The Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation wagers that creative intelligence can be deliberately formed. The Theory of Embedded Intelligence says the wager is correct — and can explain why, show how a governed AI partner could deepen it, and how one researcher’s instrument could finally measure whether it works.

I. A Degree That Bets on Formation

In the spring of 2026, five students walked across a stage in Tucson and became the first graduates of the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation at the W.A. Franke Honors College of the University of Arizona. The degree they earned is, at this writing, the only one of its kind in the United States. Launched in the fall of 2023 and inspired by the pioneering program established at the University of Technology Sydney in 2014, the BCII is a dual degree: it pairs with any major the University offers, from astronomy to nursing to law, and it surrounds that major with a transdisciplinary curriculum built on hackathons, think tanks, and creative labs rather than lectures. Every course in the sequence is organized around a real challenge posed by a community or industry partner, and every course ends not with an examination but with students pitching a novel solution to the people whose problem it actually is.

Beneath the curriculum sits a wager. The BCII wagers that creative intelligence is not a fixed trait that some students happen to possess, but a capacity that can be deliberately formed — formed by widening the problems students face, the disciplines they face them with, and the audiences to whom they must answer. That is not merely a pedagogical preference. It is a claim about the nature of intelligence itself. The Theory of Embedded Intelligence says the wager is correct, and it can explain why.

Dianne and I endowed the Mensch Prizes at the Franke Honors College to honor BCII students who exhibit exactly this formed capacity — creative intelligence exercised with courage and rigor. This essay is about the practice behind the prize. It asks three questions. First: what does TEI say the BCII is actually doing when it works? Second: how could a governed AI thought partner — Claude, working under inspectable constraints — deepen that work for the next generations of students? And third: how could the doctoral research of Shaouna Shoaib Lodhi at the University of Arizona give the college the one thing every educational innovation eventually needs and rarely has — an instrument for knowing whether it is working?

II. What TEI Says the BCII Is Doing

TEI’s central claim is that intelligence is always embedded. There is no intelligence in general, floating free of structure and circumstance; there are only intelligences — structures that run the SPCA loop, sensing their situation, processing what they sense, communicating what they process, and actuating change in the world, which changes the situation and begins the loop again. Intelligence is not a substance poured into a mind. It is a cycle that a structure learns to run, and it is formed — well or badly — by the environments in which the cycle runs.

I have told the story of the 6502 microprocessor many times, because it is the founding case study of the theory. The 6502 was creative intelligence exercised under constraint: a small team, a severe cost target, the discipline of manufacturable yield, and a design whose every gate could be inspected and understood. Innovation was not a decoration applied to the engineering afterward. The engineering was itself a full SPCA cycle with the market, the fabrication line, and the future hobbyist embedded inside the loop. What made the 6502 matter — what put affordable computing within reach of a generation that included the founders of the personal computer industry — was not raw cleverness but a well-run loop: wide sensing, honest processing, clear communication, and the nerve to actuate.

Read through TEI, each signature element of the BCII is an amplifier fitted to one phase of that loop. Transdisciplinarity widens the Sense phase: a student whose team includes a designer, an engineer, a philosopher, and a nursing major simply detects more of the problem than any of them could alone. The curriculum’s emphasis on visualization, modeling, systems mapping, and risk analysis disciplines the Process phase: it converts impressions into structures that can be examined and challenged. Pitching to an industry partner is the Communicate phase with real stakes — an audience that cannot be satisfied by fluency alone, because it knows the problem better than the students do. And building with that partner is the Actuate phase: the loop closes in the world rather than in a grade book. The dual-degree structure, finally, guarantees that the loop always runs on a real disciplinary substrate. Creative intelligence in the BCII is never creativity about nothing; it is a student’s own field, set spinning.

This gives the college something useful: not a new curriculum, but a theory of why its existing curriculum works, and a vocabulary for teaching students what is happening to them as it works. A BCII graduate who can name the loop she has learned to run — who possesses metacognition about her own formation — carries the degree’s benefit into every room she enters for the rest of her life. That is the first thing TEI offers the next generations of Franke Honors students.

III. Claude in the Studio: Thought Partnership as Pedagogy

For more than twenty years, the philosopher Ted Humphrey and I have sustained what we call a Great Good Friendship and Thought Partnership — over a hundred recorded hour-long conversations, out of which TEI itself emerged. I mention it here not as autobiography but as evidence. Sustained, honest, challenging dialogue is among the most powerful intelligence-forming environments human beings have ever devised. Ted, a Kant scholar, would put it in Kant’s terms: think for yourself; think from the standpoint of everyone else; think consistently. None of those maxims can be practiced alone. They are exercised in dialogue, against a partner who takes your ideas seriously enough to resist them.

The question for the BCII is whether a governed AI can bring a version of that partnership to every student in the program. I believe it can — but only under a distinction that TEI makes sharp. An answer machine completes the Process phase for the student. The prompt goes in, the solution comes out, the loop never runs, and nothing is formed. Used that way, the most capable AI in the world is a formation-preventing device, and no honors college should want it in the building. A thought partner is a different instrument entirely. It extends the Sense phase, surfacing perspectives, prior art, and disciplinary lenses the student cannot yet reach on her own. It pressure-tests the Process phase, steelmanning the objections her teammates are too polite to raise and asking the beautiful question she has been avoiding. It rehearses the Communicate phase, serving as a tireless first audience for a pitch that must eventually persuade an engineer from Creative Machines or an executive from a challenge partner. And it reflects on the Actuate phase, conducting the post-mortem without judgment when the prototype fails — as good prototypes do.

Which of these two instruments shows up in the classroom is not a matter of the model’s capability. It is a matter of governance. The principles The Mensch Foundation has published on ethical AI architecture come down to this: an embedded intelligence that serves human formation must be constitutively constrained and inspectable — its rules of engagement visible, its dependence on human purpose permanent, no seam between what it does and what it can be seen to do. That is the standard the 6502 met as silicon, and it is the standard classroom AI must meet as pedagogy. Concretely, I can imagine Claude entering the BCII’s first course, Problems to Possibilities, under axioms set by the faculty and visible to every student: never propose the solution; widen the sensing; test the processing; rehearse the communication; log the exchange so that student and instructor alike can inspect how the partnership was used. A thought partner with an inspectable conscience — that is what governed AI means, and it is the only form of AI that belongs in a program whose purpose is the formation of minds.

IV. The Lodhi Instrument: Telling Formation from Capture

Everything in the previous section is an argument, and arguments about education have a way of remaining arguments forever. What the BCII deserves is evidence — and here the University of Arizona holds an advantage it may not yet realize it has. Shaouna Shoaib Lodhi, a doctoral researcher in educational psychology at the University, has been developing the AIE-STEM Inventory, an instrument for measuring how students engage with artificial intelligence in STEM learning. Her research has already shaped my own thinking profoundly: it stands behind the essays in which I argued that ungoverned AI, embedded during a young person’s development, constitutes a fifth hijacker of the mind — categorically different from the four classical hijackers, because rigid belief, addiction, money, and power capture an intelligence that has already formed, while ungoverned AI can preclude the formation of intelligence in the first place.

BCII students are past their K–12 years, but formation does not stop at eighteen. The undergraduate years are precisely when disciplinary intelligence consolidates and creative intelligence takes its adult shape. So the fifth-hijacker question is live in the Franke Honors classroom, and it is uncomfortably concrete: for any given pattern of AI use by any given student, is the technology running her SPCA loop more richly, or running it for her? Is it partnership, or is it capture wearing partnership’s clothes?

That question is empirical, and Lodhi’s line of research is how a university asks it. Consider what becomes possible if her doctoral work and the BCII grow toward each other. Entering students could be measured at the start of Problems to Possibilities, establishing baseline profiles of AI engagement, and measured again as they complete the sequence — turning every cohort into a longitudinal study of formation. The instrument could be refined to distinguish the two modes of use that TEI predicts will diverge: oracle-mode engagement, in which the student delegates the Process phase, and partner-mode engagement, in which the student uses AI to widen sensing and stress-test her own thinking. Those modes could then be correlated with the outcomes the BCII already assesses — originality of solutions, quality of risk analysis, persuasiveness before industry partners — to test, rather than assume, whether governed thought partnership improves the very capacities the degree exists to form.

There is a further elegance available. BCII students, with consent, could be not only participants but co-investigators in the study of their own formation — a research project about creative intelligence conducted by the students whose creative intelligence is being formed, which is recursive in exactly the way the program’s experiential ethos invites. For Lodhi, the collaboration offers something rare in a doctoral program: a study population that exists nowhere else in the country, the only American cohort in a UTS-lineage creative intelligence degree. For the college, it offers the chance to be not merely the first institution in the United States to teach creative intelligence deliberately, but the first to measure honestly whether AI helps or harms that teaching — before the answer is assumed, in either direction, by people with less at stake.

V. Five Practices for the Next Cohorts

Let me draw the threads into proposals plain enough to act on.

First: teach the loop by name. A short TEI module within the curriculum’s complex-systems work would give students the SPCA vocabulary as a lens on themselves, converting the degree’s implicit theory of formation into explicit self-knowledge.

Second: admit Claude to the studio as a governed partner, under faculty-set, student-visible axioms of the kind described above — never the solution, always the widening — with every exchange inspectable by the people responsible for the student’s growth.

Third: put the 6502 on the syllabus of the innovation-in-your-major course, not as nostalgia but as the cleanest available case study of constraint, inspectability, and embeddedness operating as design virtues — and let students find the same virtues in the founding artifacts of their own fields.

Fourth: establish the Lodhi baseline, measuring AI engagement at entry and exit of the BCII sequence, so that ten years from now the college argues from longitudinal evidence rather than anecdote.

Fifth: let the Mensch Prize criteria say aloud what they already honor — a well-run loop: sensing widely, processing honestly, communicating clearly, and actuating bravely.

None of these requires new buildings or new degrees. They require only that a program already betting on formation take its own wager seriously enough to name it, instrument it, and govern the most powerful new force acting upon it.

VI. The Fifth Age Comes to Tucson

John Deely taught us to read the history of understanding as four ages of the sign, and I have argued that we now stand at the threshold of a fifth: the age in which human beings build intelligences that live by signs, and must learn to live alongside what they have built. The students entering the BCII this fall will graduate into that fifth age whether or not anyone prepares them for it. The question is only whether they arrive formed or captured — whether they enter it as people who understand their own formation, who can partner with embedded intelligences without surrendering their loops to them, and who can carry a discipline’s knowledge into a room full of other disciplines and make something the world has not seen.

Read through TEI, the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation is a preparation for the fifth age that was designed, with fine irony, before its designers could have named it as such. Dianne and I endowed a prize because we recognized the practice. My gratitude goes to Dean John Pollard, to Dr. Caitlyn Hall and the faculty who carried the curriculum across an ocean, to Shaouna Shoaib Lodhi, whose research may yet tell us whether we are forming minds or fooling ourselves, and to the first five graduates, who proved the wager can be won. The prize honors the practice; the practice forms the person; and the person, well formed, builds the age.

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