As machine-generated answers become ordinary, the human relationship becomes the distinctive thing a university offers. SFBU treats the capacity to build one as something a course can teach.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed the same people for more than eighty years. It finds that the quality of a person's relationships predicts a good life better than wealth, fame or social class. In 2021, 61 percent of young adults reported serious loneliness, the highest rate of any age group. Since 2020, public health bodies have treated social connection as a health factor. In one 2026 workplace survey, the youngest employees were the most likely to feel lonely at work. SFBU's graduating class belongs to that group.
Relational intelligence is the ability to build and keep working relationships, including across disagreement and difference. CEPI's working claim is that faculty can teach it and assess it. It has four parts.
Earning the benefit of the doubt from someone under no obligation to give it.
Staying in a conversation when ideas collide, without withdrawing and without trying to win.
Returning to a relationship after a rupture and rebuilding it, a skill many people never learn.
The fourth is working across difference, which means collaborating with people formed by contexts unlike one's own. These capacities are hard to automate and easy to neglect, and a syllabus does not develop them by accident. They extend the Relational dimension of PERS.
An engineer from Meta visited Design Your Life, SFBU’s course on career design. At the end, the students asked for a photo with him.
Faculty have the most influence at the level of the assignment. Every assignment already directs a student's attention somewhere: to a search bar, a rubric, a deadline. A relationship-rich assignment directs it to a person, and is built so it cannot be finished without that conversation.
SFBU describes three kinds of partner. Someone new, whom the student would otherwise never meet. A lapsed connection, renewed. An existing bond, deepened by a question it has never been asked.
In a first-year programming course, students record the stories their parents and grandparents tell at home, in any language. They then build an interactive game in which those voices form the world. The programming outcomes stay the same. AI handles transcription and translation, and the family receives the game and the recordings.
The strongest designs share five features. The relationship is the method, and something of value flows back to the partner. The work outlives the course, AI carries the mechanical load, and every student has a real choice of partner. The collapse test checks the first feature: remove the relationship from the design, and the assignment should no longer work. Teaching with AI sets out the shift these designs respond to.
Take this with you
1
Someone new, a connection renewed, or a bond deepened by a question it has never been asked. Build the assignment so it cannot be finished without that conversation.
The relationship-rich assignment canvas takes one assignment through this in about forty minutes.
2
A recording, the finished game or a one-page summary of what they taught. The partner should receive something of real use to them.
3
A design that assumes an intact family or a professional network will leave someone out. A student with no one to call must still be able to complete the assignment.
One question to keep
Who will this student know at the end of my course that they do not know today?
Download the Faculty Guidebook
The full argument, worked examples and sources. PDF.
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