In this episode, Priten speaks with Anand Rao, director of the Center for AI in the Liberal Arts at the University of Mary Washington and professor of communication, about what higher education should preserve and what it needs to rethink as AI reshapes the classroom. Rao has studied AI in digital studies courses for years and co-wrote an early book on ChatGPT in education in March 2023. The conversation moves from the practical work of building AI literacy for students and faculty to harder questions about long-form reading, attention, motivation, and whether a liberal arts education is becoming a luxury just as civic life needs it most.

Key Takeaways:

• The liberal arts should help lead AI development, not just adapt to it. Rao's framing shifted over the past year from "can a residential liberal arts institution survive AI" to a claim that orality, interdisciplinarity, and a pluralistic tradition can shape new AI models and frameworks. The center is deliberately neither pro-AI nor anti-AI; its goal is informed judgment.
• Durable skills are the foundation, but they now have to be deployed in AI settings. The communication, critical thinking, and research skills the liberal arts have taught for millennia still matter, but Rao compares updating the curriculum to teaching Boolean logic and databases in the 1990s. Students need to learn to use AI overviews and deep research tools the way they once learned not to trust the first ten Google hits.
• Education needs friction, and the real obstacle is motivation. Tools like NotebookLM can widen access to difficult texts, but they also remove the productive resistance students work against. A motivated student can do far more with these tools; an unmotivated one can complete the work without learning anything, especially under traditional assessments.
• The threat to attention is selective, not total. Rao pushes back gently on the idea that students have simply lost focus, noting that past classrooms over-represented long-attention students who were selected in. He still sees students enter a flow state for hours on work they care about, which suggests the problem is engagement and relevance more than capacity.
• A liberal arts degree may become a luxury, which raises a civic problem. As cost and return-on-investment pressures push students toward shorter, more specialized credentials, Rao worries about who still gets the general education that supports civil discourse. He argues we have to re-envision K-12 alongside higher ed rather than reform one and leave the other unchanged.