“The AI Literacy Test Higher Education Must Not Fail” Op-Ed Featured in Washington Examiner
Cornerstone University President Gerson Moreno-Riaño calls on higher education to confront one of its defining responsibilities in the age of artificial intelligence in a new op-ed published by the Washington Examiner, “The One Thing AI Can’t Replace — and Colleges Refuse to Teach.”
“To be literate in AI is not merely to know how to type a good prompt,” Dr. Moreno-Riaño said. “It is to know when to trust an output, when to verify it, and when to reject it . . . [and] to understand the moral ramifications of the choices we make with these systems and to act in harmony with what is genuinely good for us as human beings.”
The op-ed follows President Moreno-Riaño’s recent Fox News interview, which featured Cornerstone’s commitment to preparing graduates with the knowledge, wisdom, judgment and character to remain irreplaceable in an AI-driven world.
President Moreno-Riaño points to two recent national polls showing that Americans see AI as both a major opportunity and a technology that requires safeguards. At the same time, according to Pew Research Center, approximately 70% of U.S. adults are already using various AI tools. Students, workers, patients and voters are interacting with AI every day, yet few have been formally taught how to evaluate what it tells them.
“America will not lead the age of AI through computing power alone,” he wrote. “It will need people capable of directing that power wisely — citizens, workers, and leaders who can use these tools while staying thoughtful, responsible, and fully human in the process.”
That creates an urgent responsibility for higher education. President Moreno-Riaño rejects both banning technology graduates will encounter in the workplace and allowing students to outsource their thinking to machines they have never been taught to question.
His argument goes deeper than teaching students technical AI skills. Genuine AI literacy requires judgment, and judgment must be formed. President Moreno-Riaño calls for an education grounded in the pursuit, defense and application of truth, beauty and goodness — “coherent and coordinated moral formation” that develops the human capacities technology cannot provide.
“AI should be used to sharpen the learning journey of ourselves and our students. It must not serve as a cheap substitute for it.”
For Christian higher education, that responsibility begins with a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human. President Moreno-Riaño points to imago Dei — the Biblical truth that human beings are created in the image of God and therefore possess inherent dignity, genuine agency and responsibility for how they use the tools placed in their hands.
“Human dignity does not rest on functional prowess or processing speed. If it did, machines would already have surpassed us.”
That conviction allows useful technologies to be embraced as tools rather than ends in themselves.
At Cornerstone, President Moreno-Riaño points to a new on-campus AI certificate, dedicated AI courses in the Cornerstone Core™ and the new Honors Program curriculum, and an AI Advisory Board of distinguished academic and industry experts as ways the university is putting this approach into practice.
His larger challenge is to higher education itself:
“The universities that matter most a decade from now will be those that treated AI literacy as moral and civic formation, not merely a technical add-on. Cornerstone intends to be one of them.”
Read President Moreno-Riaño’s full Washington Examiner op-ed, “The AI Literacy Test Higher Education Must Not Fail.”
For more information on Cornerstone University’s Christ-centered, Biblically grounded approach to AI and its new Applied Artificial Intelligence Certificate, contact admissions@cornerstone.edu.
