Reimagining the Humanities to Make Them A.I.-Proof

New York Times

06-08-2025

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.
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