A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article asks whether colleges can “AI-proof” their students. The premise is provocative, but its most important observation is not really about technology.
José Antonio Bowen, the former president of Goucher College, offers this candid assessment of higher education’s claims about critical thinking:
“We don’t teach it well, we don’t teach it specifically, we don’t follow through, we don’t measure it.”
Then he issues a challenge:
“If we actually taught critical thinking well, you would actually be teaching AI literacy in a way that’s useful and transferable — and everybody would want to come to your school.”
I read those words only weeks after meeting Pope Leo XIV in Rome with my fellow Jesuit college and university presidents and hearing his charge for our institutions in this moment of profound technological change.
They led me to a bold conclusion: Everyone should want a Jesuit education.
Not because critical thinking belongs exclusively to Jesuit institutions. It does not. But Jesuit education offers something increasingly rare: a centuries-tested, integrated method for joining intellectual rigor with reflection, ethical judgment, human understanding and responsibility for others.
Other universities teach parts of this work. Jesuit education assembles the whole.
AI literacy is human literacy
Students certainly need to understand artificial intelligence. They should know how these systems work, how to use them effectively, how to evaluate their outputs and how to recognize concerns involving bias, privacy, attribution, intellectual property and data. But learning to operate the technology is the smallest part of the challenge.
The more consequential questions are human ones:
Is this information true?
What assumptions produced it? Is there bias here?
Whose knowledge is represented? Whose is missing?
What evidence supports this claim? What might happen if I act upon it?
Who benefits? Who or what could be harmed?
What responsibility remains mine when a machine has contributed to the decision?
And, ultimately: What is the good I am trying to accomplish?
Answering these questions well requires judgment, self-knowledge, moral imagination, intellectual humility, empathy, and even courage.
That is the work of Jesuit education.
We have a methodology.
Critical thinking appears in the mission statements of countless colleges and universities. Bowen’s criticism should make all of us uncomfortable: Do we teach it deliberately, or do we assume students will somehow absorb it through repeated exposure to academic content?
Jesuit education offers an explicit methodology.
Ignatian pedagogy moves students through context, experience, reflection, action and evaluation. They examine the circumstances surrounding a problem, encounter it through study and experience, reflect on its meaning, decide how to respond and evaluate what their actions produce.
That is critical thinking that leads to responsible action. It is also precisely the kind of AI literacy our world now needs.
It interrupts the frictionless movement from prompt to output to action. It teaches students to pause, investigate, interpret and accept responsibility for what comes next.
At the heart of this approach is discernment: the disciplined practice of learning by weighing evidence, motivation, alternatives, and consequences before choosing. Students learn to distinguish impulse from conviction, convenience from truth and personal advantage from the greater good. How? We teach students to examine their own thinking through reflection. In a technological environment designed to accelerate response, the habit of slowing down long enough to recognize patterns, confront mistakes and reconsider assumptions may become one of the most important forms of human agency.
Jesuit education also insists on cura personalis—care for the whole person. It refuses to reduce a student to a résumé, a collection of competencies or an economic unit. Intellect cannot be separated from character, relationships, purpose, health or responsibility to others.
And it asks us to pursue the magis, the greater good. The better, more generous and more humane choice. It gives students a north star when technology presents them with endless possibilities but cannot tell them which possibilities are worth pursuing.
Together, these practices form what the Jesuit tradition calls “contemplatives in action” - people who can think deeply, navigate complexity, act decisively and revise their judgments when new evidence emerges.
They also ensure that critical thinking isn’t done in isolation. Through relationships, research, internships, community engagement and encounters across difference, students learn to consider the lives of people who may not be represented in the data or present in the room.
This is the education artificial intelligence makes more necessary: analytical strength powered by stronger judgment; knowledge made practical through experience; freedom moderated by a sense of responsibility; and personal purpose made impactful through alignment to the common good.
Pope Leo’s challenge
In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV considers artificial intelligence through the fundamental human questions of truth, work and freedom.
His concern is not that technology will become too capable. It is that humans could surrender too much of their own agency—that systems designed to predict, persuade and optimize may gradually weaken our capacity to seek truth, make free choices and recognize one another as people rather than data points.
When we met with him in Rome, Pope Leo placed real responsibility before Jesuit higher education. He spoke of discernment as a practical resource for decision-making and called us to pursue truth, walk with those on the margins, cultivate solidarity and help young people create a hope-filled future.
His message transcends any one religious tradition: technological progress is not the same as human progress. We must decide what our tools are for, and whom they will serve.
Proving what we claim
We have a powerful educational tradition, and it’s our responsibility to apply it consistently and deliver on the promise of Jesuit education for every student.
At John Carroll, this conviction is shaping a more coherent, personal and purposeful student experience—one in which students do not have to stumble upon what they need. We create an environment instead to curate and connect learning opportunities, surround students with coordinated teams of mentors and advisors who strengthen their capacity for discernment and human connection, and guarantee meaningful practice in consequential, real-world settings.
Yes, a Jesuit education should produce graduates who can use AI exceptionally well in their professional domain.
And they’ll also learn to recognize when information is inadequate, distorted or unjust.
And gain enough experience to interrogate what a system produces, enough humility to question their own assumptions, enough imagination to envision alternatives and enough courage to remain responsible for the decisions they make.
And understand that their abilities are not theirs alone.
Pope Leo describes the common good not as the accumulation of individual advantage, but as a shared good created through interdependence and collective responsibility. No one’s future can be separated from the future of others. That is the difference between preparing students merely to compete in an age of artificial intelligence and educating them to shape this “age of epochal change.”
Jesuit education has never been about personal benefit alone, even though we know the investment brings a significant return in income and employability. Its purpose has always been bigger than that.
We form people whose intelligence is joined to conscience, whose freedom is joined to responsibility and whose achievement is directed toward service. We form people for and with others. Not simply to succeed in the future, but to help decide what kind of future is worth building.
What I’ve reflected on since meeting Pope Leo and reading Magnifica Humanitas is that artificial intelligence does not make that mission obsolete.
It makes Jesuit education more necessary than ever.
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