Provost Bonnie Gunzenhauser and Director of Teaching Innovation Malia McAndrew on Silicon Valley, human speed, and the enduring power of a Jesuit education in an automated world.
This summer, Bonnie Gunzenhauser, Provost and Academic Vice President, and Malia McAndrew, Director of Teaching Innovation + Enrichment, traveled to Silicon Valley to help chart the future of Jesuit higher education in the age of artificial intelligence.
Attending the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU) AI Summit at the University of San Francisco, they stepped directly into the boardrooms and research labs of tech giants like Apple, Adobe, and Salesforce. Below is a conversation exploring their three-day journey across the Bay Area—a mission driven by a clear goal: to examine the frontier where cutting-edge technology meets human discernment, ensuring John Carroll University remains at the leading edge of academic distinction.
In the following conversation, Bonnie and Malia sit down to reflect on their key takeaways from Silicon Valley, discussing how JCU is centering its longstanding Jesuit values as it engages with cutting-edge tech to shape the future of teaching and learning.
JCU: How was your trip to Silicon Valley and the AJCU AI Summit?
Bonnie: It was an invaluable experience. Our AJCU network of 27 universities across the country is a real gift and such a terrific resource for us. In this case, the provost at the University of San Francisco decided we could all benefit from sharing ideas, information, and approaches around artificial intelligence (AI). She leveraged her location in the Bay Area to provide hands-on opportunities to engage with tech companies and AI thought leaders—like Apple, Adobe, Salesforce, and Google DeepMind – to get insights into future directions of AI, and what skills our students and graduates need in order to thrive in an AI-enabled future. And the academic leaders present also had very rich conversations about how these insights might play out in the programming we offer on our campuses.
These conversations were so valuable that we’ve structured ourselves into an ongoing group. . I’ll be serving on the steering committee, and I’m looking forward to an ongoing partnership grounded in our common Jesuit values as we continue to discern the best ways for our institutions to engage with and prepare our students for an AI-inflected world. .
Malia: I found our trip reassuring! Because higher education is at a critical decision point, and every university is having to navigate changes in the ecosystem in which students learn and how we are preparing them for their next step in light of these changes. For those of us who mentor and care for the whole person, we are interested in questions much bigger than simply ‘How can I be more efficient with a machine?’ Or ‘How much output can it produce for me?’ We're stepping back and asking: What should we produce, both the minds of our human students and in the physical world with the assistance of AI? As Bonnie said, it was powerful to be with other Jesuit schools that also have a deep commitment to our shared mission.
Bonnie: Malia's words remind me of a passage from Pope Leo’s first papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Here Pope Leo is reflecting on how to ensure human flourishing in an age of AI. One claim that struck me was this: "Technological progress, valuable in itself, requires careful discernment of the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues. If technological development advances without a corresponding ethical and social progress, the result may be an increase in means without a growth in humanity—having more without being more."
How you do that practically is the hard part, but these words from Pope Leo give clarity to our purpose here at JCU when it comes to how we thoughtfully integrate AI throughout our three colleges in order to best prepare our students for all aspects of their future.
I was also struck by something that one of our AJCU colleagues observed during our time in San Francisco. He consistently asserted that "AI is not fundamentally a technological issue. It's a change management issue."
That framework clicked for me. Technology is only one piece; the real challenge is adapting how we teach, how we prepare students to approach the job market, and how we operate as an institution. Adapting to change is something higher education does continuously—and given the durability of Jesuit higher education, with its a 500-year-old tradition, we at John Carroll and in the AJCU have a long track record of success in this regard.. If AI is ultimately about managing change, we are remarkably well-suited to lead the way.
Malia: Yeah, I agree with Bonnie. Part of the AI shift is about reminding our students that while the world is moving fast, it's still okay to be human. The bots can work at bot speed, but I only work at human speed. Our 18-year-old incoming students need time to learn, discern, and make mistakes. We're committed to their human speed.
JCU: There's an interesting shift happening. As AI evolves, many people are turned off by anything disconnected from real human experience. We see it with phrases like 'AI slop'—it’s often obvious when the human touch is missing. When we create things without that foundation, it doesn't resonate; it’s just noise.
Malia: And there is no one way to be human – when something is too polished or frictionless, you can't see the human side. Humans have jagged edges, and our idiosyncrasies make us unique. Being able to develop your own voice in a world with increasingly easy ways to bypass that hard-won growth process makes it only more important to put time into discovering and expressing your authentic self.
JCU: Was there any discussion during your trip about AI over-use causing critical thinking muscles to atrophy? Where does the value of a liberal arts education fit into that equation?
Malia: When we were talking to one of the engineers at a leading AI firm, he was saying: "We see AI slop produced even within our own company." And he said that's why they want to look at ways to measure employee influence—not just whether an engineer can create more output, but whether their way of thinking and working positively affects other people at the company and how they are influencing the work that comes out at the end of all of it.
Bonnie: He was clear that he still cares about basic skills and content knowledge – for example, it’s still critical for programmers and engineers to understand foundational Stats 101 concepts and practices, and he probes for this knowledge in job interviews. Machines can run the numbers, but you need to be able to verify the output. True discernment is an earned human skill, not something you just prompt a tool to give you.
Malia: Bonnie and I were trained in a very analog world. I know how to use a card catalog and a fold-up physical map, as well online databases, and now AI tools. I have a long repository of life experiences in my head that have shaped my thinking. Giving our students multiple opportunities to develop their own critical thinking skills, and motivating them to master those hard won foundational literacies in a world that is telling them they don’t really have to is our main focus right now.
Bonnie: That's the critical thing: how do you convince an 18-year-old to build that repository? To sit for hours with the Iliad or the Odyssey? Yes, there are ways to make tasks easier, but sometimes we want you to do the hard thing so you learn the statistics and build that mental architecture. Then you can sit back, evaluate, and develop your own voice or taste.
Malia: On the teaching and learning side, we're going back to the things we've always known work: developing relationships with students and showing them day by day that we care about their development as humans. It’s most certainly not about having a better AI detectors for policing, it’s about having a clear scaffolding of learning experiences, and explaining why we want you to learn the skills we’re asking you to develop, even if it’s hard and takes a long time. It's about stressing that you both need to develop that muscle for yourself and become expert in tools that can work faster than you.
JCU: The friction is the point.
Malia: Correct. Yes.
JCU: But it's difficult for students because we live in a world where there is less and less friction. With analog tools, the friction is built-in. Has any of this informed your game plan for John Carroll?
Malia: Absolutely. Coming back from Silicon Valley, we felt even more reassured in our foundational work on campus. Bonnie and I are mapping out how we can continue to support our faculty, who also have been thinking a lot about all of this in their departments for some time.
This fall we're doing three key things:
- A four-part faculty/staff reading group on Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, led by Ed Hahnenberg, the Breen Chair in Catholic Theology, and Paul Murphy, a historian and the Director of Catholic Studies, to understand the text.
- A panel of local John Carroll experts to discuss AI and what its implications mean for our campus.
- A faculty learning group on the humanities in an era of emerging technologies, focused on creating consistent pedagogical responses across our classrooms.
If students hear "slow down", “learn the fundamentals” from just one person, it's easy to push off. But if we present a united, consistent front—the front we've always had, re-articulated for this moment—it sticks.
Bonnie: Additionally, everyone in these industries struggles with hiring. The industry folks we talked with said that probably 60% of the applications they receive aren't necessarily real. They emphasized the importance of internships and job shadowing to make human connections and build the first nodes in your referral network.
The kind of pre-professional development we offer in our Onward Launch initiative might feel like "friction" compared to submitting a resume on Indeed, but the human face of understanding your skills and value is still very much alive. Supporting our students in building those human relationships is a major priority - and differentiator - for us.
JCU: AI can't replicate that. You can't have a close human relationship with a large language learning model, but you can with a mentor. If I work at a company, I’d be more inclined to give someone I've mentored an opportunity over equally qualified applicants who I don’t know.
Malia: That's where the Jesuit advantage comes in. Students need to build connections, but with nearly 30% of our incoming class being first-generation college students, our global Jesuit network is a game-changer. If places like Silicon Valley mostly hire through elite circles, how does a kid from outside of that world break in? Part of our job here at JCU is to develop talented people from everywhere and connect them into wider opportunities.
JCU: And our alumni network is unusually supportive and widespread. John Carroll alumni genuinely enjoy helping their own.
Bonnie: And thinking about other networks, the AJCU colleges and universities are always looking for ways to collaborate and work together, and our approach to AI is a genuine point of commonality. In practical terms, could we leverage a shared AJCU Claude or Claude/LLM license across campuses rather than university-by-university? These kinds of conversations might help us to make common cause in a new way.
Malia: Oh, that reminds me of one final take away from our trip to San Francisco that I wanted to mention. It's what some in places like Silicon Valley have called the rise of the 'individual contributor.' You’re no longer hired strictly for a tech role or a people role—you have to excel at presentation, writing, and the tech stack. In higher ed, we've always called that interdisciplinary learning. A Jesuit core education trains students never to say, 'I'm a science major who hates writing,' or 'I'm a history major who can't do math.' Instead, this ability to express competence across disciplines is what creates true academic distinction at JCU. It’s the difference between producing workers who do just one thing and graduating ethical leaders who know how to learn and grow and deploy multiple tools with integrity and purpose over the course of a lifetime.
