Byron Rich is the inaugural Assistant Provost of Academic Innovation and Associate Professor of Art at Allegheny College. An internationally recognized artist and designer, he has been an invited speaker at high-profile conferences and symposia and has exhibited his work in numerous museums and galleries around the world. His work as an artist and designer tackles the cultural implications of emerging technologies (such as AI, robotics and biotechnology) using speculative design to comment on techno-futures.
At Allegheny College, Byron founded the Art, Science & Innovation program and Industrial Design programs to demonstrate how emerging technologies and art and design can be the point of coalescence of creative and critical thinking, as well as technological acumen. He also founded the Allegheny Lab for Innovation & Creativity which has since expanded into a paradigm-defining technology training and research center infused with the cornerstones of liberal arts education and critical and creative thinking. Designed in two distinct locations, both are places where science and the humanities intersect, providing hands-on experience with technology and opportunities to create a tech economy capable of sustaining continued economic growth for the region.
Byron holds a BFA from the University of Calgary (Canada) and MFA in Emerging Practices from SUNY Buffalo. Byron’s work is often featured in books and journals, and his writing can be found in numerous publications, including the recently released book Synthetic Becoming, edited by Lenka Vesela. He is the vice president of the Crawford County Historical Society and on the board of directors for the northwestern Pennsylvania chapter of the National Tooling & Machining Association.
Tell us about your company and the problem it solves, or its benefit to learners or educators.
ALIC @ Bessemer is a first-of-its-kind educational model that integrates traditional liberal arts thinking, especially critical and creative thinking, with technical education. As a branch campus of Allegheny College, ALIC @ Bessemer leverages the vast educational resources of our traditional four-year campus toward the training and upskilling of incumbent workers and unemployed individuals in our region. We focus on advanced manufacturing and emerging technologies within the sector while also providing foundational skills in manual processes. Additionally, ALIC @ Bessemer offers courses in operational effectiveness and leadership to help ensure that our region has next-generation leaders ready to continue innovating.
During a year-long needs assessment, we identified several issues with traditional technical education programs. Notably, we discovered that typical programs are too long, too expensive, and not representative of industry needs, often resulting in employers having to provide supplemental training to their staff even after individuals complete technical programs. We also learned that traditional technical education wasn’t instilling enough critical and creative capacity into its students, which presented a fascinating opportunity, given that Allegheny College, as a traditional liberal arts institution, prides itself on its ability to empower students in those very capacities as part of its liberal arts identity. ALIC @ Bessemer solves all of those challenges.
Our programming consists of stackable, short-form courses that can be taken à la carte or as part of industry-designed microcredentials. All of our courses earn individuals college credits, which gives them on-ramps to further their education as their careers develop. Our stackable courses can be combined into microcredentials over any timespan, offering a vastly increased level of flexibility for our learners. Additionally, our courses are more affordable than traditional higher education, lowering the barrier for underemployed individuals and organizations to upskill toward higher-earning and in-demand roles in our region. We also invest in state-of-the-industry and state-of-the-art technology based on input from our industry partners. Our students learn on the same equipment that they will utilize once employed in the advanced manufacturing community. Lastly, we embed 20% traditional liberal arts strengths, critical and creative thinking, into every course we run.
All of these deviations from traditional educational models manifest in a transformative approach to technical education that doesn’t prioritize one way of thinking over another. It acknowledges the intelligence and capability of individuals in our communities and simply elevates them to fill pivotal roles that will continue to lie at the heart of our region and nation’s economy.
What is the challenge educators face today that is fixable?
As educators, our ethical responsibility lies in ensuring our programs, intellectually and structurally, represent the work our students are inheriting. To that end, I believe the most significant issue facing higher education at the moment is that programs are often too slow to respond to a rapidly evolving world. The tension between ensuring a robust shared governance process is followed while also allowing institutions to be nimble enough to act on their ethical imperative is paramount to rebuilding public trust in what we know can be transformational experiences. ALIC @ Bessemer demonstrates that we can create systems that adhere to the core principle of shared governance while also enabling our College to evolve rapidly in response to political, social and technological shifts.
What is the challenge educators face today that will persist?
I’m a firm believer that all problems are solvable, so I don’t have a great answer to this question. That said, I think the problem that will persist more than any other is representing how what we teach – whether in a liberal arts setting, technical education or any other format – reflects societal need. Additionally, higher education plays a significant role in shaping culture. On a micro level, artificial intelligence (AI) is the hot topic of the moment but is simply another artifact of higher education’s need to evolve, not away from what it has historically been but toward economic and intellectually equitable futures for as many people as possible.
I’m an enormous believer and the product of an educational journey where, in a single day, I’d take a continental philosophy class followed by a welding class. We need to ensure that equal value is placed on diverse fields of study and better acknowledge that all academic journeys are vital. I believe a meta approach to higher education that reflects the intelligence, curiosity, and potential of all individuals is the moral north star we need to guide us. Unfortunately, the hierarchy of educational opportunity is likely to persist until models like ALIC are more widely adopted.
What are the areas of education or training and workforce development that are being overlooked?
The single most significant area of workforce development that is often overlooked is the importance of critical and creative thinking in all roles across industries. We are addressing this at ALIC @ Bessemer. We heard numerous times during the needs assessment phase that these two pillars of a liberal arts education are crucial to the economic futures of our region. Our president, Dr. Ron Cole, is a pioneer of understanding that the liberal arts are exactly what industry needs; we simply need to repackage and reframe the core tenets of our educational model to best serve our industry partners.
What do you foresee will be a challenge in education in three to five years?
The grandest challenge that higher education will face in the coming years, beyond grappling with AI and the demographic cliff, will be ensuring faculty buy-in as the field of higher education evolves. It will become increasingly vital that shared governance continues to play a role in shaping education. At the same time, institutions also must ensure that faculty feel valued, even if their discipline doesn’t have obvious ties to traditional notions of “employability” and post-graduation outcomes.As an art professor, my field is often derided on lists of “best and least paying college majors”; yet, the skills we teach within the field are truly transformational and have far-reaching applications. That said, not every field needs to be producing highly paid graduates, as creativity and exploration of the ragged edges of culture are inherent elements of being human. The grand challenge we face is evolving to represent culture, while also ensuring that we as educators, researchers, theorists and artists continue to shape culture. The tension is complex, but its roots lie in our ability to acknowledge that there is room for career-oriented fields, as well as those that will never appear on a list of “highest paid.” Instead, we need to avoid internal battles over “value” and lean into a collaborative approach to ensuring that higher education continues to fulfill its critical function in society: transforming lives. And whether that transformation results in economic opportunity, or intellectual satisfaction (or, with a bit of luck, both), doesn’t matter as much as ensuring that institutions evolve to thrive toward the benefit of society broadly, long into the future.