All year I have been reading articles that paint an apocalyptic picture of humanities instruction in the age of artificial intelligence. They basically tell the same story: No one can stop college students from using chatbots, like ChatGPT and Claude, to summarize their reading and write their papers, and any attempt to do so is futile. The humanities, especially for non-majors, are pretty much doomed.
Some professors are using the technology to cut corners, too. As New York magazine’s James D. Walsh muses in a viral article titled “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” this state of affairs “raises the possibility that A.I.s are now evaluating A.I.-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.”
It’s true that large language models will only improve over time and the technology isn’t going anywhere. But about 100 college professors from across the country emailed me, from all kinds of institutions, after I asked in a previous newsletter about how they are responding to A.I. I spent the past week having follow-up conversations with several professors who teach courses in English, philosophy, ethics, music, religion, art and even game design and who are reimagining their courses into something more humane and useful.
These professors acknowledge that A.I. isn’t their only impetus for changing the way they teach. Their students — particularly the ones who were in high school in 2020-21 — have social and cognitive skills that have atrophied, and they see it as their mission to build those muscles back up.
Before the pandemic, the professors I spoke with mostly relied on the methods of college instruction I remember from 20 years ago: lectures, lots of readings and take-home papers. After their students were forced home, and then ChatGPT became ubiquitous in the past few years, they realized the old way wouldn’t cut it.
They had to figure out how to make sure that their students were actually learning the material and that it meant something to them. Banning A.I. and calling it a day wouldn’t work; they had to A.I.-proof many assignments by making them happen in real time and without computers, and they had to come up with a workable policy around the technology in other situations. I don’t remember being particularly inspired by the essays I was writing as an English major back in the early aughts, and listening to the way these professors are adapting to an A.I.-powered world made me wonder if this ingenuity is overdue.
Through a combination of oral examinations, one-on-one discussions, community engagement and in-class projects, the professors I spoke with are revitalizing the experience of humanities for 21st-century students.
“So many of my colleagues are discouraged and bitter. I cannot live my life that way, and I refuse to do so,” said Chris Weigel, a professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University, which is a large public institution in Orem that integrates community college and a four-year program. Nearly 40 percent of U.V.U. students are first-generation college attendees.
Weigel teaches courses in ethics, including a class on the ethics of A.I. She told me about a partnership she had developed with the director at a local short-term residential treatment facility for teenagers in crisis. At a community fair held by U.V.U., the treatment director heard about the subjects Weigel taught and felt that the teenagers in his care would be passionate about debating big ideas. The final project for students in Weigel’s general ethics class involved teaching the concepts they had learned to the teenagers at this facility and leading ethical debates among these kids.
“I almost had to force myself not to cry tears of joy because it was just so beautiful and inspiring what my students were doing with these kids,” Weigel told me. “And the kids at the facility were so interested and they just felt so valued and validated.” She felt her students studied far more for this final than they would have for a traditional test or paper, because they did not want to let these teenagers down.
At Beloit College, a small, private liberal arts college in Wisconsin, Tamara Ketabgian has had similar success with her students as part of an initiative called Community Connections. Ketabgian, a professor in the English department at Beloit, described a class she designed “on science fiction, world-building and Ursula Le Guin” — specifically her novel “The Dispossessed,” which is “about two planets that don’t talk to each other, and it was very fitting for the 2024 election in the fall.” As part of the class, the students had to run discussions on the novel at libraries, public schools and senior centers.
“A crucial part of the class involved students practicing and role-playing before our outreach events,” Ketabgian told me, “and then, later, reflecting upon what they’d learned from their experiences, what they’d do differently and how they’d describe their new skill sets to potential employers.”
The students still had some more traditional reading and writing assignments, and Ketabgian did not outright ban the use of A.I. for those. Instead, she had the students come up with their own code of conduct around its use, since there isn’t a fixed code for the entire school. “After consulting with each other, they concluded that it would be OK for them to use A.I. to survey existing scholarly materials on our course topics, but that they would not use A.I. to generate specific text used in their written assignments,” she said.
This was another commonality among professors I spoke to: They realized that the only way forward in the age of A.I. was to have trust and transparency around the technology’s use in their classrooms, and often this involved creating a policy with their students’ input. Policing A.I. in college, among students who are ostensibly adults, is not the best use of any instructor’s time. Teachers run the risk of accusing innocent students of using chatbots because the A.I.-detection software is fallible.
Professors also spoke about the desperate need for media literacy around large language models — including their limitations and hallucinations. This is something they should be learning before they get to college. It is also important for students to learn to think critically about the information on which these models have been trained.
Moving away from traditional college essays and creative writing isn’t without downsides. David Ensminger, who teaches English, humanities and folklore at Lee College, a two-year institution in Baytown, Texas, has experimented with allowing the full use of A.I. among his students, and he found that they often preferred old-school, analog methods. That’s because both he and his students worry about the erosion of entire human skill sets, including reading long texts and writing with proper grammar, spelling and sentence structure.
Where does this leave college students? Gen Z is not giving up on the arts or the pleasures of reading and thinking for themselves. As A.I. creates chaos and uncertainty in the market for entry-level jobs, more students may react by following their passion for the humanities; why begrudgingly major in tech or business if it doesn’t even lead to employment? There’s some evidence that humanities departments are rebounding after a long period of decline. U.C. Berkeley, which is considered one of the best public universities in the country, has seen a nearly 50 percent increase in majors in their arts and humanities division over the past four years.
Ketabgian told me a story that shows just how powerful keeping the humans in humanities can be. She described a student who was really anxious about leading a discussion of Le Guin’s novel at a library, because public speaking was stressful for her. Ketabgian coached her through her fears, and she ended up having such a great time leading the talk, she joined the library’s reading group to make new friends.
This is everything humanities should be: engaging the community, talking about ideas, making intellectual bonds. We don’t need to surrender that to bots.
End Notes
-
Arbus adventure: I went to see Diane Arbus: Constellation at the Park Avenue Armory over the weekend. Arbus is one of my favorite photographers, and this creative presentation of hundreds of her images made me look at some of her most famous work — like “Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1966” — in a new light. There’s no obvious way to wind around the images; you can choose your own adventure, and they’re not in any chronological order. It feels like being surrounded by Arbus’s worldview, her own singular way of seeing. Her biographer Patricia Bosworth wrote: “Diane was always connected to her subjects by some magnetic bond and that bond was the source of her formidable power. It’s evident in all her pictures and it’s why no other photographer can imitate her no matter how hard they try.”
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
Thank you for being a subscriber
Read past editions of the newsletter here.
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
The post These College Professors Will Not Bow Down to A.I. appeared first on New York Times.
