When “Magnifica Humanitas” was released on May 15, Pope Leo XIV joined a growing chorus, questioning how artificial intelligence and optimization are reshaping modern institutions. The timing mattered. Across all economic sectors, efficiency has moved from a practical concern to something closer to an obsession.
In the context of higher education, universities now optimize admissions pipelines, deploy predictive analytics to flag “at‑risk” students, automate advising nudges, and experiment with AI tools to assess teaching, research productivity, operational efficiency and resource allocation.
Under pressure from declining enrollments, the demographic cliff, rising costs and demands for accountability, optimization promises relief. Faster decisions. Better yields. Fewer surprises.
We see a similar drive to efficiency across the various pockets of work in our post-industrial, knowledge-based economy, whether that is in the automation of individual tasks, or the outcome of organizational redesign of major workflows.
We are seeing the rapid integration of everything from the automation of repetitive tasks and data entry, through the agentic AI models, focused on autonomous decision-making and actions, related to setting goals, forecasting outcomes, ad targeting, and content creation. All of this is driving towards maximizing business efficiencies, ROIs and, increasingly, threatening the role of the “human” in this loop.
But like any obsession, this one runs the high risk of distorting judgment. And that is where “Magnifica Humanitas” unexpectedly converges with The Cult of Efficiency, the influential critique written almost 25 years ago by political scientist Janice Gross Stein.
Stein has had many roles, including as the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the Belzberg professor of conflict management at the University of Toronto. She was also—perhaps less auspiciously—my professor in Introduction to International Relations, in the fall of 1985, when I arrived as a new freshman at the University of Toronto.
As I read Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, I could not help but hear the strains of Stein’s warning against the risks of a blind devotion to efficiency at all costs. Writing from different traditions, both authors warn that, when efficiency and optimization become organizing principles rather than supporting tools—think means to an end vs. ends in themselves—institutions lose their capacity to see and serve human beings.
Risk of ‘picking winners’
Stein’s argument is especially relevant for U.S. higher education. Efficiency becomes dangerous, she argues, when it stops being questioned.
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Modern institutions increasingly justify decisions by pointing to models, metrics, or procedures rather than by defending the underlying goals themselves. Over time, efficiency becomes self‑legitimating. Leaders are insulated from responsibility because the system worked “as designed,” wringing out inefficiencies and low productivity from every operational unit.
“Magnifica Humanitas” names the same phenomenon in moral terms. Pope Leo warns that contemporary technologies, particularly AI, risk reshaping how we understand the human person, with his or her inherent dignity.
When systems are built to optimize outcomes, the risk is great that people will be reframed as variables. Dignity is no longer articulated; it is assumed, and then quietly sidelined.
Drawing on Pope Leo XIV’s account of human dignity and technology in “Magnifica Humanitas,” one could say that when efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as projects to be optimized rather than as persons called into relationship and communion with one another.
Higher education offers concrete examples. Admissions offices increasingly rely on predictive models to identify students most likely to enroll or graduate on time. Advising platforms generate automated alerts based on behavioral data. These tools may improve efficiency, and ultimately student success outcomes, but they also encode assumptions about which students are worth investing in.
Those who don’t fit historical patterns—first‑generation students, part‑time learners, students with complex lives—can appear less as educational commitments and more as statistical risks. As we live through a chapter of tremendous strain across higher education, the risk of seeing our work as “picking winners” is real.
When efficiency defines success
This is precisely the dynamic Stein warns against. When decisions are justified by analytics, responsibility shifts.
The moral trade‑offs embedded in those systems—between access and yield, equity and efficiency—fade from view. Optimization begins to masquerade as morally neutral, a mask that is far from the truth.
AI intensifies this problem because it does not merely assist decisions; it structures them. Once efficiency logic is embedded in software, it becomes harder to interrogate.
Systems optimize toward goals they did not choose. As Stein notes, institutions then confuse procedural success with institutional excellence.
At this point, the Jesuit Catholic tradition adds a crucial counterweight to our work in higher education: Ignatian discernment. Discernment is not simply decision‑making; it is disciplined moral attention.
Rooted in the Jesuit tradition, discernment insists that complex choices require context, reflection, and accountability. It asks not only what works, but whom it serves, what it costs, and who bears the burden.
Discernment is slower than optimization—and intentionally so. It resists the temptation to outsource judgment to systems that cannot explain themselves or answer for consequences. Where efficiency seeks closure, discernment keeps questions open long enough to surface moral stakes.
Pope Leo XIV’s insistence in “Magnifica Humanitas” that technology must remain ordered toward integral human development echoes Stein’s warning. AI can optimize means, but it cannot supply ends.
When institutions—or national economies, for that matter—allow efficiency to define success, they quietly allow technology to redefine what education is for.
What keeps us human
None of this is an argument against innovation. Efficiency is a genuine good and especially necessary in times of resource scarcity and emerging strategic threats.
But obsession turns goods into idols. When efficiency becomes our primary moral language—in higher education and elsewhere—other values such as judgment, equity, formation, belonging—are crowded out, because they are harder to measure. This challenge to metrics can easily render the complex unworthy of pursuit.
Universities, however, are not logistics firms. Our legitimacy rests on trust and the social compact that we have entered into with those who we serve. Society must trust that decisions affecting students and faculty are made with care, transparency, and moral seriousness.
As Stein reminds us, institutions fail not because they lack data, but because they surrender responsibility. “Magnifica Humanitas” reminds us why that responsibility matters.
Efficiency is a necessary tool—one of many—that can help society’s core institutions to function in increasingly challenging times. Serious discernment, and a moral clarity of means vs. ends, is what keeps us human.
