Newman and the university in the age of AI

When the newly appointed doctor of the Church, St. John Henry Newman, delivered the lectures that were to become The idea of a university, The steam engine was transforming the world of work and modern science was reshaping the imagination. 

Today, Artificial Intelligence is doing something similar: compressing previously time-consuming tasks to a few seconds, producing a dizzying array of possibilities and tempting us to confuse speed with comprehension.  

Newman's fundamental question remains urgent: what is a university for?

Newman's proposal

Newman's answer is disconcertingly simple. A university exists to cultivate the intellect, to train the mind in the pursuit of truth. It is not primarily a degree factory, nor a pathway to the job market, nor a provider of “skills” detached from a broader vision of the human good. It is a place where a person learns to think: to follow an argument, to weigh evidence, to distinguish the plausible from the true, and to see reality as a whole.

The education offered by the University of Dallas, and a dwindling number of institutions of higher learning, embraces Newman's vision of the university: that education is not the mere acquisition of information, but the formation of what he called a “philosophical habit of mind.” In other words, a learned person is truly learned when he or she has the breadth of knowledge necessary to see the connections between various disciplines; the ability to classify goods correctly; and the restraint to avoid fanaticism or reductionism. 

The detailed study of special disciplines should contribute to this education, but specialization alone is not enough to train a person. 

The mind of a learned person is not narrow, but is capable of synthesizing a wide variety of knowledge and making sense of it so that it can be properly applied for good.

The study of Theology

That is why Newman insisted that a genuine university cannot exclude Theology. Not because Theology is an ornament for religious people, but because it speaks of God, the highest object of knowledge, and because excluding it silently deforms the whole map of understanding. A university that says, “We will consider everything except the most fundamental questions,” is not neutral. It has already taken a position.

This goes right to the heart of what AI is doing in contemporary life.

AI excels at pattern recognition, synthesis, prediction and recombination. It can generate acceptable prose and quickly retrieve what looks like an answer. If used well, these are true gifts. If used naively, it can lead to dangerous confusion: the confusion of information with knowledge, knowledge with wisdom, and results with understanding.

Newman allows us to make the right distinctions. In our time, a student has easy access to a lot of data, without knowing how to judge it. AI may put an ocean of content at our fingertips, but it cannot give us what Newman most desired from education: the ability to discern fundamental principles, to reason about causes, to integrate knowledge from different fields, and to order the whole toward what is truly good.

Moreover, the most serious issues in the AI era are not technical. They are moral and metaphysical.

Fundamental questions 

What is a human being if we can replace their work, simulate their relationships and externalize their decisions? What is dignity? What is responsibility when an algorithm mediates decisions? What happens to the weak when the powerful get new tools of persuasion? What happens to friendship, mindfulness and contemplation when every moment of leisure can be filled by a machine designed to keep us scrolling through the screen?

These questions cannot be answered by engineering alone. Engineering can describe what we can do, but it does not tell us what we should do. Newman would say that the task of the university is to educate free people, capable of self-government, so that they can live responsibly in community. That requires more than competence; it requires virtue.

Liberal arts

This is where the liberal arts become important, not as nostalgia, but as preparation for reality.

Its value in today's culture has been much maligned, even in many Catholic universities. Often confused with mere Humanities studies, a true liberal arts education is one that embraces everything from literature to mathematics in order to train the student to see the world as it is: complex, nuanced and resistant to simplification. 

Philosophy teaches clarity about meaning and argument. Theology teaches wonder and humility in the face of the ultimate. Literature cultivates moral imagination, the ability to enter into another person's experience and see the consequences of choices. History teaches that human nature persists even as technology changes, and that pride is always punished in the long run. Mathematics disciplines the mind toward precision. 

The sciences teach us to observe the real world and to weigh evidence with great care. The liberal arts teach their willing students to observe, to inquire, to argue well, and to appreciate beauty, things that a machine can imitate, but not possess.

In short, the liberal arts educate people to have accurate judgment. And judgment is precisely what our age lacks. We are already seeing a paradox: the more we automate, the more we need leaders who can interpret, not just execute. The more data we have, the more we need wisdom to decide what is worth pursuing. The more persuasive our tools become, the more we need a moral compass that cannot be programmed.

Newman was not opposed to practical learning; he simply refused to reduce education to utility. An educated mind can learn new tools because it has learned how to learn. It can resist manipulation because it is able to detect faulty reasoning. 

Catholic university

A Catholic university, then, should be a place where technology is welcomed, but not worshipped; where innovation is pursued, without giving up the question of meaning; where the student is not trained to fulfill a function, but educated to be a person. 

In the age of AI, we must teach students to use powerful tools. But we must also teach them to ask themselves what those tools are for and who they are becoming by using them. Newman reminds us that the most important task of the university is to cultivate the whole intellect in the light of truth. If we reclaim that vision, AI will not make the university obsolete. It will make it necessary.

Because the future will not belong to those who can generate more content more quickly, but to those who can recognize what is true, choose what is good and love what is beautiful, while remaining fully human, irreducibly.