This op-ed by University of Dayton President Eric F. Spina and Brother Tim Driscoll, S.M., UD vice president for mission and rector, appeared on Inside Higher Education June 2, 2026.
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” on artificial intelligence and the human person, is one of the most direct and specific challenges to higher education issued by a global figure in recent memory.
It should be considered by every college president from public flagships to community colleges, private and public, because its argument does not depend on shared faith. It speaks to our shared stakes: whether our graduates can still think, judge and do work that machines cannot or should not.
Pope Leo writes, “Without careful attention, an educational system lacking in a love for truth may emerge, in which an incessant flow of information replaces the essential exercise of research, reflection and discernment. As knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought.”
While AI is poised to reshape the future as quickly as it analyzes data, it is imperative that our institutions provide our students an education that doesn’t have an expiration date.
The call comes even as many in our industry must consolidate majors, reduce faculty numbers and strategize how to shore up budgets while charting a future that can withstand pressure from shrinking demographics, declining family budgets and challenging federal regulations. With the introduction of AI, higher education must offer what AI cannot: shared time, trustworthy relationships and the slow work of teaching students to connect ideas across fields, to make sense of complexity and to tell what is true from what is not (see paragraph 137’s articulation of this “principal challenge” facing universities).
What does it mean to respond?
First, the version of AI literacy that has spread fastest across higher education, including how to prompt, how to cite and how to detect, is not the literacy the encyclical is asking for. Paragraph 143 names school as “the place where new generations can learn to seek and love the truth.” Graduates must be able to see the impact of these systems, whom they displace and their effect on the truth and society. Yet higher education should be honest that most AI-in-the-curriculum efforts are still training students to use these systems, not to recognize when they are being asked to build something the encyclical calls “questionable” from a human and moral perspective (paragraph 209).
Second, the parts of the curriculum that teach synthesis across disciplines — the seminars, the capstones, the writing-intensive courses, the humanities requirements — are precisely the parts we cannot cut. Paragraph 198 warns that judgment “cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person.” That sentence is the economic argument for the humanities. Cut those courses and you cut the very skills that make a graduate irreplaceable. A student who can hold complexity, exercise judgment and recognize the person in front of them is a student whose work will not be automated away.
Third, the encyclical’s most uncomfortable claim for higher education is not about curriculum. It is about what our graduates will be asked to build. Pope Leo writes that the reduction of human life to an algorithm — in warfare, in policing, in the management of human beings at scale — diminishes us all. Our graduates are the engineers, analysts, clinicians and managers who will be asked to implement those systems. If we send them out with technical capability and no moral framework, we have trained the workforce the encyclical is warning against. Every institution, religious or not, has to decide whether it is willing to form the consciences of its students or only their résumés.
Pope Leo asked higher education a direct question: In a moment when machines are deciding who gets hired, who gets a loan, who gets targeted, will universities still form people capable of the conscience, personal responsibility and recognition of the other as a person that no algorithm can supply?
Photo by Brigham Fisher.