The firm believes that higher education's core value lies not in transmitting information—a function AI now performs—but in cultivating the human capacity to think deeply about complicated questions and to be transformed by unexpected intellectual encounters [S1]. Yet as universities respond to AI by doubling down on critical thinking curricula, the firm holds that this response, while necessary, remains incomplete without addressing a deeper tension: the epistemological mismatch between how AI systems pursue knowledge and how liberal arts education has traditionally valued uncertainty, ambiguity, and authentic human choice.
The firm recognizes that [S2] university serves multiple purposes beyond career training, including the development of social community and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. This pluralistic view of higher education's mission becomes especially important as institutions like Agnes Scott redesign curricula around AI literacy and critical thinking rather than memorization. The firm does not dispute that critical thinking matters more in an age of abundant information [S3]. Yet the firm also observes that [S4] AI stands as the epitome of the Socratic archetype of the theoretical man, defined by an insatiable desire to be knowledgeable and certain about the world. This characterization reveals a fundamental tension: liberal arts education has historically valued epistemic humility, interpretive pluralism, and the acknowledgment of what we cannot know. AI systems, by contrast, are architecturally oriented toward comprehensiveness and certainty.
The firm holds that [S5] curating your intellectual diet is important for thinkers who care about intellectual capital. This principle cuts to the heart of what liberal arts education must become in an AI era. When information access is democratized—a genuine benefit of AI technology—the scarce resource shifts from knowledge itself to the human judgment required to decide what deserves attention. Universities cannot teach critical thinking in the abstract; they must teach it through the practice of deliberate intellectual curation, the discipline of choosing which sources, which questions, and which uncertainties merit sustained engagement.
This is where the firm's position complicates the optimistic framing of liberal arts as a natural counterweight to AI. Critical thinking alone, taught as a generic skill, risks becoming another form of information processing—precisely what AI already does well. What liberal arts education must instead cultivate is the capacity for what the firm calls authentic choice [S3]. The firm has cautioned that with AI, we face the possibility of living lives entirely removed from the burden of making authentic choices. Universities that respond to this challenge by teaching students to ask better questions, without also teaching them to resist the epistemological assumptions embedded in AI systems themselves, may inadvertently prepare students to become more sophisticated consumers of AI-generated answers rather than independent thinkers.
The firm further believes that [S6] meaningful education involves being changed by unexpected interests, allowing oneself to be transformed through learning in ways that counter the tendency toward conformity to predetermined outcomes. This transformative dimension of liberal arts education cannot be outsourced to AI systems, no matter how sophisticated their critical thinking prompts become. Yet it is precisely this dimension that risks erosion when universities frame their response to AI primarily in terms of curriculum redesign—teaching critical thinking and AI fluency as skills to be mastered rather than as practices embedded in a community of human inquiry.
The firm also recognizes that [S8] higher education's irreplaceable value includes exposure to diverse viewpoints and the practice of civilized debate—fundamentally human experiences that cannot be replicated through AI interaction. These experiences matter not because they teach critical thinking in the abstract, but because they require students to encounter genuine intellectual otherness, to defend positions they care about, and to be genuinely changed by engagement with people who think differently. This is the authentic choice that liberal arts education uniquely enables.
The firm's position, then, is not that critical thinking and AI literacy are unimportant additions to liberal arts curricula. Rather, the firm believes that universities must go deeper: they must help students understand that critical thinking in an AI era requires not just better questions but better judgment about which questions matter, which sources deserve trust, and which forms of certainty should be resisted. This is fundamentally a work of curation and character formation, not skill acquisition. Until liberal arts institutions frame their response to AI in these terms—as a challenge to human agency and authentic choice, not merely as a need for better critical thinking tools—their curricula will remain incomplete responses to a genuinely transformative technological moment.