer, and we're gonna have teachers using classroom time really in the role of kind of curators of community, of relationship, group work, enrichment, challenge, hypotheticals, right?

It's gonna be like close the laptops And be human in that time together. But if you are a teacher today and you think your value is knowledge transfer, you're about to be outdone by AI, which does better knowledge transfer now, I would argue, than most humans. 

[00:25:41] Matthew Rascoff: And how do you coach faculty through that?

Like, they were trained in a system of knowledge transfer, and you're asking them to become learning coaches. How do you do that? 

[00:25:51] Paul LeBlanc: Yeah. So the best ones already do it. The reality is that if you were to name the teachers who have the most transformational impact on your life, I'll bet you can name them without even thinking about it.

And when you describe it, it's not 'cause they were great at teaching. It's mostly because they knew you as a human being, they gave you their time, you felt like you mattered to them. Absolutely. Mr. Schlap in sixth grade, Mrs. Collins in high school, Dr. Heinemann as an undergrad. So we have teachers who exemplify that today.

When you look at people who have tried to move this kind of change, they always have to realign the reward and recognition systems. What gets, you know-- So the reality is today that in so much of higher ed, you are not recognized and rewarded for your relationship to your students. Scholarship, research, a whole lot of other things, but that is not primary.

So you have to start thinking about that. You have to start thinking about how you hire and train. It's like any cultural change, really hard, and I think there's gonna be massive resistance. I was talking to a colleague who's near retirement, and when I made this argument to him, he said, "I'm not a goddamn social worker."

Like- 

[00:26:56] Matthew Rascoff: Right. "

[00:26:57] Paul LeBlanc: I don't want that relationship with my students." Like- 

[00:26:59] Matthew Rascoff: Yeah. "

[00:26:59] Paul LeBlanc: They're, they're pains in the neck. I wanna talk about X." 

[00:27:02] Matthew Rascoff: Yeah. 

[00:27:02] Paul LeBlanc: I was like, "It's a good thing you're retiring soon, my friend." 

[00:27:06] Matthew Rascoff: So Ian Bogost had a piece in The Atlantic a couple of months ago saying that liberal arts colleges were the future model because they invest in these relationships, they always have done, and they don't have grad students to distract the faculty from building those connections with their undergraduates.

But you built Southern New Hampshire and saw the platform economics at work. You saw economies of scale. The more technology we have, the more those benefits will accrue to large players, and we'll have a kind of oligopoly in higher education. So where do you think we're headed? Are we headed towards more smaller colleges, more pluralistic, more driven by values, and you can select for those values perhaps in a relationship with instructors?

Or does it look more like With SNHU and even more extreme, perhaps maybe we'll have a million student universities. Where, where are we headed in terms of higher eds economics? 

[00:27:56] Paul LeBlanc: Yeah. So I think from a, just a sheer like resources already the way they build their business models, the marketing footprint, the large scale players have a very distinct advantage right now.

If I think about what are the things that we will educate for in the future and how we will get there, they start to have a disadvantage. In fact, if you think about, like, I just wrote a piece for Washington Monthly, which is about to come out for their admissions issue, and I argued that if you are really-- and this is a sort of letter to parents who are thinking about their students in the future.

I would say, you know, don't bet on a job, bet on a sector. So if you're betting on, I want to be a graphic artist, I don't know. Accountant, I don't know. If you say, "Hey, I want to be in the world of the creative arts," then let's take a look at programs that'll help you to be a creator, and it's a higher level cognitive framing.

And if you look at it closely, the things that everyone seems to agree that are going to be valuable in the age of AI, these distinctly human attributes of, let's call them capacities rather than skills, capacity for empathy, for creativity, for meaning making, for working with other human beings, for navigating the messiness of people.

We associate those capacities with the liberal arts and with the humanities generally. And I think this is going to be an invitation for a kind of rebirth of liberal arts, but not the way they look. They're gonna go back to that Culatta-Perez framing. It's got to be reinvented for the world in which we find ourselves.

And if-- in fact, Matthew, you know this, if you look at the research and describe those traits and that kind of education, most parents say, "That's exactly what I want for my kid If you describe those traits and those capacities, employers are like, "That's what I need in my employers." If you call them the liberal arts, they both go running in the other direction.

So we have to rethink what it looks like, and we have to rethink its, the claims we make for it. I think we've been very lazy in our claims. We don't back it up, and we don't measure very well. And then you said something, I know I jumped in, you said something really important to me at the-- in that commentary, which is I do think that part of what we will now be training for will be the kind of values-framed, moral, ethical ways of thinking about how we teach.

And again, we have lots of examples in the current system. You can be an engineer in a lot of places, but if you're an engineer at a really fine Jesuit university- 

[00:30:13] Matthew Rascoff: Mm-hmm ... 

[00:30:14] Paul LeBlanc: you're gonna be an engineer that's giving you a framework around what does it mean to be a human being in this world? What is your purpose?

What does this work mean? If you go to one of the military academies, you can be an engineer- 

[00:30:23] Matthew Rascoff: Yeah ... 

[00:30:23] Paul LeBlanc: within a framework of service and duty and so on, right? If you go to an HBCU, I would argue- Right ... first, there's a framework of values. I think universities have largely run away from that since- They have, yeah

like the nineteen sixty. 

[00:30:34] Matthew Rascoff: Yeah. 

[00:30:34] Paul LeBlanc: I think we will be asked to sort of return to this. 

[00:30:36] Matthew Rascoff: Interesting. I liked Ted Mitchell's point in the intro about how the last course you would take in college was moral philosophy with the president. And I was thinking- Exactly ... like, you know, which institution's presidents could teach a class like that?

Yeah. First of all, which of them have the training? Second, which have the trust? You know, they'd be laughed out of the room at most research universities. First of all, because they're secular, and, like, they don't even have a framework that everybody could agree on, you know, for moral philosophy. And most of the presidents, they don't have your background.

They wouldn't know epistemic from ontological. And so, like, they're just run by a different class of society than those who do moral education. And we look to priests, imams, and rabbis for moral education. So how are we gonna bring that back in outside of Christian and military institutions? I absolutely get that, and I do think they're thriving for a reason right now, and they have faced the dilemmas of the past few years much more capably because they have shared values.

So I look, you know, to Notre Dame and, you know, see how they've managed- Yeah. Yeah ... you know, a conflict recently. But what about secular research universities? Like, what hope do they have to do moral philosophy? That's just not their role. That's not how they see themselves, not th- that's not their capability, and their value system just seems so distant from it.

The scientific value system seems so far from that. 

[00:31:55] Paul LeBlanc: Yeah. I mean, one of the questions I ask in the book is: will we in fact see a return to a split to the research institutes because it's such a different job to be done than undergraduate education, which really is about moral formation? So first you separate that out.

You change as a result what the sort of reward systems are, what gets recognized and so on. And then you see the sort of, you know, the, the humanities and liberal arts have to rethink themselves In a way that connects with and is in harmony with the still professional preparation of one kind or another, whether it's teachers and hospitality or healthcare workers versus accountants and technologists.

That still has to happen. And the person who's, I think, doing a really lovely job of this right now is Art Levine at Brandeis, my, my dear friend, where he's integrating and challenging the liberal arts to start thinking about how they integrate AI into what they do, how it integrates into other professional fields.

That is such hard work. Like, this is, like, incredibly hard work. So where are the places that we'll start to make progress on this and start to rethink this, I think is what we need to watch for. And that's a very open question. There is no guarantee that today's institutions... They're hard to kill, right?

We know that. But who will survive and what will the new form of institution look like is a really interesting question. 

[00:33:12] Matthew Rascoff: So what do you see as the role of AI in that? So it sounded like you think of it as kind-- in this more technological frame, and the values are driven by humans. But I don't know, like I, I did like an online values exercise.

I built a little website just to help-- My son is deciding-- We're deciding about middle school for him, and I built a little website just to help him understand his own values and me understand mine, and my wife is doing it too. And then we built this kind of AI-driven values alignment tool to help make a good decision about school.

That seems to be a kind of a technological framing for a values discussion in which, you know, the AI, it is coming into this ontological space. It's not just knowledge transfer. There's no knowledge here. Yeah. Like the knowledge is trivial. It's about the application deadlines for the schools, but it's really about who we are, who he wants to become, what we want for him.

How do you see that, that boundary? And you built an AI, Ellie, right, at Matter and Space. Like if you ask Ellie a values question, will it refer you to a human and just say, "I can't handle that"? Or ha-have, have you kind of scoped it that way? Where do you see as that hybrid? 

[00:34:21] Paul LeBlanc: Yeah. And I think we were having this conversation with my team this week, this past week, in which we're saying like we keep thinking about...

So here are some of the dangers, which is we have to be really careful not to try to anthropomorphize teachers into AI agents. In fact, the example of the just the fast cognitive fatigue of Socratic dialogue, like why doesn't that work? 'Cause it works great with a teacher. Like, students love being in conversation with teachers, they're amazing.

You try to replicate that with an AI agent, it's a killer. It doesn't work very well, right? Uh-huh. So I wanna think about like, what is AI good at, but what shouldn't it be good at? 

[00:34:58] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:34:59] Paul LeBlanc: And how do we sort of make sure that we understand AI never gets employed in a vacuum, it gets employed in a context.

And in that context, where are the human interactions that make these two things act in harmony? So the fact that you and your wife are engaged with your son, and you've got a little tool that helps you all talk about your values, but that that conversation moves between the agent and its heuristic value over to you and your wife and your son talking about these things, so it becomes an aid not a replacement.

So a nice way to think about this is when is the AI abetting and helping human relationship to deepen it, make it richer, improve, make it more substantial, and when does it displace? And as you described it, I don't hear displacement. I hear a tool that we can use so we can have a conversation, a better conversation between ourselves So I'll give you a couple of examples what this looks like institutionally.

[00:35:51] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:35:51] Paul LeBlanc: And I know you want to sort of stay with the sort of ontological questions, and these are vexing questions. There's a whole chapter just on anthropomorphism in the book, as you know. 

[00:35:59] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:36:00] Paul LeBlanc: But there's a wonderful tool by, uh, Lilian Chow, who's at DoWeLearn, and it's, uh, really the ability to record your performance.

And I'm a big believer in performance-based assessment, and assessments- Mm-hmm ... are terribly broken. We haven't talked- I 

[00:36:12] Matthew Rascoff: wanna ask about that and data- 

[00:36:13] Paul LeBlanc: Yeah ... 

[00:36:13] Matthew Rascoff: and privacy, but keep going. I don't want to 

[00:36:15] Paul LeBlanc: interrupt you. So, so the idea is, you know, so I'm talking to the folks at Berkeley College of Music and say, "Look it, when you have a student who's practicing all week by him or herself, and then they finally get that end of the week session with that master teacher, what if they could have embodied in the AI and the tool the things that that teacher cares about or is looking for, or what they're working on in the moment, and they can get in the moment feedback, and they're not alone in the practice room?"

Mm-hmm. So they can say, "Hey, that technique is getting better, but you need to think about this," right? So then when they meet with the teacher who's got a report now on your progress, that time is much more... You know, you're further along. It's m- you can do better things. You can do other- Mm-hmm ... I love this phrase from Christina at Harvard.

Says that, "Don't use AI to do things better. Use it to do better things." Now all of a sudden I can have that time s- differently. 

[00:37:02] Matthew Rascoff: Mm-hmm. 

[00:37:03] Paul LeBlanc: We're seeing interesting research, though, even on this question of using AI as a brainstorming event, right? As a brainstorming tool, which seems kind of a no because like, okay, I don't want, I don't want my child to use AI to do any of their writing for all the reasons we know are important.

But look it, they're just coming up with topics. Isn't that a good thing? Not clear that it is. There's some cognitive science to suggest that that's a very different thing. We could talk about that. So we're so early, and I think one of the things I'm excited about that's happening, and I'm getting to be part of this project at the Grad School of Ed.

You know what open evidence is for medicine, right? Mm-hmm. It's a database with an AI overlay that physicians can use in the moment to get like carefully vetted, confirmed research, latest thinking. Doing that, we're talking about doing something like that for learning. Mm-hmm. 

[00:37:47] Matthew Rascoff: It sounds like medicine is the analogy for like, you know, precision medicine kind of coming- Yeah

into precision education. 

[00:37:54] Paul LeBlanc: It always has been. I mean, I've always looked at healthcare and medicine as a kind of analog to what we do to sort of see what we could borrow from it and what we would want to avoid, of course. 

[00:38:02] Matthew Rascoff: Yeah. Well, th- uh, let me ask about the avoidance, because, you know, I learned recently HIPAA does not protect your genetic data.

Once your genetic data is in a database, it's-- once it's in your medical record, you can't actually ask for it to be deleted. It's basically there, and your insurance company, your life insurance company can use it forever to discriminate- Yeah ... against you. And, you know, in this book, you basically call for a lot more data collection and, you know, you, you address this question about surveillance and, like, how it could go too far.

I've never heard a humanist make such a strong case for data-driven learning as you know, before this book. Where do you think is the boundary? Like, if you were gonna write the privacy law-- You did try to write the privacy law, didn't you, in the Obama administration, and went to Washington and tried to write it.

But if you were gonna write it today with this current technology, like, what is the line that should not be crossed in terms of the right to be forgotten, in terms of deletion, s-collection, surveillance? Like, what is that limit, and what's the protection you would want for kids and, 

[00:39:05] Paul LeBlanc: and young people? It's a great question, Matthew, and to be honest with you, I feel like I have more questions than answers to that 'cause again, this is new territory we're all traversing together.

But generally speaking, I'm a big believer in data transparency. So as a user or a student or a parent of a student, I should be able to see and interrogate what you think you know about me. So there are data profiles of you at Amazon, at Google, right? They all have a-- They have a sense, the algorithms have a sense of who you are, which is why you're getting certain ads fed to you and so on and so on.

I wanna know, I think I should know, be able to look at what kind of student profile or learner profile my provider has of my child or of me if I'm the learner. I go back and forth on whether medical records is our right, uh, sort of analog here. Like, you know, medical records, as you said, you can't delete anything, but you can annotate.

Mm-hmm. But if it's my child and there's something in there, somewhere along the line someone said, "This is true of that child." Let's say they're on the spectrum, and they said something about this Should I be able to delete that as a parent? Like, no. Like, no, what that's gonna shape the way my, you know, the way the algorithms will engage with my kid or the way teachers when they sort of read these profiles.

So I think that both of transparency and also this open question of what kind of control should we have over those profiles, over that data? I think that's very much an open question for us to be-- to, to sort through. And then there's a technical question of what kind of privacy do we have? What kind of data protections do we have so that isn't shared?

So I've been kind of geeking out lately on looking at edge computing and oddly a kind of weird back to the future on-prem computing for certain data sources, where maybe all of our student data is now sitting on some sort of air-gapped server like the one NVIDIA makes available for nine- Mm-hmm ... hundred thousand bucks, right?

And, and I think we're gonna see massive security breaches with the new models that are coming out. We alluded to this earlier. I don't think higher ed's prepared for that. So I've been sort of playing and talking to some engineers, including someone at NVIDIA, about what is the new tech stack of the future?

And the way we build these things do have implications for our safety and privacy. So with an eye towards that question. So it's gonna be a combination of those things, and this is where we're gonna need the help of ethicists. And I think we're gonna be in this very complicated period where I know we can do better support of students when I can know more about them, and I know there's going to be a huge pushback to the idea of assembled...

Like, the reality is we have all the data now, right? It just sits in fragments and silos. Even- Right ... just getting your data architecture right puts us in this state. 

[00:41:45] Matthew Rascoff: That's right. Yeah. 

[00:41:46] Paul LeBlanc: What should we be able to do about that, and how do we c-- and I think that needs a smart work- people smarter than me working on that question about where is the balance.

And I think someone asked me the other day in an interview What's the biggest thing happening right now that has huge impacts for higher ed that higher ed isn't talking enough about? 

[00:42:05] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:42:05] Paul LeBlanc: And I actually think it's the AI backlash, particularly among Gen Z. So I've been running across schools where students are now coming in asking for AI-free sections of courses.

[00:42:15] Alex Sarlin: Mm-hmm. 

[00:42:16] Paul LeBlanc: And you know, you've been see-- I'm sure you've been reading about the same phenomenon, right? Like movie theater attendance is way up because Gen Z is looking for analog experiences that bring humans together. Uh-huh. Uh, Ulysses is hugely popular because there's no CGI. And you've been reading about my new favorite phrase, friction maxing.

Do you know this phrase? No. So we know maxing, right? So friction maxing is consciously looking for-- to do things in a way that actually requires more effort from you- I see ... and more human interaction. So this is the rise of what some people have called granny hobbies: sewing, crochet, knitting, baking bread, going to the grocery store and consciously avoiding the self-checkout.

[00:42:57] Matthew Rascoff: Mm-hmm. 

[00:42:58] Paul LeBlanc: Right? There was an interesting study recently on NPR that young people today use forty percent fewer words on a day-to-day basis than their predecessors did twenty years ago. They literally are talking less, and the psychologists who had done the research are saying, "I know these are like small snippets of conversation that may not feel important."

So we go to the ATM instead of the teller, we go to the self-checkout instead of the grocery clerk, right? But those little conversations in aggregate over the course of a day are actually really good for our mental health, for a sense of connection, these loose connections. So these are gonna be the interesting, like incredibly interesting questions for us to sort out.

[00:43:37] Matthew Rascoff: So what would it mean to design for all of this? I mean, could you string that together and say, "Well, let's take this pattern and turn it into something usable for an educator," let's say? Is it the AI-free section? 

[00:43:48] Paul LeBlanc: Might look like Swarthmore without electricity. I don't know. Like it's a really interesting question, right?

I think, I think we are, I mean, we are trying to figure this out, right? Which is, for me, I was just talking to a woman named Kellanne Miller, who teaches engineering at Harvard, and she's using an AI platform. She's doing what I call for in the book, which is the flipped classroom on steroids. And in that model, all of her knowledge transfer is happening outside of class.

Students come in, they're expected to have done that work. And in her class, it's all project-based learning. It's teams, it's working together, it's evaluating each other as team members. Did you come prepared, in fact, which is a way better way to think about accountability and assessment. In a year-over-year study she did the previous year, same curriculum, same content, same teacher, et cetera, no AI Her students in the AI-powered classroom in this model, 62% learning gain.

I mean, she's giddy over the results, and her students love it 'cause class time isn't listening to her talk about differential equations. It's actually doing cool stuff together and doing good work together. And I think you're seeing a version of this. I'm thinking about your son, is it? A really, you know, interesting versions in the place like Alpha School, uh, the Levitt School Lab-- Levitt Labs at ASU.

And these are, you know, much discussed secondary schools. And you may not like what Alpha School does with the time it frees up, but it's using AI to get learning done and motivate students in two to three hours in the morning. They call their platform, as you might know, uh, Time Back. What do you do with the time back?

What cool things can you do to make school way better? 'Cause school's not great. And in the Alpha School model, it's entrepreneurship. It's kind of cynics would say they're creating the next generation of tech bros. Like, who really wants that? Mm-hmm. I think Steve Levitt from Freakonomics, you know, he's looking at this and saying: What if I could do their model of learning- Yeah

at the front end of the day, but use that time back to have them solve problems in their community, work on more interesting things that isn't about entrepreneurial stuff, but build values and character. So I think we're gonna see these really interesting models start to emerge. The School of London, Nexus School, Sophie Dean is kind of thinking in some of these ways.

We'll see the models emerge. 

[00:46:03] Matthew Rascoff: So maybe as we wind down, I could ask you just for some advice. For a young person who wants to build in this space, build a career, maybe an entrepreneurial venture, but to enter into it with all the knowledge that you've built over the years, what advice would you give somebody who's graduating from college, you know, sees kind of as you did, that they're no longer at ease with the old dispensation.

You know, you quote the, the Eliot journey of the Magi, and yet unclear about the direction. How would you advise them to navigate this ambiguous moment? 

[00:46:37] Paul LeBlanc: Yeah. So I'm gonna advise them, but I wanna invite us to also think about how we prepare a generation of young people for what this world will look like for a while.

And I fear that for quite a chunk of their time, they're gonna be in a very volatile world. It's gonna be hard And if you think about how do you prepare people for that kind of world, you start thinking about what does it mean to be resilient? What does it mean to be curious? Like, I really have a reflexive reaction against certainty these days.

In a world changing this much- Mm-hmm ... I distrust certainty. How do you make-- how do you help them be curious? How do you sort of help them think about-- how do you give them those kinda higher level cognitive skills that allow them to adjust and change to the way work will change or the way opportunity will change for them?

I am an optimist, and I do think we will come out on the other side of this in a kind of a new golden age. But I think helping them prepare, they're, they're the unhappy generation that has now lived through the transition, and the transition's the tough part, right? So I wanna give them those sort of large tools.

In the last chapter, I talk about the invitation of higher ed not to only get back to a kind of moral framework or moral stance. And it isn't to say I love Jesuit education. I wish that's what I had experienced, but not for its Catholicism, for the kind of critical thinking tools. They're tools to make those assessments on your own.

I think we're gonna have to think about, like, how do we help learners? How do we help a young generation get to that? And to expand from what we have allowed too much of higher ed today to be, which is about job training, gloriously framed- Mm-hmm ... in the university. And to talk about how do we think about their embodied intelligence?

How do we think about their unsouled intelligence, which is a phrase that makes some people uncomfortable. How do we expand the level and the-- our definitions of intelligence to accommodate what is not only distinctly human from the algorithm but also what is ennobling and uplifting? And I think that all of those things in combination are the toolkit that will allow a young generation to navigate the world of uncertainty that lies ahead.

[00:48:44] Matthew Rascoff: Well, I couldn't imagine a better closing than that, so why don't we wind up there. Thanks so much, Paul, for being part of this. It was fascinating to read your book and just wonderful to be able to engage with you. I hope our conversation gives our listeners that feeling too, of being able to, to really participate in a Socratic experience with a really brilliant thinker and visionary.

[00:49:05] Paul LeBlanc: No. Thank you, Matt. You ask the best questions, and I think we come from the same place of we all just want the world to be better. And I sometimes say to people, "I know AI feels very frightening," and for a lot it frightens me quite often, and we worry about what it's going to do the, to the world. But if you look around the world in which we have today, what's working for you?

Do you think our politics are working? Do you think our economy is working well for everybody? Do you think our planet is sort of not suffering? So it's like, yeah, I get it. I've seen the Terminator movies. I know how this could go terribly wrong. But my hope is that we can start having a conversation about what does it look like if it goes terribly right?

What if it's radically good? What would that look like And this is where I think the opportunity for higher ed to get its mojo back. Like, come on, no one's trusting the Sam Altmans and the Elon Musk of the world to shape it for our kids, for your son, for my grandson. And no one's looking at our political leadership and thinking they're gonna get it right.

Well, ask who can get it right. Universities. We've got all the tools. We've got philosophers and ethicists. We've got, you know, theologians, we've got technologists, we've got psychologists and sociologists. Like, we should be talking about, we should be taking the lead in shaping the future. And I know that's a hard thing to do when you're thinking, "How am I gonna make my budget this year?"

[00:50:19] Matthew Rascoff: Yeah. 

[00:50:19] Paul LeBlanc: But some way we gotta find space for those conversations. 

[00:50:22] Matthew Rascoff: Well, that is a charge that I think leadership needs to hear, so thank you for giving it today. Thank you, 

[00:50:27] Paul LeBlanc: Matthew. Sorry to be preachy on the end, but it's like I just want us to be better. Thank you, Matthew. 

[00:50:34] Matthew Rascoff: Thank you. 

[00:50:36] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of Edtech Insiders.

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