Dr. José Antonio Bowen

President
Goucher College

José Antonio Bowen has had a successful career in education and music since he began his teaching career in 1982 as the director of jazz ensembles at Stanford University. He’s also taught at Georgetown University, was a dean at Miami University and Southern Methodist University and has performed with some of the top jazz performers in the world in the past 35 years.

The Goucher College president is an outspoken advocate for active learning environments and using technology to enhance the classroom experience for students and is the author of the widely praised “Teaching Naked: How Moving Technology Out Of Your College Classroom Will Improve Student Learning,” At Goucher, he’s a champion for liberal arts education.

“No one really knows what the jobs of the future are going to be. Thirty million Americans took new jobs in 2017 that did not exist in the previous quarter,” he says. “The predictions are that 60 percent of the best jobs in five years do not currently exist and that finance and accounting are the two majors most likely to be useless because they will be done by artificial intelligence robots soon.

“Those are predictions, but what we know is that we are now in a ‘learning economy,’ where the value of graduates will be less what they know and more what they can learn – on their own.”

Smart is the ability to change your mind and reconsider old information in new ways, Bowen says.

“The jobs of the future will go to people who are complimentary to computers and can ask better questions, bring a variety of perspectives, and mostly, who know how to change their minds when they get new information.”

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