Book review: Reclaiming Purpose – The University in an AI World by Paul LeBlanc

This review was kindly authored by Mary Curnock Cook CBE, a Trustee of HEPI.

The book’s author Paul LeBlanc is the former President of Southern New Hampshire University, where he led its transformation into the largest non-profit provider of online higher education in the US. He’s a visiting professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

I have just re-read this wonderful book some eight months after Paul LeBlanc kindly shared a preview copy with me. It says something about how quickly the world is changing when I compare the notes I jotted down back in January to those I made this time. Or perhaps it was me that changed? There was something about that first reading that gave me a more settled and confident understanding of the sheer breadth of challenge that AI brings to higher education’s most deeply embedded assumptions.

Back in January, I was captured by Paul’s invitation to higher education to

dream again, to see itself not only as a transmitter of expertise but as a builder of a better society

and to see AI not as a monster but

a powerful force that requires us to be more human, more intentional, and more courageous than we have ever been

But in the intervening months, we’ve seen attitudes shift against screens in general and AI in particular. Consider headlines like ‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’ (Katerine Rundell in the Guardian), and analysis in the Economist showing that the question of how AI will shape society has become politically explosive in the US. It would be tempting for higher education to set all the traffic lights to red and get everyone back to the exam hall. 

But even as the ground has shifted, Reclaiming Purpose does not ignore or belittle such debate. Rather it is a heartfelt call, as the title suggests, for universities to reclaim their purpose, to transition from an

inefficient, inequitable engine of knowledge transfer into a global system of human development, committed to equipping [people] with the wisdom, skills, and ethical compass needed to navigate and shape the Age of AI

Paul emphasises how the extraordinary potential of AI requires us anew to emphasise our humanity, reclaim an elevated societal role, curate human connection, develop moral imagination, embrace the ensouled self and instil in graduates the orientation and capacity for human flourishing. It is genuinely inspiring stuff.

LeBlanc is not primarily interested in academic misconduct, institutional efficiency or the practicalities of integrating AI into teaching and assessment. Instead, he asks what higher education should exist for if machines increasingly perform many of the functions that universities have traditionally helped students master. His answer is that universities must shift their centre of gravity from epistemology to ontology: from what students know to who they become.

Nevertheless, the book does not hold back from setting out the fractures in the higher education model which have been further exposed since the advent of generative AI. 

In his chapter ‘the idea of the university revisited’, Paul sets out three cultural shifts that have been needed for a long time but are now more urgent. The first is in what we value. The prestige of universities may have relied on the mastery of knowledge for centuries, with human skills like empathy, teamwork and leadership assumed to emerge as a mere byproduct of campus life. Instead, he calls on the sector to recognise the primacy of such skills (he rightly decries the term ‘soft skills’ as signalling secondary or peripheral importance). He says:

[A] graduate’s ability to mediate conflict or navigate cultural difference should be seen as just as important as their ability to parse thermodynamics or analyze primary sources.

The second shift is surfacing the hidden curriculum of

social interactions that are incubators and sometimes crucibles [to] develop character and skill.

Currently, he points out, this is largely left to chance, “unaided by intentional design”. A new culture, he says, would treat these opportunities for human skills development not as accidents but as subjects of serious teaching and learning.

They would be named, taught, and assessed, not merely hoped for.

The third required shift is away from traditional disciplinary silos, recognising that the development of human skills requires integrative learning and collaboration across disciplines where “human and technical demands intermingle”. 

The book describes in some detail the idea of precision learning (as opposed to merely personalised learning), based on work that Paul did with other colleagues to build a platform that precisely times learning interventions based on more than just past academic performance or VLE ‘events’. This section is of value in elucidating what AI is capable of, although such a specific product solution feels slightly at odds with his discussion of the wider dysfunctions of higher education. He also sets out a significant shift in the role of faculty to become more human and more relational so that students feel more viscerally that they really matter. While the AI handles basic scaffolding and content generation and delivery, faculty’s focus moves to learning experience design and high-touch mentoring, asking them to learn to love students again. 

While delving into the potentially harmful and seductive nature of technology that simulates human voice and tone, his section on anthropomorphism reminds us that thanking our LLM makes no more sense than thanking the toaster. Beneath the humour lies a serious concern that students may increasingly form relationships with AI systems that mimic care without genuinely caring.

True to his roots, he returns often to how AI (and precision learning) could democratise access to higher education to less wealthy populations such as those in sub-Saharan Africa or in refugee camps, shifting relative scarcity to abundance of access.

Central to LeBlanc’s thesis is the emergence of a “care economy”. As AI increasingly performs routine cognitive work, he argues that societies will need many more people working in teaching, healthcare, social care, mental health and other relational professions. Universities, therefore, should be preparing graduates not only for work but for human-centred work. Reclaiming Purpose faces head on the fact that students want higher education to prepare them for meaningful careers and a ‘choice-filled life’. But his perspectives on how the workforce will change in the AI era perhaps rest on too blunt an assumption that professional white-collar jobs will disappear and that consequently displaced workers will flock to the care economy if only these professions are better valued and better paid. 

The book is more sure-footed in reimagining the post-secondary education ecosystem. As well as the shift from epistemological to ontological teaching, the degree itself, as a single static credential, is challenged as Paul sets out a vision for learning as a lifestyle, with lists of courses and programmes replaced by a ‘knowledge graph’. He says that

a traditional syllabus is a rigid list of stations you must visit in order. A knowledge graph is a subway map that shows every station, every transfer point, and every possible route. You can start at any station and see all the different paths, or pre‑requisite skills, required to get to a new destination.

While the metaphor is powerful, I won’t be the only one reflecting on how elusive an effective system of credit accumulation and transfer has proved to be in UK higher education. Similarly, his reminder that data readiness is the most significant barrier to effective AI deployment in higher education will bring many readers back down to earth. 

Despite Paul’s assertion that higher education is “broken and ripe for disruption”, this is no futurist dismantling of the status quo. Rather, Paul’s warm, engaging and humorous style draws the reader into a world where AI could be the precursor to universities reclaiming their moral orientation and becoming “the architects of a profoundly human future”. At a time when much discussion of AI in universities focusses on productivity gains and plagiarism, Reclaiming Purpose asks a more profound question: if AI assumes much of the work of knowledge transfer, what then becomes the distinctive role of universities? Can higher education credibly claim the mantle of human flourishing?