The Dean who went back to school

A career changer

While an electrical engineering degree was not what he had in mind for his career when he started college, it opened up more opportunities for learning.

“I changed pathways a lot; I didn’t know what I would end up becoming,” he says.

After the degree, he found a job in Silicon Valley working for a company, Advanced Microdevices, the stock of which he wishes he’d kept. Eventually, he started planning to go back to studying, eyeing a business degree, but the cost issue sprang up again.

“I was broke. I had a lot of debt. I really wanted to broaden my horizons, but I didn’t know how to pay for that degree either,” he recalls.

Then he adds, laughing: “Well, I did know: I was going to borrow more money.”

And so he did. The degree turned out to be a good investment — after graduating, he landed a job with a signing bonus.

“That was the most money I’d ever seen,” he says. “I just gave it to MIT.”

Funding and attitudes are among the barriers career changers face throughout life. But Dr Beardsley encourages everyone who wants to keep studying to “find a way”.

“I don't think everybody should follow the same path at the same time, but education is something that you need throughout your life,” he explains.

“It's part of developing as a human being, and that could be in the form of a degree, a short course, or learning a skill or a trade. I think the most important thing is that people develop themselves. The most important, the best investment you can make is in yourself.”

Dr Beardsley then worked for 26 years at McKinsey & Company in Belgium. He transitioned to higher education in 2015, relocating to the historic heart of the University of Virginia campus.

His experience transitioning into higher education provided him with the inspiration to write a book, which was published in 2017 as Higher Calling: The Rise of Nontraditional Leaders in Academia.

“Nontraditional leaders — those coming from outside the traditional tenure-track pipeline — have become more common as governing boards seek executives skilled in crisis management, public policy, financial restructuring and large-scale enterprise strategy,” he comments.

But, he adds: “I think academia needs the right leader to meet the challenges and opportunities that a particular college or university might be facing. It’s about finding the right person for the moment — traditional or nontraditional.”

Education in the AI era

It’s unsurprising that someone who considers education the best investment one can make would be watching AI developments closely.

“AI affects higher education, which is one of the reasons I was interested in it,” he says.

“I rarely have a meeting where somebody doesn't mention AI. It seems to be a mandatory subject of conversation in any meeting I have.”

While AI can be a force for good, he says, it’s important that it’s controlled — in a balanced way, finding an equilibrium between regulation and innovation.

“It starts by saying: what’s the purpose?

“The objective function should be to develop humanity; [AI] should be a tool used to advance the human condition, not the other way around.”

In higher education, this translates to understanding how education can be enhanced and not diminished by AI, and what skills students need to thrive in the AI era.

“If you're studying, how do you make sure that you're the one that's learning and not just your AI tool? AI cannot do the learning for you,” he explains.

“The question is: how do you use it to make learning better, to improve the human condition, to make students learn better, faster, more effectively?”

He believes in the Socratic method— and points to active participation in lectures, pen-and-paper exercises and oral exams as ways to ensure that education remains an experience that develops students’ abilities.

And while students will need to have the right skills to function in the AI era, those skills go well beyond prompt engineering.

“The most underdeveloped skills today are actually human: ethical judgment and interpersonal EQ,” he says.

“If students rely on AI to draft, summarise and code, they will miss out on the messy, face-to-face practice of reading a room, persuading a team and auditing an algorithm for bias.”

“The competitive edge in the modern job market isn't just knowing how to use the machine — it's having the critical thinking and emotional intelligence to ask the right questions and to know when to use the technology and when not to.”