It’s 9 a.m. on the Friday morning ahead of the U.S. Labor Day weekend, but the seminar room in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts is packed with 25 deans, associate deans, and chairs coming to Atlanta for a single day of discussions from as far away as Monterrey (Mexico), Klamath Falls (Oregon), St. George (Utah), Rolla (Missouri), Boston (Massachusetts), and Daytona Beach (Florida). After a first meeting in spring, where 10 of us founded the Council of Leaders of Liberal Arts at Technological Universities (CoLLT), enthusiasm for continuing our exchange and building advocacy had spread, especially because existing academic liberal arts organizations often ignore those of us working outside the mainstream of traditional liberal arts units.
A lightning round with comparative overviews of our units and presentations on our chosen theme, “Humanity & Technology,” revealed a striking conclusion: Liberal arts units at technological universities are uniquely positioned to address the social, ethical, and educational challenges posed by rapid technological change, and their experience offers a model for higher education more broadly.
Perhaps the most salient advantage of leading a liberal arts unit at a tech institution right now is our deep and long-standing experience in partnering with STEM colleagues. Thus, while the liberal arts at traditional universities tend to face hurdles against developing cross-college degrees and research and may only effect change one faculty hire at a time, we have been engaging in these processes for decades.
At Cal Poly San Louis Obispo, for example, the Ethics + Emerging Sciences initiative began in 2007 as a modest effort to strengthen relationships with the university’s strong STEM faculty. Over time, it generated research collaborations and curricular partnerships, new areas of faculty strength, and a broader ecosystem in which each side shapes the other without compromising disciplinary identities.
Such partnerships take different organizational forms: A small institution like Kettering University has a School of Foundational Studies whose main function is to support STEM majors with a liberal arts core education; at Worcester Polytechnical Institute, for almost 60 years, every undergraduate student completes the equivalent of a minor in the humanities and arts, regardless of how technical their major; and MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences looks back at a 75-year history of building its own majors as well as collaborating with and delivering core education for its STEM partners.
During our discussions, we also realized that partnering with STEM colleagues on our campuses is easier because our units attract a higher percentage of faculty whose educational backgrounds include STEM subjects than comparable units at traditional universities (for example, Georgia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts has four times as many such colleagues than the state’s other research universities). In a discipline-driven academy, such hybrid backgrounds facilitate cross-college trust and the inclusion of liberal arts faculty in STEM grant projects, increasing access to funding in the notoriously underfunded humanities and arts.
CoLLT representatives concurred that our units have mostly been spared from the catastrophic enrollment drops experienced by liberal arts programs at traditional universities. The value proposition of combining tech expertise with the liberal arts, by choosing majors like computational media that integrate technology with the liberal arts or by adding a liberal arts major to their STEM major (20% of CalTech students already do so), has become a popular option, with a range of applied and project-based liberal arts degrees available at tech institutions.
Recent research provides additional explanations for the impressive pull of liberal arts programs at tech institutions: Industry recruiters rate candidates with resumes that include a liberal arts degree from a technology-focused institute more hirable than candidates with a liberal arts degree from a traditional university; and liberal arts graduates from tech institutions earn considerably higher salaries than those graduating from comparable programs at non-tech universities.
What emerged repeatedly during our conversations was that the strategic organizational changes many institutions now seek to create in response to AI and other technological disruptions already exist, in various forms, at technological universities. Faculty accustomed to working across disciplinary boundaries, curricula that integrate technical and humanistic perspectives, and administrative structures that reward collaboration, are not future aspirations on our campuses; they are long-standing features of academic life.
Ambitious initiatives like Virginia Tech’s Tech for Humanity, currently a minor but slated to become a major as well as a curricular requirement for all liberal arts students to engage with the human impact of technology, or plans to reimagine Rensselaer Institute of Technology’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences as its university’s central hub for interdisciplinarity (renamed as School of Technology and the Human Experience) demonstrate our units’ ability to adapt and transform.
This may be particularly true when it comes to the distinctive contribution liberal arts scholars at tech institutions can make to current debates about artificial intelligence. Rather than positioning ourselves as opponents of AI, we see our role as fostering historically informed, ethically grounded, and socially attentive engagement with emerging technologies.
The STEM partners at our tech institutions understand that we embrace AI’s potential for education, but alongside the essential non-technical skills and human intelligence our own practices continue to champion. Computer scientist David Joiner, Georgia Tech’s Vice Provost for AI in Education, who confirmed to our group the importance of the liberal arts for developing human intelligence as well as for humanizing STEM and cocreating beneficial forms of artificial intelligence, summarized the current situation perfectly: “We will be learning with, about, and in spite of AI.”
We ended our meeting convinced we have ample reason to share our insights broadly. In 2018, our colleagues in engineering, computing, sciences, mathematics, and medicine concurred, in a visionary National Academies consensus report, that solving the complex problems of the future necessitated the conscious integration of the liberal arts with STEM. As leaders of liberal arts units at tech universities, we are in exactly the right place to reciprocate at this point with a report that showcases the ways in which such conscious and holistic integration can help reform higher education. We are at work to create and publish that report with recommendations from each of our members by the time of our spring 2027 gathering at the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus. I recommend you watch this space.
Richard Utz is Senior Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech.
