Key points:
- Can instructors help shape technology in the service of human advancement?
- Aligning AI with pedagogy, privacy, and outcomes
- The AI paradox: Why students feel unprepared for the AI-driven workforce
- For more news on AI’s impact, visit eCN’s AI in Education hub
If you have been following recent discussion of Pope Leo XIV’s first papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, you have likely already seen its importance for educators navigating the cultural, digital, ethical, and social changes driven by generative artificial intelligence (AI). While Catholic and other religiously affiliated colleges and universities may take the document especially seriously, it offers guidance for you and other educators trying to balance the promise of generative AI with the responsibility to cultivate students’ humanity.
As you read Pope Leo’s argument, you can see him drawing on the rich heritage of Catholic Social Doctrine to warn against a “Babel syndrome” in which technocrats, private monopolies, and an obsession with efficiency dehumanize society and further marginalize the vulnerable, especially those on the wrong side of the digital divide. He compares the development of generative AI to the desire of the people of Babel to conquer their environment by building the biblical Tower of Babel. In Chapter Two, he articulates five principles of Catholic Social Doctrine (common good, universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice) and urges higher education institutions “to give fresh impetus to these principles [social doctrine of the Catholic Church], and to apply them in a way that will be relevant and effective in addressing the digital revolution.”
To counter the Babel syndrome, Pope Leo champions a “way of Nehemiah,” calling for global solidarity, structural transparency, and an intentional “educational alliance” so that technology serves human dignity rather than profit. As you consider this image, the Old Testament story offers a useful frame: Nehemiah learns that Jerusalem’s walls lie in ruins and that its returned exiles are in deep distress. He travels to the city and organizes a diverse coalition of families, priests, and artisans to rebuild the walls piece by piece. Pope Leo suggests that the development of a global AI infrastructure, data systems, and the data itself should follow a similar model.
The encyclical draws on the Church’s social principles to argue that modern assets such as algorithms, data, and digital platforms must be universally accessible and ethically governed. Ultimately, it serves as both a global appeal for an inclusive digital ecology and a moral examination of the collective human conscience, modeling collaborative and synodal values within institutions.
You can see how the encyclical reinforces work that many university educators are already trying to do by insisting that human dignity and ethics matter as much in AI development as technical performance.
Tasks for educators
As a campus leader or instructor, you can draw five practical lessons from this text:
- You need to design curricula, learning activities, and assessments that bridge the technical and the ethical. You should teach students explicitly how and when to use generative tools, when not to use them, and why those distinctions matter in your discipline.
- You need to create pedagogical spaces that value the learning process, student growth, and students’ intrinsic dignity rather than focusing only on standardized performance metrics. Pope Leo warns against overvaluing efficiency and effectiveness at the expense of other goods. You should therefore consider your students holistically, not merely as data points.
- You should engage in and support cross-departmental research. If you work in computer science or data engineering, you should collaborate with colleagues in philosophy, ethics, and the humanities to critique and guide technical design. If you work outside those fields, you still play an important role in ensuring that the less technical dimensions of AI development and use are fully considered in educational settings.
- You should champion public-facing workshops, service-learning projects, and foundational courses that democratize digital literacy. You can examine data sets and algorithms to identify, expose, and correct historic or systemic biases embedded in automated systems. Pope Leo explicitly calls for the “promotion of digital literacy” and for efforts that prevent bias and discriminatory practices from being reproduced.
- In university governance and classroom dynamics, you need to model the collaboration illustrated by Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem’s wall. At every level, you should move away from purely paternalistic instruction toward collaborative, participatory learning. That means actively including student voices, community stakeholders, and marginalized perspectives when you design institutional AI policies and academic rubrics.
The way of Nehemiah
Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas arrives at a moment when you, like many in higher education, may still be searching for your footing in the age of generative AI. Many institutions have issued AI use policies; far fewer have asked the harder question the encyclical poses: What kind of human beings are you helping to form, and does your relationship to these tools support that formation or undermine it?
The Pope’s framework is not technophobic. It insists that the values driving AI adoption, efficiency, scalability, and optimization, be weighed against values that resist quantification: dignity, solidarity, and the slow, irreducible work of human development. For you as a college or university instructor, this is not a foreign argument. It is a restatement, in new language, of what good pedagogy has always required.
The five principles of Catholic Social Doctrine outlined in Chapter Two (common good, universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice) translate into tangible instructional commitments for you: designing assessments that reward growth over performance, building cross-disciplinary collaborations, and ensuring that the voices most likely to be harmed by uncritical AI adoption have a place at the table when policies are written. These are not merely aspirational ideals. They are practical responsibilities.
The way of Nehemiah is instructive precisely because the wall was not rebuilt by one expert working in isolation. It was rebuilt by a coalition of people with different skills and different stakes, working side by side and united by a shared sense of what they were protecting. That is the model Magnifica Humanitas extends to you as an educator. Technology will continue to develop with or without you. The question is whether you will help shape it in service of human flourishing or allow it to shape you in service of something less.
The author used Co-Pilot and Claude.ai to help revise the initial draft of the paper.
Baule’s scholarly interests focus on online student engagement, educational technology-- particularly the impact of 1:1 implementations, social-emotional learning, and the history of education. Baule led several efforts to improve student emotional health and reduce discipline issues prior to moving into higher education. He also writes on aspects of early American history.
Baule has held memberships in the American Association of School Administrators, the American Library Association, the American Association of School Librarians, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the Consortium for School Networking, the International Association of School Librarians, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the National Staff Development Council, and many of their state affiliates. He has served as a consultant in the areas of educational technology, facilities design, library program development, team building, and communications.