Reimagining the University

Beyond the Liberal Arts Ideal

It’s a scandal that wasn’t about what everyone thought.

In December 2025, a psychology student at the University of Oklahoma received a failing grade on an essay that cited the Bible to challenge a peer-reviewed study’s premises about gender. The graduate teaching assistant who failed her said the essay didn’t answer the prompt.

The university suspended the grader, calling her decision “arbitrary.” The story went national. Commentators from across the political spectrum argued about academic freedom, religious bias, and whether “woke” ideology had captured the university.

As Hollis Robbins, writing on Substack, observes, they were looking at the wrong thing. Far from merely critiquing a single course or student, Robbins illuminates a systemic problem in higher education: the disconnect between the learning institutions claim to deliver and the capacities students actually acquire.

Her analysis s shows how assignments, courses, and assessment practices often fail to cultivate the critical, analytical, and ethical skills students need — offering a rare and clear-eyed diagnosis of a structural failure that affects millions of students nationwide.

The course at the center of the dispute — PSY 2603, Lifespan Development, a required course for all psychology majors at OU and a transferable general-education option nationwide — asked students to write a 650-word “reaction paper” to a 2014 empirical study on gender typicality and adolescent mental health.

The prompt offered eight options, including “your own thoughts about how development proceeds in the domain being researched” and “an application of the study or results to your own experiences.”

No critical analysis of methodology was required. No engagement with the study’s evidence was demanded. Anything would have been appropriate, Robbins observed, because “no brain work was required.”

The study itself, Robbins noted, was weak: cross-sectional, with a sample of 84 middle-school students from a single school, self-reported measures, modest effect sizes, and a design that cannot establish which direction causation runs — whether gender atypicality produces depression or depressed children report themselves as less typical.

When Robbins fed the paper to an AI model for analysis, it identified twenty distinct methodological weaknesses. The only defensible educational reason to assign such a paper, she argued, would be to teach students to identify bad methodology. The course did not do that.

“Everything that is wrong with American higher education,” Robbins wrote, “is right there in the list” of assignment prompts.

She is absolutely right. And the implications are profound. The Oklahoma controversy is not a story about a single bad course or a single grade dispute. It is a story about what happens when a credentialing system becomes systematically disconnected from genuine intellectual development.

Students in PSY 2603 receive real, transferable college credit for a course that does not require them to evaluate evidence, assess methodology, distinguish correlation from causation, or engage critically with scientific claims. The credential certifies a competency that the course does not develop. And because roughly 60,000 students a year take courses of this kind across the country, the scale of the mismatch is enormous.

The political debate over the Bible-citing student obscured the deeper issue. Right-wing defenders focused on protecting the student without questioning whether the credential she sought had any real intellectual weight. Left-wing defenders defended the grader, assuming that the discipline’s standards were being upheld.

Both sides treated the credentialing system as legitimate, arguing only about who was violating its rules. No one asked the more fundamental question: is the system itself actually producing the knowledge and skills it claims to produce?

That is the question this essay asks.

The Liberal Arts Illusion

I attended Oberlin College in the early 1970s, at the height of the liberal arts ideal’s cultural prestige. Oberlin had a storied history of progressive education, abolitionism, and intellectual rigor. Its faculty were accomplished scholars and committed teachers; my classmates were bright, motivated, and culturally engaged. By conventional measures, I received an excellent education.

Yet looking back, I am struck more by what my education failed to provide than by what it delivered.

My learning was a patchwork of isolated courses rather than a coherent intellectual journey. I studied English literature and history in depth, but no one helped me see how these disciplines connected to other fields or illuminated the challenges of the contemporary world.

I emerged with depth in a few areas and glaring gaps in others. My training in quantitative reasoning, statistics, and the scientific method was minimal. I was never required to tackle real-world problems or engage collaboratively in sustained projects.

Even at a small liberal arts college, meaningful mentorship was rare. I was fortunate, but most classmates moved through the system by meeting requirements, accumulating credits, and attending lectures — rarely being shaped into thinking, reflective beings.

Many of my courses were discussion-based, yet they did not teach students how to discuss: how to dissect an argument rigorously, question assumptions, or engage in sustained debate. The lecture still dominated instruction, and for most students, learning meant consuming content rather than participating in a true community of inquiry.

These experiences reveal a persistent gap between the liberal arts ideal and its everyday reality — a gap that, in my experience teaching undergraduates at a major research university today, has only grown wider.

Learning in the Age of Apathy and AI

My University of Texas at Austin students attend class irregularly. When they do show up, participation is sporadic. Ask them, and they’ll tell you they learn far more from extracurriculars — clubs, internships, research positions, student organizations, independent projects — than from the courses themselves. In practice, their education is neither personalized nor collaborative. It is a series of lectures delivered to students who are often elsewhere in body or mind.

The Robbins essay and my own classroom experience point to the same conclusion: the gap between what higher education promises and what it delivers is profound. The problem is not lazy students or lack of effort — it is a system designed for credential production rather than intellectual growth, for seat time rather than genuine development, for institutional convenience rather than pedagogical rigor.

A recent New York Times opinion essay by Stanford senior Theo Baker illustrates how AI intensifies these failures. Cheating is “omnipresent.” AI is used as a ghostwriter, a shortcut past the very difficulty that defines education.

Baker depicts a campus culture organized almost entirely around wealth extraction: who can drop out and launch a nine-figure company, who can flip real estate before graduation, who can sign an academic integrity attestation with ChatGPT open in the next window. “It’s just a little bit of fraud,” a friend observes — capturing the ambient ethical atmosphere with devastating accuracy.

This culture is not unique to Stanford, and it is not fundamentally about AI. Education was already being reduced to a vehicle for financial success before large language models arrived. AI did not create Baker’s problem. It made shortcuts faster and cheating easier to rationalize. It already exemplified the credential without intellectual development. AI simply magnifies the impact.

Yet Baker’s implied remedy — a return to humanistic education uncorrupted by technology — is insufficient. The liberal arts model, as traditionally practiced, was already failing to deliver genuine intellectual growth. The deeper problem is education experienced as transaction, not transformation. The credential is the point; the learning is incidental.

The solution requires a fundamentally new model — one that is meaningful, integrated, and truly transformative.

The Liberal Arts Promise — and Its Broken Reality

The traditional defense of liberal arts education rests on three central claims:

Breadth: Exposure to multiple ways of knowing — humanistic interpretation, historical analysis, scientific inquiry, mathematical reasoning, ethical argument — intended to produce a genuinely educated person rather than a narrow specialist.

Integration: The ability to connect insights across disciplines, to approach problems from multiple angles, and to think synthetically rather than within rigid frameworks.

Formation of the Whole Person: Intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, and civic development, rather than mere credentialing for future work.

At its best, the liberal arts tradition achieves these goals: cultivating people capable of navigating complexity, thinking independently, communicating persuasively, and contributing meaningfully to their communities. These ideals remain vital.

The problem is that in practice, the institution — its courses, requirements, incentives, and assessments — has drifted far from these ideals. Breadth often becomes superficial coverage. Integration rarely occurs across siloed departments. Formation of the whole person is overshadowed by transactional metrics, grade-focused evaluation, and credential-driven incentives. The liberal arts promise survives largely in rhetoric; in reality, it often fails to deliver.

Breadth Without Depth

Most liberal arts programs require students to take courses across multiple areas: a science course, a quantitative reasoning course, a history course, and a course engaging non-Western cultures.

In principle, these requirements expose students to diverse traditions and analytical frameworks. In practice, they are boxes to check rather than capacities to develop. Students choose convenient or easy options, take courses in isolation, and emerge with no deeper quantitative literacy, scientific reasoning, or humanistic insight than they had before.

A single course in statistics or biology, untethered from broader intellectual work, rarely produces lasting skills. A single course in art history or literary analysis, isolated from other classes, rarely fosters sustained engagement with aesthetic or cultural understanding. True breadth requires sustained, connected, and reinforced engagement across multiple contexts.

Fragmented Learning

Some curricula attempt integration through interdisciplinary seminars, senior capstones, or thematic core programs. Yet these efforts face structural obstacles: faculty are trained in specific disciplines, evaluated primarily for disciplinary research, and rewarded for teaching within their specialization.

Genuine integration requires crossing these boundaries — and institutions rarely provide the time, support, or incentives to do so.

Intellectual Formation Without Mentorship

The liberal arts ideal emphasizes the formation of the whole person. But true intellectual development demands mentorship: a sustained relationship with someone who knows the student, tracks growth over time, challenges weaknesses, and helps integrate experiences into self-knowledge.

At scale, this rarely exists. Students move through sequences of courses taught by faculty who see them for only a semester and know them primarily as authors of assignments submitted to a learning management system. Academic advising is largely bureaucratic, focused on navigating requirements rather than fostering development. Real mentorship exists, but only for the fortunate few who work closely with a faculty member on research or attract individualized attention.

Competency and Career Pathways: Strengths and Limits

The main market alternative to the traditional liberal arts is competency-based education: self-paced programs in which students demonstrate mastery of defined skills rather than accumulating seat time or credit hours. Institutions such as Western Governors University and Southern New Hampshire University have made this model accessible to adult learners, working parents, and first-generation students who cannot participate in a residential college experience.

Competency-based programs deserve credit for expanding access and acknowledging that time in class is a poor proxy for learning. But they face a critical vulnerability: in an era where AI can produce competent responses to conventional assessments, the model risks becoming a credentialing system rather than an educational one. Students can meet rubrics with AI-assisted essays without wrestling with the difficulty of constructing arguments, anticipating counterpoints, or revising claims. The skills may exist in theory; the certification process does not guarantee they are developed.

Pathways and What They Get Right

A third model — structured career pathways — also merits recognition. Nursing programs, engineering degrees, accounting curricula, culinary schools, and teacher preparation programs organize learning around coherent preparation for a specific vocation.

At their best, these programs integrate foundational knowledge, supervised practice, mentored skill development, and accountability to professional standards. They answer the fundamental student question: “What will I be able to do, and how will I demonstrate it?” Learning is organized around genuine stakes: the patient harmed by a nurse who doesn’t understand pharmacology, the bridge that fails if an engineer miscalculates loads. Pathways programs, when done well, combine theory and practice in ways the traditional liberal arts model rarely achieves.

Where Pathways Fall Short

Yet pathways programs share critical weaknesses with the liberal arts. They produce technically competent graduates but often neglect breadth, integration, and self-knowledge. A nursing graduate may master pharmacology but struggle with statistics, cross-cultural communication, or ethical reasoning in end-of-life care. An engineer may design structurally sound buildings but be uable to explain implications to non-technical audiences or understand social, regulatory, and environmental impact.

A second major failure is career illiteracy: a systematic mismatch between preparation and the labor market. Even vocational students often lack insight into sector trends, evolving skill demands, realistic career trajectories, and how to demonstrate capabilities in ways employers value. This is not a student failure; it is an institutional one. Programs teach what faculty know, reflecting outdated labor markets rather than the ones graduates will enter.

The pathways approach should not be abandoned. Its strengths — coherent preparation, practical grounding, and real-world stakes — must be preserved. Its weaknesses — narrow focus, inadequate integration, and labor-market illiteracy — must be corrected.

The model proposed below incorporates the strongest features of the pathways approach into a broader educational framework designed to foster intellectual breadth, holistic development, and meaningful personal growth. It combines technical mastery with synthetic thinking, sustained mentorship, and lifelong learning, aiming to produce graduates prepared not only for their careers but for meaningful, engaged lives.

A New Vision

I propose not a single fix but a truly integrated model: a combination of complementary educational experiences, each cultivating capacities the others cannot, and together forming something far greater than the sum of its parts. This model rests on six key components.

Component One: The Intellectual Cohort

At the heart of the model is the cohort: a small, sustained group of roughly 20 students working closely with a faculty mentor over an extended period — at least a full academic year — on a complex problem no single discipline can solve.

This is not a course. Courses have beginnings, middles, and ends; cohorts have a trajectory. Students develop evolving intellectual relationships, challenge one another’s assumptions, cultivate a shared vocabulary, and explore questions of lasting significance. The cohort embodies what Michael Oakeshott called a “conversation” — a sustained, mutual inquiry into questions that matter, not a mere exchange of information.

For example, a cohort exploring “What does democracy require, and why is it under threat?” would engage deeply across disciplines. Students would read the canonical liberal political philosophers (Locke, Mill, Tocqueville, Madison), critics of democracy (Schmitt, Tocqueville’s darker passages, contemporary illiberal theorists), empirical social scientists studying polarization (Levitsky and Ziblatt, Pippa Norris, Roberto Foa), and historians examining democratic experiments across cultures.

They would debate, write, revise, and argue. They would invite guest speakers — politicians, journalists, activists, political scientists — and rigorously interrogate them. They would respond to unfolding events in real time, applying evolving frameworks. The work would be substantial: analytical essays, not short responses.

The faculty mentor is not a lecturer. She is a curator of intellectual experience, a model of serious inquiry, and a mentor in the fullest sense: noticing when students are capable of more, challenging them rigorously, and creating conditions in which genuine intellectual development — uncomfortable, exhilarating, transformative — becomes possible.

Historical precedents show the model’s promise. Oxbridge tutorials provide intensive, mentored engagement, though limited by one-on-one structure and assumptions about prior independence. Danish folk high schools foster inquiry around shared problems and values. Socratic seminars in leading K–12 programs demonstrate that structured, text-based dialogue can transform students’ capacity for argument and self-understanding. Even in higher education, the experiences students report as most transformative are not their best courses but their most significant mentored relationships — the professors who took them seriously, pushed them, and demanded genuine engagement.

The cohort model makes these experiences the rule, not the exception, placing sustained, mentored, interdisciplinary inquiry at the center of the university experience.

Component Two: Disciplinary Breadth with Genuine Integration

The second component addresses the liberal arts model’s deepest flaw: the promise of breadth without true integration. Students should not merely complete a distribution of courses; they must develop the analytical frameworks, methods of inquiry, and habits of mind characteristic of multiple intellectual traditions. Checking boxes satisfies the first; genuine intellectual formation demands sustained, structured, and progressively deepening engagement.

Quantitative and statistical reasoning, for example, unfolds across multiple courses and contexts. Students begin with fundamental concepts — what a probability distribution conveys, the meaning and limits of confidence intervals, the distinction between correlation and causation — and then encounter these ideas in social science surveys, public health data, economic analysis, and environmental models. The goal is not simply solving a test problem but cultivating the habit of asking: “How do we know this, and with what confidence?”

Scientific reasoning follows a similar trajectory. Students explore the history and philosophy of science — how consensus forms, how it can be challenged, the significance of replication, and the limits of peer review — alongside direct engagement with pressing civic and ethical issues: climate change, genetic engineering, AI, and pharmaceutical testing. True scientific literacy is the ability to read a paper critically, evaluate evidence, and interpret uncertainty responsibly.

Historical thinking develops through sustained engagement with case studies that illuminate contingent, situated human experience. Students ask not “What happened in 1789?” but “How do social orders break down, and what replaces them?” — deriving lessons relevant to contemporary challenges.

Humanistic interpretation is cultivated through disciplined engagement with texts, art, music, and performance. Students learn to read, observe, and listen carefully, constructing meaning and articulating why it matters.

Ethical reasoning is woven throughout the curriculum, applied to the real-world problems explored in cohorts and projects. Students confront moral complexity, evaluate competing frameworks, and develop coherent, reasoned judgments.

Integration is essential. Students must apply these frameworks repeatedly and from multiple angles, learning to combine them in sophisticated, synthetic ways. Only then does breadth become genuine intellectual formation rather than mere exposure, and exposure become a source of real intellectual power.

Component Three: AI as Intellectual Interlocutor

Artificial intelligence offers one of the most significant pedagogical opportunities in decades — if used correctly. Concerns about AI as a ghostwriter, a cheating tool, or a shortcut are real, but they miss the larger point: AI can accelerate learning when treated as a critical interlocutor.

AI functions as a Socratic partner: it never tires, never dismisses questions, and can generate objections to test a claim. Students can pose questions like, “What is the strongest counterargument to this claim?” or “What evidence supports the opposing view?” Essays emerge in dialogue with AI, producing work that is stronger, more nuanced, and intellectually honest than solo effort alone.

This requires rethinking writing instruction. The goal is no longer polished prose; it is clear thinking: organizing ideas, identifying counterarguments, making defensible claims, and revising them rigorously.

Similarly, research skills must evolve. The essential competency is not gathering information but evaluating sources, identifying assumptions, and formulating questions that push knowledge forward.

AI magnifies these opportunities but requires structured engagement: assignments must distinguish between independent work, AI-assisted inquiry, and collaborative AI research to ensure genuine learning.

Component Four: Team-Based, Project-Driven Learning

Project-based learning places students in teams tackling complex, real-world problems that carry meaningful stakes and demand interdisciplinary integration. These projects are where knowledge meets judgment and where students apply capacities cultivated in cohorts, integrated curricula, and AI-supported exercises.

For instance, a team investigating social media’s impact on political polarization might design surveys, conduct statistical analyses, interpret empirical literature, examine historical precedents, and evaluate ethical implications of data use. Their work culminates in reports, presentations, and actionable recommendations — outcomes no single course could produce.

Collaboration is essential. Students develop leadership, coordination, constructive disagreement, and followership through sustained interdependence. Lectures cannot replicate this experience. Only real consequences teach the dynamics of teamwork.

Real-world stakes heighten engagement. Students whose findings will influence a local organization, government agency, or other external body approach problems with seriousness and accountability. Simulated assignments cannot replicate this depth of learning.

Component Five: Longitudinal, Personalized Development

The fifth component is the connective tissue of the model: longitudinal advising, reflective portfolios, and individualized development planning. Each student is treated not as a collection of credit hours, but as a person with a distinctive intellectual profile, strengths, weaknesses, and a developmental trajectory that unfolds over years, not semesters.

Contemporary higher education rarely provides this. Advising is episodic, bureaucratic, and transactional — focused on scheduling, graduation requirements, and course navigation. No one tracks the student’s overall intellectual growth or offers the sustained mentorship that turns disconnected courses into a coherent, transformative education.

True longitudinal advising begins with a deep intake process: understanding a student’s thinking patterns, interests, and developmental needs. It continues through regular, substantive developmental dialogues, in which advisor and student assess progress, identify patterns in work, and plan the next stages of growth. The process culminates not in a transcript, but in a developmental portfolio — a curated record of intellectual evolution, including reflective accounts of learning, struggle, and growth.

The portfolio disciplines students to examine themselves honestly, articulate how their thinking has evolved, and identify new frontiers of growth. This practice cultivates genuine self-knowledge, among the most important outcomes higher education can provide.

AI can amplify this process: analyzing patterns in student work, identifying consistent strengths and weaknesses, providing feedback, and generating calibrated challenges. But the essential relationship — sustained human mentorship — cannot be automated. It demands time, attention, and intimate knowledge of the individual.

Component Six: Career Pathways and Labor Market Literacy

The sixth component ensures education is genuinely preparatory for work and life, rather than a superficial credential. Students engage with career pathways and labor markets as a fully integrated part of their learning, not an afterthought.

Many undergraduates, even in pre-professional programs, have limited understanding of the sectors they will enter. They know job titles but lack insight into daily responsibilities, evolving demands, critical skills, and how to demonstrate those skills effectively. This is an institutional design flaw. Programs typically teach what faculty know, reflecting labor markets of decades past rather than the ones graduates will actually face.

In this model, students enter a career pathway — such as health, business and finance, technology, education, law and policy, the arts, or engineering — which shapes but does not dictate their program. Pathway affiliation guides project-based work, professional engagement, and sector-specific inquiry.

For example, a health student might explore healthcare organization, policy, and delivery, meeting nurses, administrators, and technologists while assessing how AI and automation impact roles. A business student examines evolving sector trends, skills priorities, and entrepreneurial pathways. An engineering student studies technical, regulatory, and social contexts affecting design and practice.

Career pathway work is fully integrated with the model’s other components. Cohort-based inquiry connects to the pathway. Projects address real sector problems. AI supports research and analysis applied to industry questions. Longitudinal advising ensures students maintain a coherent portfolio of pathway-relevant skills.

As Theo Baker notes, students often seek shortcuts — using AI to game credentialing systems — when education feels disconnected from purpose. When learning is meaningful, integrated, and directly connected to the world students will inhabit, shortcuts lose their appeal. Career pathway integration is not vocationalism. It is recognition that students deserve education grounded in real-world stakes, challenges, and opportunities.

What This Would Actually Require

Implementing this model would demand a fundamental reconceptualization of what a university is and does, and it challenges deeply entrenched features of American higher education.

Faculty incentive structures currently reward research productivity over teaching and mentorship. A professor investing the time to guide a genuine cohort — reading students’ work deeply, meeting regularly, designing sustained intellectual experiences — often makes a career sacrifice. Real change requires restructuring tenure and promotion to value pedagogical engagement, confronting hierarchies that treat teaching as secondary to scholarship.

Accreditation and financial models present additional obstacles. Cohorts do not fit neatly into three-credit courses. Projects defy semester boundaries. Longitudinal portfolios cannot be reduced to a GPA. Scaling this model demands collaboration with accreditors to recognize alternative measures of student development — a slow, complex process, but one that some innovative institutions have already begun to navigate.

Student preparation and expectation is another barrier. Many enter college trained to optimize grades and test scores. Open-ended, uncertain, and demanding intellectual work can initially feel alien. Learning to embrace difficulty, to find the uncertainty of inquiry energizing rather than anxiety-inducing, is itself a developmental achievement that requires patient guidance and cultural recalibration.

Why This Matters

The stakes for higher education — and for society — are immense. The traditional model assumes education is content transmission from expert instructors to passive recipients. In a world where information is freely available, this premise is increasingly untenable. What is scarce is judgment: the ability to evaluate evidence critically, synthesize across domains, prioritize what matters, communicate persuasively to diverse audiences, and act wisely in morally complex situations. These are precisely the capacities AI cannot replicate, and precisely the capacities today’s graduates most need.

Conventional higher education has failed to deliver on its promises. Students who are disengaged, bored, and learning more outside the classroom than inside are being shortchanged. Even prestigious institutions that tout liberal education while offering half-empty lectures are failing the trust of their students. A university that truly cultivates judgment, creativity, ethical reasoning, and self-knowledge must rethink structure, pedagogy, and incentives — comprehensively, not superficially.

The stakes extend beyond individual development. Democratic societies rely on citizens capable of critical reasoning, empathetic engagement, and tolerance for complexity. The vitality of civic life depends on the capacities universities cultivate. Institutions that succeed in this mission are not simply educating individuals; they are sustaining democracy itself.

This model is ambitious. It is disruptive. It challenges incentives, accreditation, pedagogy, and expectations. Yet it is feasible. It builds on historically successful practices, leverages technological advances like AI to expand human mentorship, and responds to widely recognized institutional failures.

This is not merely an educational blueprint. It is a call to action.

Higher education in the United States — even at its most celebrated institutions — cannot remain as it is. Students need, and increasingly demand, an education that is rigorous, meaningful, engaging, and explicitly practical.

The future of the university depends on meeting that challenge.