If you’re looking for a book that is not too heavy, analyzes how changing technologies impacts skills, and does a great job of sketching out some possible attractive responses from higher education institutions: have I got a book for you.  It’s called Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Joseph Aoun.

You’re surprised, I can tell.  The book does have the kind of title that suggests it has a point of view that ordinarily would set me off on a rant from here to Sunday.  But if you can get past the title and its overly easy acceptance of the gee-whiz view of technological change, it has some very worthwhile things to say.

(The real tip-off that it’s good comes from the author’s absolute refusal to use the words “Fourth Industrial Revolution” even when he is referring to the Klaus Schwab book of that name.  I wanted to kiss the man when I read that.)

Aoun, a linguist, is President of Northeastern University in Massachusetts, which is, in a vague kind of way, America’s Waterloo University (in that they put a lot of focus on co-op and experiential learning).  It might sound a bit odd, putting a humanist at the head of a tech school, but remember former Waterloo President Jim Downie, who was one of Canada’s most eloquent- and clear-sighted university Presidents for over 20 years (both at Waterloo and UNB).  He gets the tech side, the students-need-jobs side, but he also believes deeply in the humanist side of the equation.  We often treat “obtaining skills” and “humanistic education” as being mutually exclusive, but this book is as good a rebuttal as any I have ever seen to that point.  It’s a false duality: we can both, and do them well.

The central plea of this book is for institutions to take up something Aoun calls “humanics”.  Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s a terrible portmanteau, but the underlying idea itself is pretty good.  The idea is that students today need three new literacies: data literacy (understanding statistics and how to use data responsibly), tech literacy (understanding how machines work, their strengths and limitations and how they interpret data), and human literacy (understanding how to communicate and function in a team).  Students also need to build three new sets of cognitive capacities, namely: systems thinking (wholism and inter-disciplinarity, basically), entrepreneurship (in the sense of being a self-starter and an innovator rather than a go-start-a-business-and-make-a-million-bucks sense), and cultural agility (that is, the ability to understand and negotiate cultural differences sufficiently well that one can fit easily into different working milieus).

Now, I suppose you can call this “humanics” if you want, but to me it is just the kind of learning outcome statement every institution should have.  Tinker and play around the edges with definitions if you will, but it’s a very good, non-discipline-specific statement about the kind of graduates we should be producing.  Who wouldn’t be proud of graduating class after class of students with those qualities?  And whether you’re a philosopher or an engineer, every single one of those skills are things which will be advantageous both in life and in work.

To be clear: there is nothing revolutionary in this book.  Its beauty lies in brevity (145 pages!  Woohoo!) and simplicity and, most of all, the way it ignores all the false dichotomies in the education wars to state very clearly what qualities (or literacies, or cognitive abilites, or what have you) every graduate should have.  It’s a joy to read.  Everyone in higher education policy should read it.  And then ask themselves: could my institution produce a learning outcomes statement as clear and universal as this?

And if not, why not?