A Message from the President

There is a book I return to often called “The Elegant Warrior,” by Heather Hansen. Its central idea is deceptively simple: You can be formidably strong in your profession and still meet every challenge with grace. Strength and elegance are not opposites. In fact, at their best, they are inseparable.

That idea has quietly shaped the way I think about leadership in higher education. Because this work demands both. The challenges we face — shifting demographics, changing workforce expectations, rapid technological change — require us to be bold and resolute. But how we respond to those challenges matters just as much as the fact that we do. In a time of disruption, elegance is not a luxury. It is a strategy.

Nowhere is that balance more important, or more tested, than in how we approach artificial intelligence.

John Dewey once observed that “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” He wrote those words more than a century ago, and yet they have never felt more urgent. AI is not a distant horizon. It is already transforming the professions our students are entering — medicine, design, architecture, business, nursing, the law. The question is not whether we prepare them for it. The question is how.

Last year, Jefferson launched four AI-focused academic programs, each one designed to build meaningful, career-relevant fluency in the technologies reshaping our students’ fields. This semester, we are going further. We are rolling out free, optional online modules on AI basics — available to every student across the University, regardless of discipline or degree level.

These modules cover a range of foundational concepts. Among them is something called prompt engineering — essentially, the skill of constructing clear, precise, purposeful questions that draw the most useful responses from an AI system. It sounds technical. What it actually is, is timeless.

Learning how to ask better questions is one of the oldest and most powerful forms of intellectual development we know. Socrates built an entire method around it. And now, in the age of generative AI, it turns out to be one of the most practical professional skills a graduate can have. What’s more, it crosses disciplines: The student who learns to prompt an AI more precisely is also learning to think more precisely, to communicate more precisely, to advocate for themselves and their patients and their clients more precisely.

This is what strength and elegance look like in education. Teaching students to thrive amid constant change — not merely to endure it, but to lead through it. Helping them think critically, collaborate generously, and stay resilient when the path forward is unclear. Giving them, as we have always given them here at Jefferson, not just knowledge, but the capacity to use that knowledge wisely.

Jefferson has entered its third century, but our mission has not changed. Only the tools — and the beautiful, demanding work of mastering them — are new.