Artificial Intelligence, David Tracy, and the Purposes of Higher Education

Welcome back to school

Back to school is upon us. My daughter has started kindergarten (!), I have made it through half a dozen fall faculty meetings, and I now have the first week of classes under my belt. As I start my fifteenth year teaching theology to college students, and my thirteenth at Saint Leo, I am cognizant of the many challenges facing higher ed in general and my institution in particular. There’s an interesting and difficult set of issues around funding, ideology, and mission, many of which have erupted in conflict with the current administration.

For me, the most pressing of these challenges has been artificial intelligence. This is due to several factors: my research interests in theology and technology, my own ambiguous feelings about when/if to use AI,¹ issues of academic integrity with students, and the overall push to integrate AI more fully into higher education.

On this last one, the two primary refrains I hear are

1. AI is inevitable, so might as well accept the new dispensation for what it is

2. Students need AI in their courses because they will need it in their jobs.

On (1), I guess I fundamentally don’t accept that outcomes dependent on human choices are inevitable; they’re the consequences of people making choices that could have been otherwise. AI is as inevitable as people choose to make it. I don’t have much more to say about (1). As for (2), please allow me a substantive pivot before returning to it.

David Tracy’s Three Publics

In his seminal text The Analogical Imagination, Tracy argues that the theologian is responsible to three distinct but overlapping publics: the academy, the church, and society. The academy is the public concerned especially with the development and dissemination of knowledge. Key to this is a concern about what it means to be an academic discipline and with the ability of any particular field, such as theology, to engage critically with questions of method and its disciplinary status.

Church is the body that both mediates between its individual members and the larger society and mediates between God and the world. There is a sociological dimension to it, in that it has members that choose to participate in the church, but there is also a theological dimension understood in the sacramental character of the church. Tracy highlights the centrality of fidelity in the church - fidelity to the beliefs, traditions, practices, and fellow members of the church.

Finally, society is a public in the sense that most people colloquially think of: more or less everybody who is to some degree active within a given culture, state, etc. Both academy and church are incorporated into society in meaningful, if not totalizing, ways. For Tracy, society can be further subdivided into three “realms”: the techno-economic, the political, and the cultural.

The techno-economic refers to the aspect of society composed of the various technological and economic structures that exist to deliver goods and services to people. This is what makes it possible for people to meet basic needs and, ideally, thrive in society. As such, Tracy’s main way of defining the techno-economic realm is that it functions according to instrumental reason, the form of reasoning concerned with determining the means to achieve ends.

The political realm² refers to the system of government, the laws, and political institutions that are essential to a society. The main issues in the political realm are questions of justice, of how the polity ought to be organized in a way that can contribute the flourishing of all. In this regard, it functions according to practical reason, the form of reasoning concerned with determining ends to be achieved.

Finally, Tracy describes the cultural realm as the realm in which society focuses on deeper questions of its ethos (the way the citizens of society live) and its worldview (the way citizens envision reality). For this realm, rather than instrumental or practical reason, Tracy thinks the driving form of reflection is “critical reflection upon symbols,” which he argues most explicitly happens in religion and in the arts. Put differently, it is here that members of a society most seriously consider their fundamental values and commitments.

As may be clear by now, Tracy idealizes an ordering in society where by symbolic reflection directs practical reasons judgment about the ends of a particular society, and that practical reason directs instrumental reason’s determinations of the best means for achieving those ends. He’s not Pollyannish about the reality of that ordering, but retains it as a standard for judging the realities of any particular society.³

Photo by Ken Theimer on Unsplash

The Three Realms and the Purposes of Higher Education

While meeting with doctoral students this summer for a course on public theology, I argued that Tracy’s three realms of society would be a good way of thinking through the mission of higher education, or at least of Catholic higher education.

The connection between higher education and getting a job fits squarely within the techno-economic realm. This is only in part due to the costs of college, which continue to grow at a pace outstripping inflation. Many of my students are first time in college students, often with little to no family support, who take on some combination of additional jobs and student loans to get a degree. Of course they need to get a job on the other end of this in order to survive, provide for themselves and their family, and to cover the burdensome costs. So it makes sense to me that, in some part, college helps train people for jobs, that college graduates might be good workers, managers, entrepreneurs, etc.

It does not make sense to me, though, for this to be all that college is, or frankly for it to be the primary goal of college. If we consider Tracy’s political realm, here I would argue that higher education is part of forming people into good citizens who can contribute to the flourishing of civic life for all. This might be done in part through their work, but I believe it also does so through the liberal arts education that is meant to form people into attentive, reasonable, intelligent, and responsible people. Put differently, higher education is not only a means towards the ends of entirely legitimate financial needs, but also a means towards the ends of participating in and contributing to the flourishing of the wider community.

Finally, at the level of the cultural realm, I think higher education (and Catholic higher education in particular) should also emphasizing forming their students to be good people. I think every college has some version of their “core values” that are supposed to guide students (and faculty and staff), and thus represent some vision of what it means to be a good person. My sense also is that these are often given lip service or are presented in such a way that many students don’t take them seriously because they don’t think the university takes them seriously. A stronger commitment to an idea of virtues, and of forming students in those virtues, could speak effectively to those fundamental values and commitments that are essential to the cultural realm.⁴

Thus I return to the two refrains about AI and education I noted above. Again, (1) AI is only as inevitable as people choose for it to be. But on (2), that students need AI in their courses because they will need it in their jobs, this only reflects a techno-economic vision of what colleges and universities can and should be doing. In the very many webinars and training sessions on AI and education that I’ve been to, the overwhelming emphasis is on (a) students will need this for employment so (b) here are fun ways to incorporate it in your courses. It is ultimately about training good workers; there is far less attention paid to AI as it might impact being good citizens or good people. It is a reductionist view of education, and it reduces our expectations of our students and ourselves.

As my own way of thinking through this, I’m teaching a course on AI and Theology for our Honors program. I proposed this course in part to have the opportunity to think about the current state of AI and education with students directly. I guess I’m hopeful that a course that tasks them with thinking theologically about what it means to be human, to be in relationship, and to be responsible in society will provide some helpful critical lenses for reflecting on their use of, and their being used by, artificial intelligence.

Already after the first class discussions, I note that students have a very high degree of confidence in (a) their ability to make good choices about how to use AI in their studies, (b) their ability to resist becoming dependent on AI, and (c) the goodness of their habits around AI and other technologies. Maybe they’re right about that, but at the moment I am dubious on all accounts.

1. I am, for example, looking to make an Okeydoxy logo for this substack, yet I lack both artistic vision and artistic skill.

2. Tracy never really calls is this, instead saying “the realm of polity,” but I think calling this also the “political realm” is more readable, and it should be fine so long as one does not import a partisan understanding of the “political.” Similarly, Tracy calls the third realm “the realm of culture” rather than the cultural realm, but again the difference does not seem relevant to me.

3. This section all comes from the first chapter of The Analogical Imagination. I also discuss it in more detail in my book, A Theology of Conversation, on pages 21-36.

4. In preparing this section, I was reminded of an earlier version of my thinking through this question in a post from 2011, when I was really just getting into Tracy.