Q&A: Post-Sabbatical, Scott Beardsley Assesses the Opportunities Ahead for Darden

In January, Scott Beardsley returned to his role of Dean of the Darden School of Business after a six-month sabbatical, during which he studied and researched at Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics on the intersection of artificial intelligence, ethics and wellbeing. The Darden Report caught up with Beardsley to discuss his experience in the U.K., and to look ahead and explore some other items of importance to the Darden School community.

How would you describe your personal and professional mindset now that you’ve been back at Darden for a couple of months?

I’m really excited to be back and energized about bringing to life some of the big projects we’ve got going on at Darden. It feels good to catch up with friends and colleagues, be back teaching, on the Lawn, playing with our golden retriever Lawnie and seeing some incredible Wahoo sports.

How would you distill the sabbatical experience?

It was not a vacation! Darden still commanded a lot of my time. A sabbatical is a structured environment for learning and pursuing research with more intensity. It affords mindspace to think and write. Oxford is an incredibly intellectual and vibrant, historical place that is a fascinating place to learn, meet interesting people and conduct research. I’m a lifelong learner and the ability to have time to focus  on topics that I think are relevant to business, to society and to Darden, that was a blessing.

You described your time there as exploring the intersection of AI, ethics and wellbeing. What did that entail?

I took a class on the ethics of wellbeing, and when you think about AI, artificial intelligence is just a mimicry of human intelligence, trying to find ways to mirror and/or advance understanding of the way humans think and feel. When you study human wellbeing and the ethics of it, you also are in effect studying what AI would need to try and learn about humans to artificially simulate that in so far as the objective function of AI is to advance human wellbeing. And that is not something we can take for granted. What I came to realize is that there’s no one theory for wellbeing. There’s a lot of competing theories, just like there are disagreements over what is ethical.

At the end of it, I’m interested in human wellbeing. I’m less interested in what makes an artificially intelligent entity well off. I’m interested in how AI can be aligned to human ethics, put to the service of humanity.

What kind of opportunity does this intersection present for Darden?

It’s something that Darden could excel at, because Darden is one of the best business schools in the world, if not the best, for ethics. And we have an incredible new gift from Dave and Kathy LaCross to advance Darden and UVA’s capabilities on AI business ethics. Asking the big questions, but also having a moral compass associated with that fits Darden incredibly well because it’s so baked into what we already do. AI will just call to the fore so many ethical issues because really what it does is create new ways of solving problems using technology.

If you had to rate on a scale of one to 10 your concern about AI and also your enthusiasm, what would your numbers be?

It’s a 10 on both. It is like a barbell for me. On the one hand, I can see incredible possibility to do amazing things with AI on almost every dimension you can think of. It is already embedded in GPS, in search, in AI tools such as Claude, Perplexity, Chat GPT and Gemini, in video and art (from Dalle to deepfakes to Sora), self-driving apps, therapy bots, virtual friend software like Replika, productivity software, healthcare applications and coding, to name but a few uses now. On the other, I worry about how to ensure containment and alignment, how to ensure that AI stays at the service of humanity and that there aren’t bad actors doing bad things. It’s what you call a dual-use problem, similar to the development of nuclear technology. Nuclear energy and fission and fusion can provide tremendous benefit to humanity as a renewable, low carbon energy source. But that same scientific knowledge being used to cause tremendous harm is potentially very high. And high-speed innovation, while important, often evolves without the typical constraints, regulations and scrutiny of more stable applications, with the attendant risks.

What’s in the middle of the barbell?

What’s in the middle are the regulating mechanisms, objective functions and ethical premises that underpin AI. But there’s not one AI. There are many, many versions. There are governments and several large companies with their own Large Language Models and training data. So, the bar in between is — call it regulation or implicit social contracts. There’s regulation in the sense of rules and laws. But for me it’s more than that. It’s also what the programmers put in the models because that’s really the level at which trade-offs are being made. The United States, for example, has a certain set of laws and rules that apply to people. The question is do those same things apply to the tools that we use? And if so, how? Who decides, what are the values, what training data is used, and how do you guarantee that it serves humanity in a positive way?

How does Darden fit in?

There’s a big role for Darden because we produce responsible leaders who will make the world a better place. When you have a new technology that is so pervasive and will be used by everybody and is growing at a super-exponential rate, we will need leaders who are adaptive and can figure out how to use it and lead our society and our companies through this tremendous amount of change. Darden is great preparation for a fast-changing world, and we are going to see change at a faster rate than we’ve ever seen before. Darden also has an opportunity to show how AI can best be used to create a transformational education experience inside and outside the classroom, in degree and non-degree programs, and in our Partnership for Leadership in Education (done in partnership with UVA’s School of Education) program that improves pre-K through grade 12 school systems.

AI seems to be another example of how innovation and technology have gotten ahead of everything else, including legal and ethical frameworks for its implementation.

If you go back, for example, to the emergence of the Internet or to the rise of broadband telecommunications, the personal computer and semiconductors, this is a continuation of that trend. You want innovation. You want technology to proceed in innovative ways, to break new ground, to try new things without incredible red tape. What happens is that companies operate first in an implicit social contract. We have an understanding that what you’re going to try and innovate is going to be positive for society. Until it isn’t. That’s the ever-changing role between business and society and something Darden is focused on. Darden’s expertise on stakeholder theory and stakeholder capitalism, and the Institute for Business in Society (IBIS) is absolutely germane and relevant in this regard.

Where are we going to see AI speed up the fastest and how is Darden preparing our leaders for that?

In the business world, AI is exploding. If you look at government research grants and what private equity and venture capital are investing in and the large cap technology companies, their market caps have absolutely risen to unprecedented levels. Countries have declared AI a national priority. So one opportunity is to work in AI itself, applying it as a tool, finding new leaders and managers who know how to deploy it in their environment in every industry or in startups. This is an obvious opportunity for business schools and their students. Being able to be savvy around AI and use it in a positive way, there will be a huge market for that.

The talent demand if you’re proficient in AI is very high. And with our AI Initiative and formation, I think combined with the strong ethics background of Darden, this should be a sweet spot for Darden. The number of ethical dilemmas to navigate will be high: Are autonomous weapons OK? Should sentient AGI have rights and personhood? What are the limits of AI relationships, and with children? etc. Darden has always been top ranked globally for general management. So if you look at what any general manager needs to be able to do, they need to be able to adapt to changes affecting their company. Sometimes they’re technological, some of them may be geopolitical, some of them may be social. And Darden has always been great at making the learner the leader, in developing that person who has to adapt to the change.

In addition, there’s going to be tremendous disruption. What is the future of work? What is the future workforce? All of the jobs that are going to be retooled will create opportunity and threat. So those who are agile thinkers, those who are able to adapt, to be lifelong learners, will build the toolkits. Darden makes you lift your game and learn how to adapt and deal with uncertainty. And we’re going to be getting more uncertainty rather than less.

Post-sabbatical, what are you focusing on? What are your top priorities?

Every year we have to deliver great quality at the highest levels of excellence for every student. We need to deliver the magic in the classroom. We need to keep producing ideas. We need to hire great people. We need to engage our alumni. We need to recruit the next class. We need to execute with great quality on our mission. That cannot be taken for granted. At the same time, we need to look to the horizon and ask what are the things that could truly make Darden stand out and be one of the absolute preeminent business schools in the world.

What are some of those items?

Standing up our new institutes that are really important for the future of Darden. The Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning, for example, came from a gift several years ago, but with the opening of the Forum Hotel, for example, we’re now better able to start unleashing the potential of the vision that Frank Sands Sr. had for Darden to create lifelong learning and non-degree programs.

A second platform is the AI Initiative we are hoping to stand up, helping to propel the University of Virginia forward. How do we use AI to deliver that learning magic that we have at Darden? For example, might customized tutoring allow students to achieve a higher rate of learning?

A third one is the second milestone of our capital campaign, called “Faculty Forward,” which is about investing in our faculty and the next generation. We’ve hired a tremendous number of faculty and enabling them to achieve their full potential is a priority.

Fourth, continuing to invest in the student experience and what makes Darden special, including getting residential housing built at Darden and bringing our full master plan to life. The BOV just gave final approval to the housing design in February.

Lastly, Darden needs to continue to have transformational fundraising in a number of areas. That includes need-based aid for students, scholarships keeping Darden affordable, allowing it to have a great return on investment and to be a game-changing experience without too much economic stress.

Financial Times recently ranked Darden the No. 1 public business school in world in 2024, among other very strong results. What should Darden take away from these accolades?

The first is that we should pause to see that Darden is an amazing place already, thanks to the incredible efforts of our faculty, staff, alumni and students over many, many years. The world is noticing, and we have an opportunity to use this momentum. We were also ranked No. 1 among all US business schools in 2023 by a Princeton Review composite ranking, and No. 3 overall in Bloomberg Businessweek, our best results ever. But rankings are the kind of thing that you love them when they’re good and you hate them when they’re bad. In general, we need to be humble and rankings-aware, but mission-driven. I’m proud of the rankings we’ve had, but some aspects of them are more than imperfect.

That being said, certain components of the rankings, such as assessing career outcomes or whether students like their experience, are valuable. Are they satisfied? Is there alumni engagement? There is real feedback in there that we should look at if we’re self-critical, and I put myself in that category. There are things upon which we can still improve. For example, we can improve upon scholarships. We can improve upon our ranking for research. I can improve as dean. Rankings also do not guarantee future success in our wildly competitive space. As Dean Bob Bruner rightly says, “Standing still is not an option.”

My approach to life and to developing institutions and to developing people is to focus on building on their strengths. Darden has many strengths: a great student experience and outstanding teaching. We cannot lose that. The question is how do you build around that in a way that takes you to the next level?

The strategy for Darden for the future is to allocate resources and execute on initiatives to be one of the greatest business schools in the world by focusing on key elements of our mission — the students, the faculty, the staff and the infrastructure supporting them. And excellence is the only aspiration that works.