This introduction situates current debates over AI within a longer historical transformation of higher education, arguing that the real challenge is not technological adoption but the redefinition of institutional purpose. Drawing on the Humboldtian ideal of Bildung, it contends that colleges and universities must navigate rising skepticism about their value, shifting labor market demands, and the erosion of humanistic inquiry by making deliberate choices about how technology shapes learning, community, and intellectual development. What's needed is renewed clarity about the values and ends that higher education is meant to serve.

Despite billions in edtech investment over the past two decades, aggregate graduation rates have barely moved. Now, as student-driven AI use is surging, institutions face a familiar risk: adopting powerful new tools without the deliberate institutional strategy needed to ensure they actually deepen learning rather than erode it. This essay argues that AI's real danger isn't displacement — it's widening the cognitive equity gap. What's required is not more technology but an infrastructure of intentionality around how it's used.

A wide-ranging discussion with Duke professor Henry Pickford explores how AI is at once a rupture and an accelerant of longstaning trends reshaping higher education, from the erosion of critical thinking and reading habits to the rise of pre-professionalization and institutional mission drift. A central question for institutional leadership emerges: how does one preserve intellectual autonomy, foster an environment for genuine inquiry, and maintain a public sphere capable of standing apart from, while critically reflecting on, the forces now transforming it?