J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (00:00) Welcome to the InforMaven AI Update, a podcast for higher education administrators to discuss the practical use of AI and intelligent agents. I'm J.D. Mosley-Matchit, the founder and CEO of InforMaven, a company that helps you work smarter by harnessing the power of intelligent agents. And this month, our guest is Dr. Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University. He's a futurist and the author of multiple scholarly books, including Universities on Fire and Peak Higher Ed. He's also the creator of the Future Trends Forum video program. Welcome to the podcast, Bryan. Bryan Alexander, PhD (00:40) Well, thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (00:43) I've been a fan for years because of the Future Trends Forum. The range of topics you and your guests cover is amazing. And all of it's focused on the future of higher education. So why don't you tell us about that discussion forum? When and why did you start it? Bryan Alexander, PhD (01:02) Sure. I'm so glad that it's meaningful for you. I started this almost 10 years ago to this date, and I wanted to do a couple of things. I wanted to set aside a place for good conversations about the future of higher education. And I wanted to make sure that it was community driven, that I wouldn't be the only interlocutor, that we wouldn't just have one regular guest, but that we'd have a lot of people and the audience could drive things. So the lowercase D democratic kind of ethos. And we've been doing it with all kinds of developments, which we'll talk about in a few weeks. Ever since we meet once a week, about 51 shows a year. That's an hour long program. And every week we have a different guest or a couple of guests who brings us some part of the puzzle of the future of higher ed. So last week ⁓ we had Dr. Michael Mann, one of the world's leading climate scientists. Next week we have Dr. Pete Hotez, who is a world leader in public health. Both of them talking about science and how to do science in these troubled times. And then we have scholars on a whole range of issues. I love the community so much. They ask fantastic questions and every conversation is just so rich. And JD, you're a part of that. Thank you for making it work. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (02:19) Well, thank you. This podcast is laser focused on higher education administrators using AI for good. So let's begin with this first question. Based on the research you've done and the people you've interviewed, how are campuses currently using AI and do you think that will change in 2026? Bryan Alexander, PhD (02:42) They're using it in a wide range of ways. And ⁓ I think 2026 may be decisive. So if we think about it in terms of teaching and learning, we see a wide range of uses. First of all, there's just the unstoppable force of students using AI for a range of things, for making stuff. And that might be making a presentation, making images, making video, making music, making a paper to cheat on an exam, ⁓ making stuff. They're using it for conversation. know, just having a back and forth like you and I are doing now in order to pass the time to get emotional support to help them with a difficult study object. One of my students had a great idea. He kept uploading challenging materials from our class and asking ChatGPT or Gemini questions about it. Like give me this is a theoretical passage. Give me real world examples, or this is a challenging passage. Help me see it another We also see it being used in research for related principles, for making materials. And again, I'm trying to describe this neutrally because I think some of these uses are fascinating and positive. Some of these are ⁓ negative depending on the context, but these are all in play. In terms of administration, administration gets to respond to this, which has all kinds of challenges, which are often unresolved. So we have, for example, some faculty who would like to see AI blocked or sequestered. So there's a massive administrative challenge for that at the IT level and at the policy level. There's the question of when a campus does render access to AI, how do you license that at the enterprise level? Again, that's a major challenge for enterprise IT, which is also a challenge for financing, because this is pretty expensive stuff. We think about a whole range of policies. So to what extent do we, how do you integrate AI into an economic integrity policy? How do you support AI in terms of teaching students, faculty and staff to use it. So does that go through, for example, professional development through a provost? Does it go through a teaching and learning center? Do you outsource this to off campus supporters? Do you leave people on their own? Do you devolve decisions about this to individual colleges or to departments or other units? Then there's questions of outside partnerships. Thinking about partnering with external companies like the California State University System partnered with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT access to their entire system of, I think it's 19 universities. The University of Michigan and Arizona State University did something similar. But also do you, how do you connect with outside businesses and nonprofits as well as the public sector when they're trying to figure out how to hire students for a post AI world? So what kind of degrees are they looking for? What kind of general education preparation are they looking for? And there's no consensus on that. That's completely open. And I think community colleges are pretty much in the lead about this. But behind all this going on at the administrative level, there are plenty of AI uses. And in general, it's hard to get good data on AI uses in academia because there aren't a lot of polls and surveys. Some of them are badly designed, but also they're all based on self-reporting. And people have all kinds of incentives to offer, shall we say, creative responses. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (05:33) Okay. Bryan Alexander, PhD (06:01) to questions about this. And I haven't yet seen one that looks hard at how administrators, staff, and faculty in their back-end role are using ⁓ Generative AI. I mean, anecdotally, I can observe quite a few of them using it for all kinds of writing purposes, creating grant proposals, RFPs. I was talking to a VP who works with external partnerships. He just got a big slug of legal data from a state, an 800-page document. So he fed it into NotebookLM, how to translate it and work with this. But we, don't know how widespread that is. We don't know how supportive it is. I mean, I think overall at the administrative side, higher ed is still scrambling to grapple with this technology, even though it's three plus years after ChatGPT 3.0 came out. That's a long answer to your good question. Sorry to go on so long. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (06:31) Thanks. It's so true. No, that's great. In fact, it was a perfect segue into question number two. AI as a technology is here. The genie is not going back into the bottle. So why are some academics continuing to be vehemently opposed to AI? And is there anything helpful that institutional leaders can do? Bryan Alexander, PhD (07:16) Well, the academics that I read, listen to, talk with ⁓ tell me, guess, two different buckets of critique. In one bucket, they have a critique that we could call ethical or political to say that Generative AI is immoral, dangerous, problematic. And the reasons are pretty well established. They'll argue that Generative AI reproduces certain forms of inequality from gender to race to religion to geography. They'll argue that it has horrible labor practices. They'll argue that it reproduces colonialism in the sense that Generative AI is very much a first world developed nation technology and that you could see it as exploiting and extracting wealth from the developing world. And there are other critiques as well. In the second bucket is the practical, on the ground, and also professional critique of what it means for the teaching and learning. So you'll have faculty who will say this is degrading my students' abilities to learn, that it's harming their ability to practice writing, that it's reducing their ability to wrestle with complicated texts and problems. Now, I usually hear this from writing faculty and faculty in the humanities, but it's still pretty widespread. And what they call for really depends. Some of them will say they would like to have an end to any AI access in their classroom at the physical level. And so for them, that might mean banning all devices, phones, laptops, tablets, desktops. For some of them, it's a policy. simply excluding that. And I've questioned them and said, well, what do you do when they leave your classroom? And then they said, well, then I can't control that. And so at least I can make my classroom an AI free space. And how I think one reason that we have seen relatively few campus strategic engagements and policy engagements with AI is in part because of this longstanding critique and opposition where presidents and provosts feel they cannot impose an AI engagement when they might face open revolt from a chunk of the professoria. Now, this varies from place to place, has all kinds of local contours, but I think that's generally in place. Beyond, to answer your last part of your question, I think administrators of all levels, from department chairs to presidents, state boards, private boards, can simply listen and engaging conversations about this because this is still an emerging technology that is still very complex and changing on a daily basis. There is a lot of hard thinking going on. And when you have a professional academic in philosophy, in composition, in religious studies, in history, offering their critique, it's worth listening to and worth engaging in. In 2025, 2026, having disagreeable conversations can be challenging, but I think academics should be good at this and we should be ready to have that kind of conversation. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (10:12) Are there any institutions that are structuring their use of AI in interesting ways? Bryan Alexander, PhD (10:18) I mentioned a couple of them. So my alma mater, the University of Michigan has a huge computing power on campus. They've got a lot of great computer science program. They have a lot of technologists. It's a very powerful engineering school. So they are building and building all kinds of open source tools. And this is a very, important point for your listeners that a lot of what gets the attention are the big proprietary AI projects. So you think about ChatGPT from OpenAI, you think about Microsoft's Copilot, you think about Gemini from Google, and so on. And these are powerful tools, it's very, important to see this. But there's also an open source wing, which is revolutionary and progressing really, really rapidly. In fact, looking at Silicon Valley, a lot of workers will actually be using open source tools while they develop proprietary ones. ⁓ China has developed an incredible AI industry by... building on and then building out open source tools like DeepSeek, for example. And so this is one opportunity that academia hasn't really engaged with, both in the research wing and the teaching wing to have students and faculty explore open source tools, but also in the operational wing to save money and to use open source tools. So the University of Michigan is doing that, which I think is pretty exciting. To pick an incompletely different example would be Bowdoin College, a small liberal arts college in Maine which got a donation from a pretty interesting figure, Reed Hastings, the one of the founders of Netflix. And he gave them a few, I want to say $100 million, I have to look it up, to establish a center for AI, but in the liberal arts tradition. So you get an interdisciplinary center, with lot of strengths in the humanities, you get integration with the student body because the liberal arts, among other things, has a lot of undergrads doing research. And you also have a very high-touch system. It's a small campus and you have a lot of close relationships between faculty, staff and students so they can really grapple with AI as a community. Here's another one. Montclair State ⁓ had, I want to say 14 different committees working on AI. I might be wrong, it might be just 12, but they were covering it from all kinds of angles, from AI in the library, to AI enterprise software, to AI in the classroom. And they were just tackling this from multiple directions with a great deal of coordination and collaboration. ⁓ One thing they did was set up a campus archive of AI in higher education policies so that anybody can just dive into those and examine them, which I think is just a great thing for everyone to have. I mean, these are interesting examples. One last one. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (12:56) Yeah. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (13:04) I mentioned the University of Michigan as my alma mater. So though I'm about to say, please, Ann Arbor, forgive me for saying this. Ohio State University, or the Ohio State University, announced what they call their AI fluency efforts. So to back up a little bit, there has been a call, which I think is a solid one, for AI literacy. And AI literacy is usually defined as giving students J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (13:15) yes, yes. Bryan Alexander, PhD (13:31) the ability to think with and think through AI. So they understand the technology to some degree in a general way. They understand some of the issues around it that I've mentioned a few minutes ago. ⁓ The American University of Armenia has the wonderful Brent Anders, who you may have seen on the FutureTrans Forum JD. He's a terrific energetic fellow who's done a lot of work. He's published something like three books on AI literacy, has a wonderful YouTube channel called Soverell, ⁓ and he's been pushing for this. And I think there's a lot of interest in that. But what Ohio State was doing was taking it further, calling it AI fluency. So basically a ramped up version of AI literacy. And that would plug into individual disciplines. So if I'm going to be a marketing ⁓ major, so I would learn the general uses of AI, but then focus on AI and marketing, or if I'm going to be a French major, what it means for the French language and linguistics and so on. I think those are a few that are pretty exciting. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (14:28) They are, I quite agree. when we say higher education, we're really talking about many different types of institutions, community colleges, R1 research universities, liberal arts colleges and others. Are they responding to AI in different ways? Bryan Alexander, PhD (14:36) Mm-hmm. Indeed. That's fantastic And I'm so glad you asked this because so many discussions about higher education usually focus on a handful of campuses, often elite research universities, which are literally extraordinary in every way, but also outliers and non-representative of American higher ed. We have around 4,000 colleges and universities, everything, as you mentioned, research one universities, liberal arts colleges, military schools, community colleges, religious school. mean, it's J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (15:06) Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (15:14) It's one of the glories of American culture is that we have this huge institutional diversity to offer. I think, and I've heard some initial thoughts about this, which I think are pretty interesting. I've heard from some Catholic universities that they are examining what kind of uniquely Catholic approach they might have. So drawing on 2000 years of religious tradition and thinking about media, thinking about humanity, thinking about psychology, thinking about belonging and meaning J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (15:28) Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (15:42) and bringing that to bear. So to think in terms of discernment or to perhaps think about ⁓ some of the great Catholic thinkers about technology like Teilhard de Chardin or, I mean, there's a lot you can do with that. And so that's one field I'm looking at. The community college field is another one where you think about that that sector's deep engagement with workforce preparation and how they are so committed to preparing students to go into the community, hence the name. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (16:11) you Bryan Alexander, PhD (16:11) and to work in the private sector, in the public sector, in the nonprofit sector. And so they have their antenna out trying to detect what these enterprises need in terms of AI. And so I think that's a place where the rest of higher ed can learn a great deal. The liberal arts sector, I think, can pull together a few things. ⁓ Middlebury College has a program emphasizing what it calls the liberal arts digital humanities. So how you get to use ⁓ J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (16:26) Yes. Bryan Alexander, PhD (16:40) computing technology in a liberal arts way. And that may be interdisciplinary with an emphasis on the humanities that may also involve a lot of critical theory, a lot of critical studies, ⁓ and ⁓ also a great deal of, ⁓ I think, production as well, so that people in the liberal arts colleges learn how not just to perceive and stuff, but to make it. ⁓ They'll, you know, they'll use AI to make code, to make images, to make videos, and so on, but to do so in a form way. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (17:06) Okay. Bryan Alexander, PhD (17:10) I think the Research 1 type of university can do all of these things except for the Catholic part because they're usually public. But then it's not always true. But they can also really emphasize the research and development. And this is tricky because it's hard to keep a really good AI researcher in academia because the commercial industry is growing so fast and is hiring people all over the place. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (17:18) Hahaha ⁓ Exactly. Bryan Alexander, PhD (17:40) universities have to struggle to figure out how to keep someone when they can earn six times their salary in Silicon Valley or wherever else. But they have such great opportunities for work. For example, in Switzerland, three Swiss universities collaborated to produce ⁓ a tool they call a public benefit, an LLM, ⁓ called Apertus, which is basically a nonprofit that is designed to have facing not for profit, but for community J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (17:47) Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (18:09) benefit and for enlightening humans. They just launched a couple of months ago. It's very interesting. So I think about all the possibilities. I mean, you think about the North Carolina University System, think about the Research Triangle. ⁓ Imagine if they were able to, say, produce something very creative that doesn't have immediate cash value. So imagine a digital archive on the history of the American South. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (18:13) Interesting. Mm-hmm. Thanks. Bryan Alexander, PhD (18:36) that I can query through LLMs and it can generate all kinds of interesting results and content. I mean, I just made that up off the top of my head. But think about, you know, any research university, UT Austin, you know, University of Texas at Austin to be able to do something on Texas culture and history. Again, those are just a couple I'm thinking of, but there are a lot of ways that can go if research universities are able to hang out with computer scientists and give them that kind of ⁓ opportunity. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (18:36) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but that's wonderful. Mm-hmm. Lots of food for thought there. Okay, your very recently published 2026 book, Peak Higher Ed, focuses on declining enrollment, political scrutiny, and the erosion of public confidence in higher education. But the subtitle, How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis, indicates there's light at the end of this era, but only if institutions reinvent themselves. So as a futurist, How do you think AI intersects with all of the other challenges being faced by higher education? Bryan Alexander, PhD (19:44) It's a great question and I'll try and keep this as concise as possible. ⁓ One of the things we have to think about is public perception of higher education and public perception of AI. This is distinct from the realities of both. So, for example, the public perceives higher education as being supremely expensive because they look accurately at our published tuition and fees figures. We just saw this year, sorry, last year for the first time. two Boston area institutions now cost more than $100,000 a year to attend. Now, that's the sticker price. What actually is paid by most students is substantially less than that. In fact, we can roughly say that the typical price paid by a median student is roughly 45 % of that. And so the richest families really subvent and support everybody else. But that's invisible. I mean, nobody notices that outside of higher ed. And in higher ed, not many people really fully grasp that. So the perception is there. And the same is true of AI. We may point to AI's ability to do certain things, but the perception that people have of AI will matter. I mention this because this could drive us in a couple of different directions. It's possible that people will become increasingly nervous about AI. Already, if you look at polls, a majority of people say that they think AI will be bad for jobs. They're frightened about what AI might do in certain ways. They're afraid of AI addiction. They're afraid of AI being used for harms in different ways. And we can debate about how real these may be and which of these is the most salient, but the perception is there. And that could worsen. It could worsen for political reasons. If right now in the United States, we see the Republican Party, most of it being very pro-AI. So we could see the Democratic Party turn against that and become more anti-AI. We could also see if there is a spectacular problem that people see as caused by AI. So if we see a plane crash or worse, a celebrity death or some kind of economic collapse and people believe that AI caused it, again, this is a question of perception that that might take AI down a bit. ⁓ In contrast, academia might look better. Academia might look more trustworthy. We might look more sturdy, J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (21:54) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (22:06) more knowledgeable, more imminent, more human. ⁓ I saw on Instagram a few videos where little children were using the word AI as a synonym for BS. So don't listen to Tommy, everything he says is AI. I don't know if that's going to catch on, but just to think about if we go in that direction where we're very skeptical of AI, then higher ed might look better, J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (22:23) you Bryan Alexander, PhD (22:35) and people might turn to us. So our public opinion might grow as a result. So that's, I can say more about this, but that's one option. The other is to reverse these. If people like AI in different ways, some people might celebrate it. Some might find it just simply be a net positive to their life. One of my favorite initially depressing uses of AI I saw in 2023 was a CNN article about real estate agents using AI to generate copy for houses on sale. And at first I thought part of my soul died as I read that. But then I thought, no, actually that made sense. Nobody goes into real estate because you want to write beautiful prose. It's a technical field. And it's also challenging to do, to craft just the right thing. So maybe this isn't the world shaking news, but maybe this is one of those small benefits that people view as having meaning. And it may be that people like having conversations with AI for various emotional reasons, everything from romance to therapy to loneliness, and they find it to be good enough for them. And especially it's always available, it's more friendly, it's cheaper and all kinds of benefits. In contrast, they might come to see academia in an inferior way. We might look too expensive, we might look out of touch and obsolete, we might be slow to respond. So here's an administrative story I heard. ⁓ The chief information officer for a New England school told me that he had on their website, a webpage, which was click here to start applying for the school. And he said to me, okay, well, what two days of the year do you think that page got the most hits? And I thought about it I thought about it. My guess was really bad. I said it would be early fall. And my friend said, yes, yes. And he said, this is completely wrong. The two dates were the day after Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas. Because you, well, you've got family gatherings, people have time and you get people saying, well, look at, look at our friend JD. She went to college and she did really well. Why don't you do this? J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (24:25) ⁓ it's too late by then. Wow, that is, ooh. Yeah. Yeah Bryan Alexander, PhD (24:48) But then my friend said, as institution, they weren't able to respond because that was a holiday. So the person would say, I'm interested in attending your school and they get back up, sorry, we're out of office. So they had to spin things around to retool things, to get that response back. You know, my, our guesses about high school is based on, on being inside education. So you're, so if you're J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (24:53) Exactly, exactly. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Bryan Alexander, PhD (25:15) If you're anybody, if you're a teenager, if you're an adult and you get that out of office, that lack of response, you might think higher education, they're sluggish. But my AI responds right away. know, three in the morning, Christmas morning, it does. So it might be that in this scenario, the AI booms and higher ed declines as a result. ⁓ There's another option, which I think J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (25:27) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Exactly. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (25:45) gives me a little bit more hope, but also matches my nerdy brain a bit more. ⁓ Which is, I think AI's potential is to be strange. It is an alien technology in a lot of ways, in that it is different. It doesn't think like humans do. I mean, it literally doesn't think, but its processes come out strangely. When the ⁓ famous AI match between a computer and a Go master, the game of Go, ⁓ J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (26:04) Right. Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (26:15) and the Go masters were defeated and they all said that the moves the computer made were weird. Like they'd never experienced anything like that. And if you look at AI art, there's a lot of strange stuff that comes out. If you look at AI designs for things like clothing or interior design or cars, sometimes they're unusual. And it may be that we get the world becoming more and more strange. So there's already a Reddit where you can follow people who have detailed romances with AI, and they talk about how they find that to be a better experience than in-person romance. So if we have more of that, we have AI being used for advertising and for politics. In short, if AI makes the world stranger and stranger, people might turn to academics for help in figuring it out. So if I want to understand how it is J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (26:46) Yeah. you interesting. Bryan Alexander, PhD (27:12) that my self-driving car can get hacked by someone putting a sticker on a stop sign. It's a known hack, by the way. Who can help me? I mean, who do I turn to? Do I turn to Congress? No, that's a bad idea. Hollywood will give a few ideas, but they're hit or miss. But academics, they can help you think about this critically. You can talk to a philosopher about the ethics of these. You can talk to an economist about what it means to the labor market. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (27:19) Uh-huh. Mm. Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (27:42) You can talk to a religious scholar about what this means. You know, again, in terms of meaning, you can talk to a computer scientist about how the stuff actually works and so on. So it might be the world becomes stranger and academics become stranger as well, but we help people respond. So that's another option. There's one more. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (27:50) Mm-hmm. Yes. Bryan Alexander, PhD (28:03) I'm very keenly interested in the impact or the intersection between climate change and higher education. That was the subject of my previous book called Universities on Fire. And ⁓ Peak Higher Ed has a chapter on this. ⁓ And one of the things that I'm fascinated by is looking at the intersection between climate change and AI. So, you on the one hand, we have the promise of AI that will help us process huge amounts of data that ⁓ planetary science generates, J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (28:12) Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (28:32) that'll help us create new means and new ways of approaching climate change and grappling with it terms of mitigation and adaptation. But then there's the flip side, that the enormous computational demands of AI, especially for electricity, may worsen the climate crisis, where we may end up burning more fossil fuels in order to fuel these AIs that help us solve the problem of fossil fuels. ⁓ I think that intersection is one that, again, academics are supremely placed to help people think through. You know, to try and puzzle out the complicated math and statistics of this, which is largely a data problem, to think about the ethics of this, to bring up all kinds of ideas, everything from say, degrowth economics, to small is beautiful, to thinking about the idea of progress. And again, I think that intersection is one where if we do things right, if we play our cards right, if we reinvent ourselves well, then college and universities can really play a role. last two chapters of my book offer ⁓ two different ways forward for higher education over the next decade, and they both concern technology. And the first is one where institutions or academics in groups assume that their group is going to be declining, that its enrollment will shrink, its physical footprint will shrink, that. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (29:38) Mm-hmm. Hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (29:52) its financial apparatus will decline. And in the second, we decide to reinvent higher ed in a positive way to, among other things, re-attract students and public investment. And technology plays a key role in both. We have found, although it gets very little press, that online education is just growing and growing by leaps and bounds. It's a major, major player. It's not a fringe element. It's a major part of higher education. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (30:06) you Bryan Alexander, PhD (30:22) And some universities, some mega universities, offer huge amounts of classes and enroll lots and lots of students online. I can think of Southern New Hampshire, Western Governors, Arizona State University, Liberty University even. And these are enrolling a lot of students. And so you have to think, is that something at your institution or in your own profession, whoever you are, if you're a librarian, a professor, a dean, do you want to try to J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (30:29) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (30:52) board or expand your efforts at that, which takes time. It takes some technological substructure. It also takes a lot of planning to offer online classes. I mean, think about transitioning a class from a seminar to a lecture or from a lecture to a lab. It's that kind of transformation and rethinking. Is that something which you can feel that you can bet on? I mean, we know how to do it well. We have an elaborate scholarly literature on how to do it well. So that's not J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (31:11) Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (31:21) a secret. The question is just actually the design and carrying it out. But also for students on campus, is your institution prepared? Is your academic profession prepared to make the maximum humane use of that technology in supporting students? Think, for example, we have a mental health crisis that's widely discussed, and we do not have nearly enough therapists to meet the demand. So does your campus turn to telehealth? J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (31:26) Exactly. Hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. Bryan Alexander, PhD (31:51) if your physical campus can't bring in enough social workers and nurses and therapists on campus for that. Do you turn to AI? I'm not going to say good or bad. I'm saying these are options where you can use the technology to try and improve that. But also, my first book was about digital storytelling. And that's something which still just warms my heart, thinking about how humans love to use new media to tell stories. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (31:55) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (32:17) You and I might remember long playing records. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (32:17) Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (32:21) that told full operas, right? And that was something which was amazing, the technology J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (32:21) yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (32:27) Well, with digital technology, students have all kinds of opportunities to develop their voice, to express their stories. It's very, very empowering and exciting. So do we teach students how to do that? And do we teach faculty and staff to do that themselves and also how to help them? And these are just a few ways. ⁓ I'm teaching a class this semester on gaming and education. And we know how to use gaming to improve learning and teaching. So do we do more of that? My point is we can use technology to enhance the student experience. And if we can enhance the student experience, we can improve our institutions. We can grow their reputation. can attract more students. We can attract more and better faculty and staff to support them. ⁓ J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (32:50) Eww. Right. Mm-hmm. Bryan Alexander, PhD (33:12) It seems like a kind of no brainer really, a real win-win. So I think that's, that's one thing that I hope people take away from our conversation today, but also from my book. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (33:16) you Bryan, you are truly of the great minds researching the future of higher education and your insights show just how important it is for our institutions to use all of their available resources. So thank you for keeping watch despite the literal and figurative storms that we're currently facing. Bryan Alexander, PhD (33:37) Mmm. Thank you so much, JD. Thank you for the very thoughtful questions. And thank you for your patience as I go on and on about this. I think in many ways we're at a potential decisive point where higher education has to figure out not how to tell its story better, but how to actually do better. And that is something which is very, very challenging. But I believe that academics have so much creativity, so much knowledge and a wonderful opportunity to be inventive. That we really can do it and we can do it right. J.D. Mosley-Matchett, PhD (34:21) Well said, sir. Well said. For more information about AI news and trends that are directly impacting administrators in higher education, please follow InforMaven on LinkedIn and visit our website at InforMaven.ai.