The Future of the Humanities Looks Like Monasteries

Humanistic research outside of the university

Since 1893, Princeton University has maintained a strange yet noble tradition: exams were not proctored. But this tradition is no more. Princeton is now requiring professors to be in the room with students as they take their exams; this isn’t an example of university administrators strongarming the faculty, either; in fact, the faculty voted on the decision. They changed the policy because AI made it too easy to cheat:

All in-person examinations at Princeton will be proctored starting July 1, representing the most significant change to the honor system since it was established in 1893…The historic vote was the culmination of months of deliberation within the administration and student governing bodies about how to address increasing concerns over academic integrity violations, including the proliferation of AI usage.

This is just one example of how universities, and the humanities in particular, are going to be very different places soon.

Source

There are two dangers to writing an essay like this, both of which I want to avoid.

First, this can be yet another brow-beating piece about AI and its negative social consequences. I’ll be honest: I’ve given up on this. These technologies are being widely adopted, and instead of lamenting this development, we would do better to ask questions about what comes next.

Second, there is a tendency to treat Ivy League universities, along with other elite institutions, like a microcosm for American culture. In one major piece on AI-assisted cheating, the first people interviewed were students at Columbia University; in a piece in The Atlantic on university students’ reading abilities, the primary subjects were students at that same institution. When controversy raged about anti-genocide/pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, it was again Ivies that attracted most of the attention—actually, it was Columbia again that seemed to make the most headlines. But these institutions are weird, even by American standards. The students are often wealthy strivers whose lives will look very different from most of the roughly 40% of Americans who earn a bachelor’s degree, and when compared to the many Americans who did not attend college it will be as if they lived in different worlds.

So, while the Princeton story does seem to reflect some development in culture, and one worth taking seriously, it would be a mistake to make this about AI or the Ivy League. We need to take a broader view.

Many of the people I went to high school with stopped attending regular classes in their junior year and instead attended Laurel Oaks, the career campus in a nearby town, to gain job skills so they could work as welders, dental assistants, or auto techs. I grew up in a rural part of Ohio, an hour away from the nearest real city, and for many of my peers, a place like Laurel Oaks was the best path for them to achieve something approximating a middle-class income. I’m not sure how many of us went to college, but I would estimate about a third did. But our guidance counselors told us that there were really only two paths for us: get ready to go to college, or go to Laurel Oaks to learn job skills.

But fundamentally, the question of why we would go to either had the same answer: you went to college or to Laurel Oaks so that you could pick up skills that would make you employable. So, most of the guidance we received was really about what sort of career you’d like to have. We sorted ourselves fairly quickly. A lot of the football team went to Laurel Oaks to become masons and welders; most of my tribe, the band kids, planned to go to college, and I think that if you polled us, the top career choice would have been to become a teacher. That was what I wanted to be at first: a high school English teacher. For all of us, education was, again, about securing a career.

We were very traditional American students in that way—we didn’t know it at the time, but we were thinking about our education in the same way that the United States government has always thought about it.

The United States doesn’t have the most BA holders per capita – that honor goes to Canada – but we are in the top 10. 43% of American adults, at least in the states (and so not including our various territories), have bachelor’s degrees. We achieved this, in part, through a massive increase in public education funding. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States began founding land-grant universities; there are now 106 of these institutions. This was the sort of initiative that allowed many large state universities to exist: Ohio State, the University of Connecticut, Purdue, and the like. These universities were practical from their founding. The act of Congress includes this description of each university’s mission:

[Each] State which may take and claim the benefit of this subchapter, to the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.¹

The point being that when we decided to take education seriously as a public good, we had in mind highly practical fields of study; the idea that these would primarily be liberal arts institutions seems to have come later. We, of course, kept funding public education after the initial land grants, often, again, for practical ends. The threat of the Soviets didn’t hurt, either: ‘federal funding during the Cold War for research of all types grew in constant dollars from US$ 13 billion in 1953 to US$ 104 in 1990, an increase of 700 percent.’² The United States government is often ruthlessly practical in orientation; we were funding these institutions because we wanted to beat the Reds.

This is very different from how people like me like to think about education. While I briefly flirted with majoring in physics in high school, I was always destined for the humanities; I entered college as a dual major in English and Philosophy, and I never regretted it. I was there to read and write. So, it is no surprise that I’m attracted to a vision of education that emphasizes the liberal arts in a more classical mode, where liberal here is importantly linked to liberty. The point of a liberal education is to be formed into a free human being.

And from this standpoint, I’ve criticized the turn in American universities toward more practical ends—but now, looking a little more closely at its history, I’ve started to think that this is really a return to American form. We’re shutting down humanities and language departments around the country, at both public and private universities; hell, we’re even shutting down math and physics at some universities, because it’s too abstract and difficult to make practical.

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I started this piece by discussing Princeton’s honor code and the rise of AI-assisted cheating. Then I made you read a few hundred words about the United States’ propensity for practical education. You’re probably wondering what these two have to do with each other.

When we’re evaluating a new technology, the best question we can ask is, ‘What does it make difficult, and what does it make easy?’ The point of this question is to get beyond asking what is merely possible and to focus on how human beings are likely to use it. When a new technology makes something easier, human beings are likely to take the easy path.

Writing, for instance, makes recollection very easy—and, as Plato taught us long ago, makes memorization more difficult, because memorization is no longer necessary. Plato predicted that the rise of literacy would be accompanied by a decline in memorization, and he was exactly right. We no longer needed to memorize information as we could now rely on written records, and this meant our ability to memorize atrophied (or was never developed in the first place).

Currently, AI technologies make it very easy to:

• Produce large amounts of text in seconds, with very little prompting or guidance.

• Summarize long, difficult texts.

• Solve problems in science and mathematics.

Unfortunately, these are the sorts of things that college students spend most of their time doing—so I don’t think it is all that surprising that students use AI to make their lives easier. Sure, they are robbing themselves of an education in the process, and they shouldn’t do it, but that’s a separate issue from it being surprising.

But here’s the next question that we need to ask. If AI makes it so easy to do most, and maybe even all, college coursework, what does that mean for the function of a college degree? What I’ve been intimating above is that the real function of a college degree, at least in the United States, is to serve as a credential that signals you are capable of performing certain jobs. Even humanities degrees have come to be viewed in this way. Thus, the emphasis on ‘critical thinking skills’ seen on nearly every college website.

If AI lets you cheat your way through college, however, degrees can no longer serve this signaling function. The procurement of a college degree and the development of job skills may never have been strongly correlated, but that correlation will become less and less significant. In short, having a college degree doesn’t mean you learned anything that will make you more valuable to a future employer.

If your model of education is American, where you emphasize the acquisition and development of job skills, then this is a troublesome development. I would not be surprised if state legislatures started to grow more and more skeptical of universities, progressively slashing budgets and perhaps phasing out all but the biggest institutions. After all, if the education spending does not have a meaningful economic return, then they are going to start thinking that the money could be better spent on something else.

While the current funding cuts seem to impact the humanities more than business and engineering schools, I wonder if those practical degrees will actually be more degraded by the rise of AI. If you’re hiring an English major to become a product manager at a mid-sized tech company, you might not be concerned that he didn’t read Middlemarch. If you’re hiring a structural engineer, you really want to be sure that she knows how to do calculus.

And this is why I said at the top that it was important to think about institutions other than Princeton, Columbia, and their peers. Yes, those institutions do have practical degrees—but a large part of the value of an elite education is in the social connections you gain from living in a dorm with other children of the world elite. For a school like Ohio State, the devaluing of a degree is a much bigger deal.

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But all of this leaves me with another question: what happens to the humanities? Since this is the world I was trained in, and the world I still live in, it’s the thing I’m most worried about.

Let’s focus on philosophy for a moment. A philosophy degree is not particularly useful for finding an entry-level job. You know that going in—if you decide to major in philosophy, you’re doing it for other reasons. While the ‘philosophy major serving you fries at McDonald’s’ is a tired joke (and one that does not reflect reality), the kernel of truth it relies upon is that being able to discuss Plato, Liebniz, or Judith Butler isn’t the sort of thing you list as job skills on a resumé. Even before the rise of AI, departments like philosophy and English always existed uncomfortably in the American university system, especially at state institutions, because we’ve had such a practical emphasis for so long.

Let’s grant the point. Let’s say that philosophy and other humanities degrees really are useless in an economic sense. Let’s cede all the ground for the argument’s sake.

Importantly, this doesn’t mean that studying them is without value. If we really do believe in the promises of a liberal education, then studying things like philosophy, literature, and history is an important component of human flourishing. We need to find some way of preserving these disciplines, and I think this means we need to find ways for these disciplines to thrive outside of the university.

I am, after all, a proponent of autodidacticism. As I put in a piece last year, I wrote: ‘Your education continues well after your school days, so long as you’re willing to take it into your own hands.’ And I really do believe that. The future of the humanities is, in part, the future of autodidacticism.

But this isn’t enough. Autodidacts have previously been able to rely on universities to produce and curate scholarship that they can then study. Autodidacts are not independent; they have always relied on universities. This is why I am skeptical of claims that the future of the humanities will only be autodidactism—if that’s the future we’re building toward, then we’re going to be in serious trouble.

How do we, then, preserve humanities scholarship if it isn’t going to survive in the university system? That’s the pressing question. And the only answer I can think of, really, is that the future of the humanities looks less like the modern university and more like secular monasteries, communities of self-selecting individuals who live very strange lives isolated from much of the world, enabling them to teach and research.

This would be a very different vision of humanities scholarship than we’ve seen for a very long time. For one, humanities scholars would be a lot poorer; they wouldn’t be able to rely on state funding nearly as much, if at all. As a consequence, things like academic conferences, where researchers fly across the world to present their papers to each other, might become a thing of the past. It may also require adapting the old Benedictine motto Ora et Labora for these new institutions. Instead of ‘prayer and labor,’ it might be ‘research and labor’—but the point being that labor, meaning the daily work that it takes to sustain a community, might have to be a regular part of these scholars’ days. Benedictines would farm or brew beer to sustain their monastery, because they had to find some way to sustain themselves so they could get back to praying. Maybe future humanities scholars will have to do the same sort of work so they can have the time to read The Republic and write about it.

Above all, scholarship would look a lot less professional. When I was in graduate school, ‘professionalization’ was an important word. We were not only being taught how to teach and do research; we were taught to be members of the profession. This meant going to conferences, in part, but a large part of professionalization was teaching us how to write papers in a narrow, targeted way so that they could be published in quality journals, which would then help us get academic jobs. But this was always a farce. Many of the people I went to graduate school with published in a lot of journals, but they still ended up leaving academia, because there aren’t enough jobs in ‘the profession’ for all of us. And in our drive to publish as quickly as possible, I think our scholarship suffered—we followed trends, tried to write on the smallest of small debates, and we didn’t give ourselves the time to let our ideas simmer. This affects everyone, not just graduate students. Professors are increasingly asked to be more productive, but this productivity is almost always measured by how many articles they publish in high-impact journals. The quality and depth of ideas didn’t matter at all — after all, those are hard to quantify.

Losing the emphasis on professionalization would, I think, be a very good development.

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I don’t know if that’s an attractive vision to anyone else. I don’t know if most or even many humanities scholars would think this is plausible or desirable. You lose some of the romanticism of the university, which, despite its pathologies, has trained generations of humanities scholars. But I think it might be a way to keep the humanities alive.

1. 7 U.S. Code § 304 - Investment of proceeds of sale of land or scrip

2. Labaree, 2016