Date
October 22 at 5:00 PM - 9:00 PM EDT
Location
120 Physical Sciences Building
Chesterton House & COLLIS Institute present:
Why Are We Here? On the Proper Ends of an Undergraduate Education
Thursday, October 22nd, 2026
5:00pm EST
Physical Sciences Building 120 or via Zoom
Dinner reception to follow
Is the purpose of a university education to get a degree? To get a good job? To have a transformative social experience?
While these are, naturally, valuable components of a university education, Jennifer Frey argues that the primary goal of college is the cultivation of a student’s humanity–their mind, character, and inner freedom. The college years should be a time when students are transformed through their personal search for truth. Other outcomes may naturally follow, but they are external to the central goal of personal formation. For the Christian, this personal formation means having our lives, virtues, and intellectual pursuits properly oriented toward God.
But what happens when the technological tools universities embrace and teach begin to undermine the formation of those very virtues? Frey argues that artificial intelligence threatens our humanity along several dimensions. If the primary purpose of university life is to cultivate our humanity, then universities should be cautious about when and how AI belongs in the educational experience. Perhaps more cautious than they are currently being.
Join us for an evening with Jennifer Frey, in conversation with Dean Peter Loewen (Cornell College of Arts and Sciences) as we explore what a university education is actually for, how AI might contribute to (or threaten) this purpose, and what the Christian intellectual tradition has to say about the proper ends of education.
Jennifer A. Frey; Director, Classical Liberal Arts, Visiting Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia, Watson Manor
Jennifer A. Frey is Director of Programs in Classical Liberal Arts at the University of Virginia, where she is also a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and Visiting Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. She came to Virginia from the University of Tulsa, where she served as the inaugural Dean of the Honors College, whose curriculum centered on the great books of Western civilization. Before Tulsa she was Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina, where she also held the title of Peter and Bonnie McCausland Faculty Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Jennifer earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in philosophy and medieval studies, with a minor in classics, at Indiana University Bloomington. She has published widely on virtue and moral psychology and has edited three academic volumes on virtue and human action Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology; Practical Truth; and a forthcoming volume, Practical Wisdom. She is currently writing a book on the liberal arts and freedom. Her non-academic writing has appeared in First Things, Image, Law and Liberty, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Point, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal, among other venues. She hosts the philosophy, theology, and literature podcast Sacred and Profane Love.
Peter John Loewen, Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences
Peter is a professor of government and the Dean of Cornell’s largest college. His research examines how citizens can make better choices, politicians can make better decisions, and how we can harness technological change to improve democracy and the economy. He has published in leading journals in political science and general science, and several other fields.
