The Future Is Humanist:
On Artificial Intelligence In Humanities Higher Education
Justin Neuman
I. Part 1: The Year the Assignments Failed
Humanities higher ed ran on a simple loop for decades. 1) Assign a difficult text. 2) Expect students to struggle through. 3) Demand an essay to prove they actually did the work. 4) Repeat.
ChatGPT broke the loop in about six weeks back in the fall of 2022.
Now anyone can generate a clean, competent analysis of Kafka without reading Kafka. Competent summaries of Kant when you can’t pronounce Kant. Prose comes back polished. And it’s the same at scale with homework, essays, and term papers. The response has been predictable: universal panic at the universities. Some seek AI detection software. Others want to double down on honor codes and anti-AI pledges. The luddites call to ban the laptops, forbid the phones, bring back the blue books and opt in to oral exams. Problem solved, right?
Except it's not. It’s as if we’re trying to outrun the future by sprinting back to 1950… and those strategies aren’t going to help our students face their futures. Here’s the hard truth: the old assignments were already failing before AI arrived. They rewarded summary over insight, compliance over conviction. In the old paradigm, most students wrote for the assignment anyway, not to think. AI just made a transaction once possible with Sparknotes and Wikipedia (or a generation before with MasterPlots) even faster and more obvious.
So: is it time to dig a moat around the classroom and throw the phones over to the other side along with the computers and the AI? The data says we’re heading there: blue book sales surged 30% at Texas A&M, nearly 50% at University of Florida, and 80% at UC Berkeley amidst AI concerns (WSJ, 2025). Is it back to blue books? Or do you see another path? I’d love to hear from my colleagues in the trenches, from the parents paying the tuition, and from the students currently on the ride.
II. The Prognosis – What’s Broken, What Broke It? In my last post, I described the Broken Loop: the moment the traditional humanities assignment collapsed under the weight of ChatGPT. The response was immediate and predictable. Universities sprinted back to the 1950s in search of a moat wide enough to keep the bots and screens out.
But if we are honest, the moat was already dry.
AI didn’t kill the humanities. It arrived to find a discipline already hollowed out by decades of self-inflicted damage. The collapse didn’t start with the chatbots. It started when we stopped making the case for why the humanities matter.
Between 2012 and 2022, while the economy recovered, the humanities didn’t. English and history degrees fell by roughly a third. Students weren’t just fleeing toward STEM. They were voting with their feet against a discipline that no longer made a compelling claim on their lives.
When I declared an English major in the mid-1990s, I was riding the discipline’s second great wave. English was near its post-Vietnam peak, conferring more than 56,000 degrees a year. To my parents, it looked like a one-way ticket to a cardboard box. To me, it felt like a ticket to infinite worlds.
The cardboard-box warning eventually won, for the statistical person, if not for me.
English majors fell from 7.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in 1971 to just 2.8 percent in 2021. Even at Harvard, despite immense prestige and generous aid, English majors have dropped by roughly 75 percent in recent years as students chase paths perceived as more directly impactful, like policy, economics, or computer science.
This wasn’t simply a STEM land grab. It reflected an internal failure of what you might call the building instinct. Over time, the humanities trained students to approach texts primarily as problems to be diagnosed rather than worlds to be entered. Deconstruction became an end rather than a tool. We taught readers to knock things down more fluently than to build meaning out of them.
The more perverse revelation of AI is this: many of our core assignments were already training students to act like chatbots. What is this reading about? Output a paragraph. What is this passage of Woolf saying? Output the correct answer. Identify the theme. Produce a clean synthesis. The highest reward went to frictionless paraphrase, familiar critical gestures, and tonal compliance. When a machine suddenly did that work better, faster, and without fatigue, it didn’t cheat the system. It completed it.
The irony is economic as well as intellectual. The dogma that STEM is the only path to a paycheck is overstated. Long-term outcomes for humanities graduates are often competitive, especially in fields that value judgment, communication, and adaptability. Employers say they want AI-proof skills: ethical reasoning, synthesis, empathy. We simply stopped telling students that this was what the humanities were for.
While undergraduate enrollment collapsed, the PhD prestige machine kept spinning.
We produced a generation of brilliant people trained to work alone for six to eight years on projects no one asked for, writing for an audience of twelve, if they were lucky. This is the profession’s most unsayable truth: the structural disqualification of the PhD.
We optimized for peer review rather than stakeholder buy-in. We taught candidates to mistake complexity for rigor and to treat collaboration as drama rather than standard practice.
The labor data is unforgiving. Tenure-track English jobs have declined by roughly 55 percent since 2007–08. The steepest single-year drop came in 2020–21. The tenure-track share of those jobs has steadily eroded.
The old humanities loop, read, struggle, write, depended on a classroom contract of open inquiry and a private contract of diligent study. Those contracts broke long before AI.
First, the phone. An external lobby for attention that made the slow struggle of difficult reading feel gratuitous.
Second, digital permanence. A seminar comment can now become a permanent artifact. A misstep can metastasize into a reputation. Risk becomes expensive.
Seminar instruction, the territory of the humanities, requires provisional speech and intellectual risk. In an environment shaped by attention capture, social punishment, and administrative process, neither students nor professors want to take the blocks out of the box to play.
What emerges is what the Martin Center has described as soul-destroyed humanities: English quietly rebranded as communications, a sterile and safe information-transfer function that a computer can, and soon will, do better.
Three years after ChatGPT, the dust is settling. The prognosis is clear.
If you can do it from behind a screen, a computer will soon do it better. If the humanities is reduced to information transfer or the routine identification of familiar tropes, Wikipedia and AI have already won.
But if the humanities is about cultivating the capacity to read other people’s lives with intelligence and care, it becomes a survival skill. More than that, it teaches you how to make sense of your own life: how to answer the questions that no career path, algorithm, or optimization framework can resolve – why you are here, who is worth loving, what obligations you owe to others, and what you want to do with your one and only life. It becomes a way of living at capacity, of expanding the range of experiences, perspectives, and moral pressures a person can hold without collapse.
The prognosis for the current model is terminal. But the territory itself, the real work of human connection, judgment, and meaning, is still there.
The time has come to stop mapping the ruins and start building the house.
Part 3: The Future Is Humanist The point was never the answers. It was always the journey.
Confusing answers for meaning is a mistake that sits at the center of both the crisis in the humanities and the panic over artificial intelligence. When someone asks an AI, “What is the meaning of life?” the system responds fluently. It produces language that sounds like wisdom. But it does not produce meaning on a boring Tuesday afternoon, or during grief, or in a moment of moral pressure. Meaning does not arrive as information. It emerges through repetition, commitment, consequence, and revision, over time, and in relationship with others.
For decades, higher education behaved as if the humanities existed primarily to deliver content: answers, essays, critiques. AI exposed how brittle that model was. When machines can summarize, paraphrase, and analyze faster than any student, the question becomes unavoidable: what were we training students for in the first place?
The answer is not more in-person assessment or better surveillance.
Artificial intelligence drives the value of quick answers toward zero. It excels at outputs. What remains scarce, and therefore valuable, are judgment, taste, ethical reasoning, lived memory, moral accountability, civic action, and the capacity to live inside unresolved questions. Those are not defects in a humanities education. They are its core competencies.
The humanities need not be defensive. They must be foundational. When the value proposition shifts from content to meaning, from knowledge accumulation to agility of mind and strength of character, the humanities return to the center of education. In a fact-saturated world, the most important thing education can do is train people to undertake the lifelong work of becoming their best selves.
At the same time, we need to think at two scales at once: the personal and the civic, the small daily practices and the big public visions.
On the large scale, knowledge work as we have known it is transforming. Entire categories of cognitive labor will disappear, along with a lot of dull, dirty, and dangerous work. New categories will emerge in their place, many of them not yet named. Professional pathways will be less stable, less legible, and less predictable than those higher education was designed to serve. My own career certainly has been. What this world will require is not just technical flexibility, but civic capacity: the ability to identify real problems, act in public, build communities, and adapt without losing one’s bearings.
On the small scale, daily life will matter more, not less. As work ceases to provide meaning by default, people will need to generate it elsewhere: in art, community, and contact with the natural world. We must produce it through our passions and live it through the rhythms of everyday lives.
In this context, the humanities are no longer merely career-adjacent. They become life-centric. Humanist, with a capital H. They train people to orient themselves when external scripts collapse.
There is an ethical implication here that is easy to overlook. Even when productivity is automated, meaning never can be. Students still need to figure out three things: what they are passionate about, what they are good at, and what the world needs. That process is deeply individual, but it cannot happen in isolation. It requires a shared community of legibility, one in which aspirations are articulated, tested, revised, and made intelligible to others. It requires good teachers.
This is why presence matters so much. When answers are abundant, presence becomes the scarce good.
Seminar learning depends on things that cannot be replicated by machines: embodied accountability, unrehearsed speech, risk followed by repair, trust built over time. These are not nostalgic preferences. They are design requirements for character formation. In-person humanities represent an affirmative return to education as encounter, with the classroom serving as a crucible for civic action and public engagement.
The deeper shift required is philosophical. Critique has value, but it cannot be the destination. Suspicion is a tool, not a telos. Meaning is not something we uncover by dismantling texts until nothing remains. Meaning is composed, practiced, and sustained. Narrative is not merely an object of analysis. It is the technology of consciousness, the means by which human beings orient themselves in time, responsibility, and relationships. We are narrative beings, as individuals and as societies. Education fails when it trains students only to diagnose stories, rather than to live inside them and shape them wisely.
This is where the builder replaces the critic. You cannot live in a deconstructed house, and you cannot be sustained if you never grow things. We have to plant something. An orchard is not a metaphor for critique. It is a metaphor for faith in the future. Cultivation presumes tomorrow. It requires patience, repetition, care, and acceptance of uncertainty. You cannot optimize an orchard. You tend it.
That requires a new classroom contract. Attention and risk become the price of admission. Process matters more than product. Mistakes become occasions for repair, not expulsion. These norms do not prevent cheating. They prevent shortcutting the work of becoming.
Practically, this means pedagogy that forces thinking into the open: discussion, live learning, ethical engagement, active seminars, more fun. It also means meeting students where they are, designing courses that can change lives rather than merely reproduce disciplinary credentialing. The goal isn’t purity. It’s character and community formation.
As work stops supplying meaning by default, education must teach people how to generate it, daily, locally, imperfectly, together. In that sense, the humanities are not obsolete. They are the institutions explicitly responsible for judgment, relationships, and meaning.
The choice facing higher education is not blue books versus chatbots. It’s about whether to cultivate an orchard or conserve the ruins. The question isn’t why anyone would major in the humanities, but how to live without them.