Students usually come to our institutions with one of three aims in mind: to get a job, to change the world, or to “grow as a person,” as they like to put it. Unsurprisingly, these three aims correspond to the three aims that define contemporary higher ed: to train workers for the economy, to drive…

I was driving north from Edmonton to a Canadian farm family on the 54th parallel. Soon, I would be stopping for tea with them. As I approached Neerlandia, the name of their community, I was startled by a Timber Wolf crossing the road in front of me. A few minutes later, I was even more…

During my graduate studies in philosophy, and later, when I began my teaching career, one of my areas of focus was social-political thought. I concentrated in part on the ancient Greeks, particularly Plato and Aristotle. I dug into the detailed writings of the “social contract” thinkers of the modern period: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, especially.…

One of the boldest decisions that I have ever made as an educator was taking twenty-four middle school students on a camping trip at the end of the school year. We had made our way through a couple of months of astronomy and what better way to conclude the project than to celebrate our learning…

Rumors of Christian higher education’s (CHE’s) demise have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, unlike the broader state and secular private sectors, American CHE continues to grow. The 2024 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System’s enrollment data is out, and the data provides good news for Protestant colleges. Catholic and Protestant Christian higher education enrollment, as I…

How do we train AI to recognize what is a human? In other words, what is an instance of the human? In my non-technical, lay-person’s understanding, AI makes this distinction by differentiating between semantic segmentation and instance segmentation. In a semantic model, the output would be a silhouette of the whole group against the background.…