CONCEPT
General Education as the New Core
The argument that the broad intellectual formation the multiversity defunded for fifty years — general education, distribution requirements, the liberal arts — becomes the economically necessary core offering in the AI era.
The most important curriculum in the American university is the one nobody defends at budget time. General education — the requirements compelling the engineering student to take literature, the English major to study statistics, the premed to sit through philosophy — has been under siege for as long as the multiversity has existed. Faculty view it as a distraction from departmental mission. Students view it as an obstacle to their major. Administrators view it as a scheduling problem. The systematic neglect has produced a specific institutional irony: the function the university has most undervalued for fifty years turns out to be the function the AI era makes most economically necessary. When specialist knowledge can be acquired through AI tools in weeks, the premium on specialist training diminishes; the premium on the cross-domain judgment that general education, at its best, was always designed to produce rises correspondingly.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The case