Keynote
2025 Keynote Speaker
José Antonio Bowen
Educator, Musician, Scholar
José Antonio Bowen has been leading innovation and change for over 40 years at Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Southampton (UK), as a dean at Miami and SMU, and as president of a top ten USN&WR most innovative college until 2019. He now runs Bowen Innovation Group L.L.C., and does innovation, leadership and inclusion consulting and training for Toyota, AT&T, Chevron, Pfizer, and other Fortune 500 companies.
Bowen holds four degrees from Stanford University (in Chemistry, Music, and Humanities) who honored him as a “Distinguished Alumni Scholar” in 2010. His research includes over 100 scholarly articles and books, including Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology out of your College Classroom will Improve Student Learning (winner of the NessAward for Best Book on Higher Education in 2012) and the new Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers using Relationships, Resilience and Reflection (2021, Johns Hopkins UniversityPress).
Bowen has long been a pioneer in teaching and technology as profiled in The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, PBS News Hour, and NPR, and was awarded the Ernest L. Boyer Award (for significant contributions to American higher education) in 2018. He has presented hundreds of keynotes and workshops in 46 states and 17 countries around the world. He also worked as a musician with Stan Getz, Bobby McFerrin, Liberace, and Jerry Garcia, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. He is a Senior Fellow at the American Association of Colleges and Universities and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (FRSA) in England. For more, watch his TED talks.
Keynote Address
Educating Humans to Thrive in an AI World
It is hard to ignore the AI threats to economic, academic, political, environmental and psychological well-being. Higher education, however, finds itself in a unique position to understand and combat these threats: asking better questions and judging answers has always been at the center of a critical thinking education. Education manages the tension between learning to be fully human and preparing for a successful career. Since expertise is also essential to using AI well, we will need to prepare students to be experts in a world where AI can produce better work than many interns. Understanding how we might (or might not) use AI to support human thriving will be essential as we begin the process of maintaining the best of our tradition while rethinking curriculum for a new world.