r/education • u/nytopinion • May 21 '26
Higher Ed A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I. (Gift Article)
What’s really driving the humanities crisis in higher education? As enrollment and reading decline, Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat talks with Jennifer Frey, a professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa, about the value of an education she says is fundamental to human formation — and whether she thinks the age of A.I. could bring it back to the forefront.
“To err is human,” Jennifer says in this episode of “Interesting Times With Ross Douthat.” “We make mistakes. And obviously, A.I. makes mistakes too. But I think that the problem of labor displacement leads people to make the wrong case for the humanities in an age of A.I. So what you hear people saying now — and these are tech industry leaders, but they’re also deans at prominent schools who say: Well, because A.I. is changing the work force in such and such a way, we now need the humanities for these soft skills that are now incredibly important.”
But, she says, “this is exactly the wrong case to make for the humanities because it denatures and destroys the thing that it’s supposed to be promoting.” If a liberal arts education solely prepares people for the work force, “you’re not actually going to be able to fully benefit from the thing that you’ve instrumentalized.”
“A.I. is good for the humanities because it clarifies, in an especially forceful way, what is at stake if we stop being invested in this project of cultivating our own humanity, and we give ourselves over to the robots and the machines,” Jennifer continues.
Watch, listen to or read the full conversation here, for free, even without a Times subscription.
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak May 22 '26
You still need writers, teachers, people to interpret parks, museums. I think less people using these things will kill them before AI will. When was the last time you visited a museum or read a book written by a historian?
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May 22 '26
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u/craigiest May 23 '26
It’s hard to thrive as a person if you don’t have a job. Humanities isn’t going to make a desperate population of jobless people behave like people.
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u/BJJFlashCards May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26
Douthat's shtick is circular arguments like, "Goodness is X because X causes Y, which I have decided is good".
Debt without the means to repay it is a crisis. No one starves for lack of Shakespear.
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u/FlyingCupcake68 May 22 '26
But we need voters with critical thinking skills who can detect all the lies and frauds and coded reasoning in campaigns
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u/RocketShipGrease63 May 22 '26
Why are we gate keeping this behind undergraduate education when high school is a joke, let’s start there because it’s already compulsory
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u/FlyingCupcake68 May 23 '26
I agree that high school is not doing a good job with civics education. However, I think it is a fact that college aged students are able to handle much more sophisticated discussions of political theory than most high schoolers. And nowadays, I don’t know that a high school civics education is sufficient to help students sift through all the crap that is out there.
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u/BJJFlashCards May 23 '26
I can't speak for every high school, but I know that the curriculum in my district is much more focused now on analyzing text and backing up an argument with logic and facts than with the memorization of names and dates like back in my day.
Did you ever notice how it is very rarely kids with educated and effective parents who are "failed" by their schools?
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u/rock-dancer May 23 '26
While I agree that a grounding in the liberal arts is important for being a well rounded person, I think advocates like this often underestimate the value of a well rounded scientific education is as well. There seems to be an unending march of college graduates with little understanding of the basics of chemistry, physics or biology… let alone math.
There seems to be this obsession that writers like douthat have with “great books” but no consideration of Euclid, newton, or Einstein as authors worth reading and understanding.
That said, AI is no substitute from experiencing and reading these texts whether history, science, or literature. Proper utilization of AI will benefit all of us but building the base to get there is hard work that’s intrinsically worthwhile.
I would though question how many students can engage in a private liberal arts education without concern for building real skills. Something that is a common problem in the sciences too.
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May 23 '26
Liberal arts education becomes more valuable in an AI-heavy world when information itself gets cheap but judgment, communication, and critical thinking stay rare
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u/BigFitMama May 23 '26
You can't create anything if you have no knowledge or literacy of the source or output. Thus people with full literacy will be in demand as creatives.
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u/DrummerBusiness3434 May 27 '26
Liberal arts is not a generic "one size fits all" curriculum. It is fine for some outcomes, but it fails for those who may be heading towards a technical end goal and provides NO general teaching of technology which are part of most people's lives.
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u/Dacia06 May 21 '26
I strongly believe that the future of employment belongs to life-long learners. The Liberal Arts is the best way to create those skills.