Teaching People to Think, Not Just Work

At a time when higher education is increasingly focused on job training, what are we losing?

In this conversation, Craig Fahle sits down with Roosevelt Montas and Rishi Jaitly to explore the enduring value of a liberal education—and why it may matter more than ever in the age of AI.

They discuss what it means to develop “full-stack humans,” the difference between learning for a career and learning for a life, and how the humanities help build the judgment, curiosity, and perspective that leadership now demands.

This is a conversation about thinking—what it means, why it matters, and how we cultivate it in a rapidly changing world.

In this episode:

• Why the humanities may be the most durable leadership advantage
• The shift from education as cultivation to education as job training
• What distinguishes a liberal education from a liberal arts major
• The idea of “flourishing” and its role in lifelong learning
• The “full-stack human” and the balance of timely vs. timeless skills
• How Bard is rethinking liberal education and civic life
• A new model for leadership development at Virginia Tech
• Why judgment matters more than information in an age of overload
• What AI reveals about distinctly human intelligence
• Why not everything valuable can—or should—be measured

If you enjoyed this conversation, subscribe to the VVK Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes are also available on the VVK YouTube channel.

Transcript

Welcome And Big Questions

Craig Fahle 0:11

Hey greetings everyone. Welcome to the VVK Podcast. I'm your host, Craig Fahle, and thank you very much for joining us today. Now, today we've got a really, really interesting conversation on tap. This conversation sits at the intersection of technology, leadership, and something we don't talk about nearly enough anymore, and that is the value of a liberal arts education. We are joined today by Roosevelt Montas, the John and Margaret Bard Professor in Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College, and executive director of the Chang Chavkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life. He's also the author of Rescuing Socrates, How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, which makes the case for liberal education as a transformative force in both personal and civic life. And we're also joined today by Rishi Jaitly, founder, professor, and director of the Institute for Leadership in Technology at Virginia Tech. Before launching the Institute, Rishi held leadership roles across the tech sector, giving him a front-row view into how technology is shaping not just industries, but how we think, communicate, and lead. And Rishi's work right now is focused on building what may be the first leadership degree grounded in both the humanities and AI, centered around some pretty big questions like what does the full stack human of the future actually look like? So together, we're going to talk about what some are calling the humanities and tech movement and whether the most important skills in a rapidly advancing world are not just technical, but deeply human at the same time. Because at a time when education is increasingly about getting a job, we may need to ask: are we preparing people to think, to lead, and to engage with each other in a more complex and divided world? Roosevelt, Rishi, welcome to both of you. It's great to have you here.

unknown 1:53

Thank you, Craig. Great to be with you, Craig.

Have We Overcorrected On Majors

Craig Fahle 1:55

Yeah, and I just outlined a lot of stuff in that intro that we've got to get to here and try to sort out as best we can. But, you know, I want to start with this because it seems that we have spent years really pushing students towards practical job-focused degrees. I think all the advice I got when I was getting ready to go to college in the 80s was, you know, get into finance or be an accountant or something along those lines. None of those things were geared towards my strengths. I ended up getting, of course, a liberal arts degree. But the numbers certainly reflect that trend. Uh humanities majors have dropped significantly over the years, while fields like business and health have really sort of surged. So the question is, have we sort of overcorrected this? Are we preparing people to get their first job, but not necessarily teaching them to think critically over the long term? Um and I don't care who goes first on this one. I didn't direct that to anybody, but you both have smiles on your faces like you want to go first. So I guess I'm going to pick Rishi on this one.

Rishi Jaitly 2:52

Well, thanks again, Craig. It's great to be with you. And I think you're you think you're flagging something really important. You know, two things I'll offer. One is we're living through future of times where a lot of future of questions are in the air. You know, the future of geopolitics, the future of higher education, the future of learning, the future of everything seems to be in the discourse. Among those are what skills and sensibilities will matter in the future. And I think you can actually learn looking backwards. That's what happened to me. I found as a history major, still as my only degree, that through my career in business and entrepreneurship, soft skills always mattered. Soft skills were actually what were breakthrough over the last couple of decades, even as our culture seemingly was over rotated to the hard skills. And so, in many ways, what was always true underground, even if our culture didn't lift it up in the main, was that the difference between a senior manager of engineering and a senior manager of sales and a vice president of engineering and a vice president of sales wasn't merely one's ability to be to program with more speed or be more adept at a particular piece of sales software. It was the ability to introspect, to imagine, to be curious before realizing conviction, uh, to see around the corner, to live at the level of the forest, not just the trees. And so, in a weird way, Craig, this moment, which AI has sort of catalyzed, where we're all confronting this idea is that wait a minute, is the soft power of the past now hard power? And the hard power of the past now soft power, in many ways, one of the arguments I'm making is was that always true? And is it now our obligation to give it a name? And from backstage to mainstage. And that's a little bit of what I've done through my work at Virginia Tech.

Craig Fahle 4:53

Uh Roosevelt, I want to get your sort of take on this uh bigger overarching question as well.

Roosevelt Montas 4:58

Yeah, thank you. Uh it's a pleasure to be here with you, Greg, and with you, Rishi. Um first let me uh underline something that Rishi said that I agree with 100%, which is that a professional education um geared towards the marketplace, geared towards uh uh leadership and um high achievement in any profession will be um enhanced by what we should call soft skills, that is, by the kinds of cultivated judgment, uh critical thinking, communicative skills, listening skills, empathetic skills, imaginative skills that a liberal education produces. You will be a better professional, you will be a better executive, you will be a better uh participant in the in the productive forces of society. Um and then I want to add a second thing, which is that these uh skills, these capacities that our liberal education enhances and deepens matter beyond the marketplace. Your life will be better. You will be a better father, and you will be a better husband, and you will be a better member of your community, you will be a better citizen of our democracy. Um by uh deepening and enhancing these skills that sometimes we associate with the humanities correctly because they are the things that make us human. Um, they are the things that um uh build on this very unique phenomenon in the universe, which is human consciousness and human existential awareness. Um the sort of ultimate questions of a liberal education are questions about not just how you're going to make a living, but about how you're going to live your life. Um, and it's in fact one of the reasons why you will be a better professional if you have this broader scope through which you understand your own activity, not just in the industry that you're in, but in the world, the society, the moment in history that you're in.

How College Became Job Training

Craig Fahle 7:09

It it does seem though that we've made sort of this pivot in this country in taking a look at a college education in particular, post-secondary education opportunities, as training for the workforce, as opposed to an opportunity to learn for learning's sake, to better yourself as a person. Um, you know, I'm 58 years old and still contemplating thinking about law school just because I'm interested in it. There you go. And I want to learn more. Um we've gotten away from that. It's got to, you know, everybody sort of like it has to point to something that is tangible, financially tangible, uh, rather than you know, something that is about bettering oneself. And I'm wondering when you think that shift really started to take place and and what's behind it.

unknown 7:49

You know what's behind.

Craig Fahle 7:50

Go ahead, listen.

Roosevelt Montas 7:51

Yeah, right. No, I I I tend to think about this historically in the sort of evolution of higher education in the United States. And and one of the things is that you know, way back in the 19th century, early 20th century, there was a pretty clear distinction between the college, higher learning, and the schools. And by the schools was meant business school, medical school, journalism school, uh, sort of the practical, the places where you learned how to be a professional, versus the college, which was the place where you got cultivated into a set of sort of intellectual and social and political virtues. Uh now you can understand how uh with the democratization of college, because part of what used to happen when college was that, it was that it was essentially a finishing school for the social elite. Uh, it was a social elite who didn't have to worry about making a living and who could just worry about matters of state, about the deep questions of society and of human life. Uh, but as we democratized education, uh, the practical aspect of college became central. It has become so central that by and large, colleges and universities have have forgotten that there was this other thing that college used to do, a thing that is no less important, and that the working class and the mass uh numbers of people that now have access to college deserve and need just as much, in fact, I would say even more, than the elite of the 19th and early 20th century did.

unknown 9:26

I I love your notion, Roosevelt, and your attention to this idea that we are not merely economic actors. We're not atomic units uh whose value merely comes from our contribution to GDP. You know, we're talking within 90 days, Craig, of the 250th anniversary of our declaration of independence. And one of the things I've been interrogating the pretend historian in me is what did our founding fathers mean by this curious phrase in our founding document: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and particularly this notion of happiness. And it turns out, I'm not the only one to make this argument, a lot of historians uh have, and this is something that Ken Burns, the filmmaker, has talked about as well. Is that Franklin and Jefferson and Adams, when they were sitting around and constructing this phrase pursuit of happiness, what they had in mind was the pursuit of lifelong learning. In other words, they situated lifelong learning as a kind of civic virtue, a kind of prerequisite to a thriving republic. And so if your starting point is lifelong learning as kind of this North Star, not just essential, but perhaps existential to the health of a republic, all of a sudden you sort of orient higher education and higher learning around that proposition, actually. And when you orient it around that proposition, you sort of liberate yourself from this constraint we've been talking about, which is higher learning, higher education, is about the resume so that you finish on Friday and on Monday you have a job. In fact, it's about something deeper. And I think part of what I'm flagging as someone that studied history and has tried to be a lifelong learner, but also worked at Google, Twitter, and OpenAI and started a venture capital business has been an entrepreneur, is that actually this has always been true. It's always been true that the lifelong learners amongst us with a commitment to both the sciences and the liberal arts actually thrive. And it's now time that our culture emphasizes that in the main institutionally. And I'm delighted that institutions like ours are beginning to center this.

Craig Fahle 11:37

And we'll we'll get into what you're both doing in just a couple of minutes, because I think it is worth exploring uh the approaches that are being taken at both BARD and at Virginia Tech in this regard. But I do want to get a sense of, and we you hinted at it, Roosevelt, at the beginning, just sort of like how this enhances somebody's educational experience. Um, when you look at it, we're we're at a time when a lot of people are starting to devalue the importance of a college education, questioning whether or not it is economically worth it to do so. That's that seems to me to be an attack on uh just about you know cultural literacy more than anything. And and maybe that's part of it. But um, you know, talk about if you come, you know, combine again a good liberal arts education with a good technical education, how is that improving your outcomes?

Liberal Education Is Not A Major

Defining The Full-Stack Human

Roosevelt Montas 12:23

Great. You raise a really good point because part of what has produced this debility in liberal education in our colleges and universities is the fact that a liberal education has been confused and conflated with a liberal arts major. Um and those are two quite different things. Um a liberal education has nothing to do with a liberal arts major. A liberal arts major is a specific, almost technical, uh disciplinary, vocational training in a thing that's called a liberal art. And there is that there are certain disciplines, history and music and literature that are that. And when you major in that, you're usually preparing for a career that will draw on those things. Maybe you're gonna, and all those majors are organized, in fact, as if you were going to go to graduate school in those fields and earn a PhD. That's a liberal arts major. That's fine. I was a liberal arts major, love it, teach them, but that's not a liberal education. A liberal education is the kind of education that it is as appropriate as relevant to the engineer, to the computer scientist, to the uh pre-med, to the pre-health. It is the kind of education that works on the fundamental um qualities and skills that make you a fully developed human being. That which Ritchie uh which Richie invoked in the Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness, right? It is a it is a process, it is a process of sort of cultivation. And the the word that that the founders had in mind when they thought of happiness is this Aristotelian concept. Um, they all studied the classics, um, and they would often call it the classics, but it's this Aristotelian concept uh that Aristotle renders in Greek as eudaimonia. And you know, happiness is the most straightforward translation in English, but another very good translation is flourishing. Um what they have in mind is a kind of flourishing, is a kind of coming into yourself and coming into the fullest development of your inward capacities. Um, and that is what liberal education is for, is to accelerate, is to um uh feed and um activate and empower that process of unfolding. So that's not for the liberal arts major, that's not for the future scholar, that is for every student and every citizen of our of our society.

Craig Fahle 15:05

And we'll talk about that in just a second, because I know that's something that you're implementing at Bard that I do want to get to, but I want to give Rishi an opportunity to sort of talk about this concept that I've been reading in some of his uh uh social media posts and LinkedIn and places like that, about this concept of the full stack human. What do you mean by that? Because it seems like you're talking about this other layer again, again, the humanity, uh the life lessons, all that sort of stuff to make one, you know, more functional, frankly.

unknown 15:32

Yeah, no, I I appreciate that, Craig. And it's another way into this question, right? I came of age in global Silicon Valley, basically, and you know, discovered that technologists think in terms of stacks, right? The front end, the back end, back end hardware, software, APIs, et cetera. And it turns out humanities folks often think in terms of stacks too, or maybe used to. There, I guess there aren't stacks any longer in many libraries. But a way into the a conversation that's not adversarial is to ask before answering, what does the full stack human of the future look like? And everybody may have a different answer to that strange, weird question. But my answer is that at the top of the stack, if you imagine a three-layer stack, is what you might consider the applied layer, right? Which is timely skills and sensibilities. Be fluent in what's happening today from a technology standpoint. Today, it's artificial intelligence. If we were recording this at the height of COVID five years ago, Craig, we'd be talking about, you know, crypto and Bitcoin. A couple of years earlier, we'd be talking about Web 2 and the passion and creator economy. A few years earlier, we'd be talking about e-commerce, meaning flavors of the day keep changing, but keep mastering what's timely. But then the question is sort of what's the infrastructure of that full stack? And my argument is that that's where timeless skills live. And I think that that's where the liberal arts, and to Roosevelt's point, a broad liberal education, that's where that's where we and it live, the skills that I've described earlier, from introspection and imagination to communication and creativity and the like, because those skills are durable and cultivate intuition for one about where in the woods one belongs, actually. And then the middle layer is what I call kind of evangelism and entrepreneurship, the ability to take intuition about oneself and help it manifest and travel, right? In the culture. And so that's one way to think about this question. And, you know, it and I think it's a capacious way to think about the future of higher ed, higher learning, the humanities. You know, I always chuckle when I see people reducing the humanities or or the liberal arts to ethics, when in fact, I think the humanities can actually make you a better sales executive, a better entrepreneur, a better product manager, because they teach you to live and inhabit the lives uh of a customer in many ways. And so I hope that's a helpful way to think about this question and appreciate it, Craig.

Rebuilding Human Virtues In College

Craig Fahle 18:11

You know, it absolutely is. And I sort of want to talk a little bit about what's happening, the approach you're both taking uh at your individual institutions to sort of deal with this. And I I guess I don't know if I want to call it a problem, but um obviously there was a need to correct something that led you to create these programs. And and Roosevelt, I'll start with you. Uh talk a little bit about the program that you're uh that you're putting in place there and what you recognized or saw that led you to realize this was something that needed to be done.

Roosevelt Montas 18:40

Yeah. Um let me first uh validate and affirm your suggestion that that there is a problem. Um we are facing a kind of human resource problem. We are facing in our society, and you can see it very clearly in our politics, you can see it in the way that businesses are conducted, you can see in the ways that technologies are being developed, that there is a kind of deficiency in, you know, uh something that people used to call human virtues. Um, you know, the capacity to listen to others empathetically, a commitment to truth telling, a commitment to rational demonstration, uh, a commitment to accepting uh uh the authority of truth and evidence, uh commitment to law, to abiding by the law, a commitment to the law applying to the weak as well as to the to to the uh to the powerful. So there is this deficiency that we are seeing in our society in various levels. And it's a what what causes that and where it comes from, it's obviously very complex and a historical process. But if you look at places in which those uh human virtues were presented, examined, cultivated, um, one of those places is higher education. Um and it is a function that higher education has withdrawn from in the last 40, 50 years. Um, it has become, as you alluded earlier, more technical, uh more focused on job preparation, and more um suspicious of the idea that there is such a thing as human virtue, that there is such a thing as a fundamental shared humanity that uh about which reflection and debate is is useful for your development. Um so the the the program, the center that I am uh launching at BARD, the Jank Chapkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life, is aimed at revitalizing this form of education, this idea about education in colleges and universities. It's a traditional idea. It's not it's not a it's not a new invention. It is a um re-animating and uh reincorporating into our contemporary, you know, tech-driven, entrepreneurial, uh transforming culture, uh that idea of education, that idea of of a portion of your college education that is specifically concerned with these um human virtues, human excellences, and the examination and cultivation of them through reflection and debate, not indoctrination, not um uh uh programming, but investigation.

Craig Fahle 21:42

I I want to stop you for just a second because you just made me think of something here. But I mean, one of the concerns that we have as technology emerges, and we'll spend a little more time talking about AI and its impact, but does sort of a lack of some of these critical thinking skills that come along with this type of education and and frankly, you know, the knowledge that You gain about the human experience, what we've been through over the uh centuries and centuries, um, is the type of thing that actually helps protect us from things like groupthink or uh falling victim to tech and some of the messaging that is out there and and frankly and what social media is doing, especially with with young people and students today.

Learning To Navigate Information Overload

Roosevelt Montas 22:20

Absolutely. I mean, there is a there's a kind of discursive sophistication, a kind of inoculation um that this form of education uh promotes, uh inoculation against conspiratorial thinking, diluted, magical thinking, uh a kind of skepticism and openness, um, a attention to facts and detail. Um so these are these are skills that you hone in classroom, in small classroom discussions, thinking and reading uh fundamental, thinking about fundamental questions and reading texts that raise them. Um so absolutely, but part of what a college education does is equip us for the increasingly complex task of navigating this rich information environment. Uh education, higher education evolved in an environment of information scarcity, where you went to college to get the information because that was in libraries and in the in the brains and skills of this verified uh intellectual elite. No longer. We are in a situation of information overabundance. We are drowning in information. The problem now is ways to put that information into some kind of order, into some kind of hierarchy, into some kind of value system that that indicates to you what matters and what things are worth uh worthy of your attention.

Craig Fahle 23:42

Uh Rishi, that sort of gets at the heart of what you're doing at tech, isn't it?

A Humanities-Based Leadership Degree

unknown 23:46

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, a few things I'll share, building on what Roosevelt you shared. One is to just rift back to this notion of what is a liberal education. And of course, the origins of the frame liberal in the classical sense is liberty, uh, which is this idea that this kind of education we aspire to ought to liberate us and um and free us uh to live in the blue sky of question asking, but not just the blue sky, but the fog of ambiguity is okay too. And so, you know, that really is the North Star of these institutions and certainly our republic. And at the heart of that work is asking big questions. You know, as an entrepreneur, uh perhaps for me, at least one of the lessons of entrepreneurship is that a big question is the starting point of any great entrepreneurial journey. And that's how my work at Virginia Tech started. Uh, I'm not an academic, um, but I have a deep appreciation for advanced research. And a few years ago, it dawned on me, and I asked this question why doesn't the United States of America have an executive degree in the humanities? Now that's kind of a crass way to ask a question because it it's sort of very product-y, right? It's sort of like, how in the year 2022 or three do we not have leadership degrees in this nation grounded in the liberal arts? When we reflect on what constitutes a breakthrough leader, no matter his or her sector, we tend to use human skills, sensibilities, and superpowers to reflect on that individual. Well, I started to wonder then, are majors and minors, are PhDs and MAs really the right metric that the liberal arts ought to be using, or the only metric to tell a story of success or tailwinds behind us or momentum? What if our opportunity was in and around lifelong learning and recasting the liberal arts as being as advancing a kind of leadership, even stewardship that our nation and its institutions sorely need? So I said, what if I just built it? Right. A lot of what happens I've observed in higher ed, and I wear a lot of roles in higher ed is that there are these adjective wars that develop around, well, our field does this and this field does this. I said, forget it. I'm gonna show and not tell. What if I just built the thing and let's see what happens? And so now we're in our third year. Uh, over three years, we've had individuals from five countries, 10 states, more than 30 companies and causes, ranging from Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft, Byte Dance, uh, and more, all come to Virginia Tech to advance their leadership practice, purpose, and potential through an experience grounded in the liberal arts, history, philosophy, creative writing, literature. And it's worth sort of saying that again. These are folks in the middle of their careers, but a wide range of folks, from nonprofits to companies across age ranges from their 20s through their 60s, all of whom have decided that I'm going to spend my time and treasure in the middle of my life to dig into read scripture with others, to consume philosophy, to read Renaissance history, to try my hand at creative writing. In a world where you can do that on YouTube, right? In a world where you can podcast your way to that, they said, I want to run to the pixie dust that exists in American higher ed. What is that pixie dust? Right. It's community, it's place, it's to Roosevelt's point, a kind of higher curation. And it's been, I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot through, you know, to taking this lifelong learning product to market. And more than anything, I've learned that there's a nation of learners out there. If only we found a way to meet them in even more accessible, aspirational ways. And uh hope that's helpful.

Craig Fahle 27:42

No, it is. And you're giving an opportunity for people my age and and and around there to, you know, regain some of that experience or maybe get that part of their college experience they didn't get the first time around. Well, to be honest, never had a chance to experience.

unknown 27:55

I built this because I was looking for this product. You mentioned at the front, and you're contemplating going to law school. As my family knows, a few years ago, I was doing the same. I felt like in this rat race of self-identifying as an economic actor, that there was something missing in my life. And so, in many ways, I tried to build something that I was craving.

Craig Fahle 28:17

Roosevelt, you know, from the way that you guys are approaching it though, with the center, it almost seems as if this is the kind of thing you're trying to instill this value in young people so that they take this throughout their lives, um, you know, and and want to continue that journey. And I'm being exposed to a lot of different things, whether it is, again, mythology, philosophy, history, anything, that opens up so many different doors and there are so many different morality plays that come out of these things and ways of looking at the world and circumstances that you don't get otherwise. Um and it just certainly seems as if, you know, we're in such a rush to get through that four years and get that degree to do something that we're not stopping to smell the roses.

Roosevelt Montas 28:58

Yeah, that's right. Um, and we uh my center is focused on the on the on the college curriculum. We want to change the institutions. Uh we want to change the uh conversation in higher education about what is the fundamental mission of the university and of the college. Uh, what does an education really mean? Um and one of the things I have found is that the key to doing that is getting faculty to have this kind of educational experience. That, in fact, most faculty have not had this kind of educational experience. Uh, these kinds of programs and curricula that gave you that have disappeared long ago enough in college that today's current faculty, many of them, have just simply have not had that. And when you go to graduate school to earn a PhD in the humanities or in the social sciences, you're not taught how to teach. You're not taught how to teach even your own expertise, much less how to teach the general student body. At most, you're given some idea of what, like an undergraduate, say you go to get a PhD in economics or in history, you might get an idea of what an undergraduate needs to master and be exposed to to go into a career in history. But do you ever get taught or asked to think about what does a future engineer, a future doctor, a future entrepreneur, a future lawyer, what do they, uh what kind of education should they have in common? No, that's not part of the conversation at the graduate um PhD level training. So part of what the center is doing in order to impact the undergraduate curriculum is bringing faculty together and facilitating this kind of liberal education experience for faculty while at the same time thinking about how can we bring models like this into our institutions and into our undergraduate curriculum.

Craig Fahle 31:01

You know, I want to get a sense from you whether or not this notion and what you're trying to do is starting to regain traction. Um, because again, this was the basis for you know most education, especially uh, you know, going back to the early days, frankly, of learning. Uh it was all about learning history. It was all about, you know, learning uh humanities, and uh that's obviously changed. But are people sort of catching on to this notion that this is an important part uh that we have lost over the years?

Changing Faculty Culture And Curriculum

Roosevelt Montas 31:29

Yeah, there is a kind of reawakening of interest in this form of education. Uh part of that is has been triggered by a set of crises, a crisis in higher education, a crisis about credibility, um, a crisis in the humanities where people are just not majoring in the humanities, not and therefore not giving the material sustenance for the profession as it exists in the university, for the department as it exists in the universities. So a kind of crisis of um epistemological crisis, what are the humanities about? What are what are we doing? What is our role in the university? Um the credibility crisis outside of the university, where the general society is thinking, wait a minute, what are college students doing in in college? What are they being taught? Um what are the the civic inputs that that that they're getting? What kind of uh citizens are universities producing? Um and there is of course then our political crisis um that we're in. And that political crisis recently has had a dimension that's explicitly concerned with higher education, right? There's that there's been um uh a wave of sort of existentially threatening federal attacks on higher education. Um so these crises combined have created this opening where a lot of people are saying, we need to get back to the basics. We have in significant ways lost our uh our North Star. Uh we have been moving um rudder without without a rudder. Um and it's time to re-engage with the fundamental questions about what education is for beyond just getting a job.

Craig Fahle 33:13

Well, and I want to sort of, and we've got a few minutes left, and I we definitely need to get to this because the emergence of AI, I think, is is changing everything. And you get all sorts of doom and gloom people saying that we're you know just churning out a nation of idiots, uh, nobody's doing their own research. If we are going to, again, utilize AI in a way that's actually beneficial for society and actually beneficial for human growth, Rishi, how important is it going to be to have a grounding in this type of thinking before we allow AI just to basically take it all over?

unknown 33:47

Yeah.

Craig Fahle 33:47

And is that the kind of thing that that could prevent the worst parts of AI from from you know manifesting themselves?

AI Forces The Humanities Question

unknown 33:54

Yeah, well, a few thoughts, right? One one starting point is that technology is a part of the human condition, right? The starting point is that the human uh the human desire to to build and create and and invent is real and it's hard to get in the way of. That's point one. Point two is it is really wonderful that unlike the last wave of technology, i.e. social media web two, about 10 to 15 years ago, when you and I first crossed paths, um, you know, where we weren't having conversations like this at the front end in civil society about the implications of all were green lighting. And I think it's really good that there's a lot of green, yellow, red conversations happening worldwide, not just nationwide, about how to get this right. That's not to say that there's one answer or one silver bullet or one thing I'd say that this nation needs to do or not do, but I think the conversation is the point. I think the third thing is in some ways, the, you know, the rise of AI is one of the triggers that Roosevelt noted, right? Which is it's it's in many ways helping those of us who've long championed the value of broad, capacious, athletic, agile capacities as important. You know, it's I I uh not a day goes by where I don't meet an entrepreneur who's not at all trained in artificial intelligence or technology, demoing for me the product they've constructed over the weekend to solve for X, Y, and Z use case at a consumer or enterprise level, right? The barrier for entry is so low now around creation that the more that the interesting question is no longer what did you build, but why? And I think that's where the humanities loom large, right? They help us understand where, you know, which neck of the woods do we belong in, right? Because I think, I think now when you interview candidates for jobs, I've interviewed many, when you interview young people for college, I've interviewed many. What you look for is sort of folks who have a kind of the kind of charisma that suggests they've begun to found their authentic um story. And and so those skills I think start with the kind of educational experience we're talking about. And I, yes, there's been an awakening, and I think I think uh Roosevelt's work is a signal that a broad, capacious way for the humanities to self-identify is emerging. I do think that there are still lots of interesting questions to be asked about our institutions and what they ought to look like decades from now. But uh in many ways, AI is forcing the conversation.

Roosevelt Montas 36:31

If I could piggyback on that, it it's a truism, but true nevertheless, that AI is changing uh fundamentally the way that we live and industry and anything that involves knowledge. Um and it raises this fund this basic, like foundational question. Uh what is the other kind of intelligence? That is, there's artificial intelligence. Um what other kind of intelligence is there? Is there a kind of distinctly human intelligence? And of course, part of what is awe-inspiring about AI is that so many things that we thought were distinctly human forms of intelligence, in particular our capacity to use language, um turned out not to be distinctly human, that uh forms of machine learning and and neural networks um are able to replicate and improve on many of these things that were thought were uniquely like organic, biologically human. So again, the question is what is the distinctively human form of intelligence that we bring into the formula? And you know, it is it there is such a thing, and it is rooted in our humanity, it is rooted in our existential condition, in our incarnated, in our embodied biological, organic existence, in our existence in time, in our existence for a finite period of time, um, in our psychological complexity, in our um capacity to want things, our capacity for desire, for intention. Right? So these are these are things that are distinctly human. And and increasingly it's it it makes the humanities and the liberal arts focus on those things that are not artificial, but that are specifically distinctly human.

Craig Fahle 38:40

Well, we've got to wrap up in a minute, but I want to ask one last question of each of you uh to get your take on this. Um because measuring something like this is not going to be an easy thing. It's not just gonna be the number of people graduating with humanities degrees. Um, but how are you gonna know if this is moving in the direction that you want it to?

unknown 39:02

That's a great question. I mean, I I think the first thing I guess I'll say, which maybe is a challenge to the premise of the question, is part of what I've wrestled with as an entrepreneur in higher learning and the humanities, is there's this temptation to measure. There's this temptation in our culture to have an experience on a Friday and for it to turnkey help you in your Monday afternoon meeting. I think that's the thing to resist. I think the thing to resist is the idea that experiences that cultivate the kinds of muscles Roosevelt just so beautifully illuminated for us that those experiences come from a weekend retreat where you learn how to be intentional. They don't. They come from a rigorous habit of mind and soul in and around all kinds of questions about human and non-human others. And they show up in surprising ways and pay dividends down the line and compound like interest. So I think part of the starting point is just as a culture, becoming comfortable with a non-causal, non-instrumental approach to experiences. And I use the word experience broadly because underneath experience is education, underneath experience is travel, underneath experience is relationship, underneath experience is one's inner life, right? And so I think that's the starting point. I think to more directly answer your question, I guess I start with the zeitgeist and you know, dreaming of a of a country and a world where more people, you know, self-identify as committed, as committed to these virtues we've talked about, right? Whether they use the H-word, humanities or higher ed is not, is less interesting to me than whether they, whether, whether we as a nation can commit to these, um, to these to these virtues and the spirit of lifelong learning in a more lower casey sense. And I think they'll show up in some of the metrics, you know, some of the downstream health of republic sort of metrics, right? Curiosity of of uh you know, just the nature of the discourse. But, you know, and I think I think I take inspiration actually from the large language models, most particularly the second word, language, right? The idea that that the building block and the path to this is to reappreciate something that's been core uh to to the human experience. And from that comes not in not the intelligence age, but maybe the wisdom era, right? Um and I think that's what we're on the verge of, and time will tell if we get there.

Craig Fahle 41:31

Uh Roosevelt, I want to get your your thoughts on this.

Roosevelt Montas 41:33

Yeah, I I really uh want to sort lean in and reinforce uh what what Rishi said. I I I I think um he names it um uh really well and puts it beautifully. I want to address it in in reverse order. Say first, let's say, yeah, there are things that we can measure about the work um doing, you know, uh how many schools will pour more um uh curricular space to the liberal arts for all the students, not just for the liberal arts major. Uh so you know what what does what does curricula look like in higher education? Will there be more schools that adopt this model of learning where students, regardless of their major, have small classes where they encounter fundamental texts, where they engage in dialogue and debate about the things that concern us by virtue of our humanity? You could you could have all kinds of metrics that could attract that. But that's not ultimately what we're after. Um what we're after is uh an idea that concerns this. Is there a form of human development? Is there a form of human activity that does not need to be justified in terms of its outcomes? Um that is what we are after. We are after enshrining, institutionalizing a form of cultivation and development that is valuable in itself and whose justification and meaning does not come from the outcomes that it delivers.

Craig Fahle 43:15

All right. Well, we'll have to wrap it up right there. I mean, obviously there's a lot more that we could get into uh along this subject matter, but uh this is one of those conversations that's just beyond just about education, right? This is about humanity, this is about where we're going uh as humanity. Uh and and frankly, where's that leadership going to come from in the future? Um, and is it gonna be grounded in the morality and ethical lessons that are learned from a liberal arts and humanities education? I mean, stuff matters. But I want to thank again Roosevelt Montause and uh Rishi Jaley for being here. We appreciate it very much. Good luck uh with your endeavors and your programs. And Rishi, you know, um maybe I'll call you up about uh coming down to check that out. I haven't been to Virginia in a little while, so I'd like to do it. But thank you both for being here. We certainly do appreciate it.

unknown 44:00

Thank you so much, Greg. Great to be with you.

Craig Fahle 44:02

All right, real quick, I want to thank my VVK teammates, Tommy Binkley, Alan Holimsky, Ned Ward, and Peter Van Dyke for their assistance in putting together this program and bringing this great panel together. And if you've enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe to the VVK Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And you can also watch full episodes on our VVK YouTube page. That's a new thing. You want to check that out? No, you don't want to look at me on video, but I can't do anything about that. I'm sorry, everybody. Thanks so much for listening today. We'll see you next time for another conversation that we hope goes a little bit deeper. Thanks, guys. Thank you so much.