A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.

28:24A little less than 3 ,000. I think it's— Undergrad?

28:28Ross Douthat:Yes. Yeah, I think if you throw in grad students, it's more like 4 ,000. Okay. And so how many kids roughly did you end up enrolling in the Honors College? So every year we were somewhere between 26 to 28 percent of incoming freshmen. Okay. Yeah. And what did the, just very quickly, what did the overall program look like? So you'd be signing up first and foremost for the Corps. So that's four semesters of great books. You can think like from Homer to Honor Rent. So first seminar is the three ancient cities, Athens, Rome, Jerusalem. And, you know, you read Plato and Aristotle and Greek tragedy and some Greek history.

29:14And then you do the same for the Romans. And then, of course, you read some of the Bible. And then you go into Long Middle Ages. And that's basically Augustine to the Reformation. So we start with the confessions and we go all the way into, you know, Luther and Calvin. And then your second year in the core, it's the birth of modernity. So there's where you get— That's a big year. Yeah. A lot going on. Yeah, no, it's a fantastic course. So that's basically Machiavelli to Mary Shelley. And then the last sequence is 19th and 20th century. And that starts with de Tocqueville. And then actually it ends, the professor gets sort of like a free choice about where it ends.

30:01So I would say Homer to Hannah Rent, because I think Hannah Rent is the last required reading. So like St. John's, it's a set curriculum. And that was very important that everyone be reading the same books because it was also a residential experience. And we didn't force you to live in the honors dorm, but most students wanted to. And so I think we had like sort of three pillars. When I would address incoming freshmen as dean of honors, the first thing that I would remind them is that they are going to die. And that recognition of this was the first step towards wisdom. So strong mission and vision, right?

30:44So we are not here to prepare you for a job. We are here to prepare you for life and for being a human being. Secondly, community So it was very It's very important to me Because I think that it's true That liberal learning take place in a community And then the third thing is We took very seriously In a way that very few people are willing to do The connection between An education for freedom And the need to cultivate character Right? That helps you to be free We had these sort of virtues of liberal learning That we would name and talk about explicitly. And they were things like humility and civility and fortitude.

31:30And then also curiously old fashioned ones like studiousness, where that has nothing to do with hitting the books. Studiositas is sort of like cultivated attention. So sort of like training that desire to know so that it's focused on the good stuff as opposed to like looking at TikTok for five hours a day or, you know, yeah.

31:55Ross Douthat:Hypothetically. Hypothetically. I've never done that. Just say something about the kind of students that you got. This is a Plain State University. Like who is signing up for this program at Tulsa? You know, we got students from all over the country, first and foremost, although obviously a healthy number from the states that circle around Oklahoma. So like Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, et cetera. And they were mostly STEM students. So you were not their major. No, absolutely not. So this was a program that they did parallel to their major. Yeah, I mean, I think this was like a sort of stroke of genius on the part of the president who sort of saw an honors college as a really great way to recenter liberal learning within general education.

32:48Because the point is to give that general education, that liberal foundation upon which you can specialize, which is, you know, how the medieval university is structured. Everybody goes through the arts curriculum before they can study theology or medicine or canon law.

33:06Ross Douthat:Right. The real sciences. But most gen ed requirements in American higher education are not the most super rigorous things. Right. So I'm just curious how students who were studying mechanical engineering balanced that, you know, pretty rigorous course of study with the kind of like intense communal Socratic style that you were trying to build. Yeah, I mean, they loved it. I mean, is the short answer. You know, they would always say things like, none of my other classes are like this, you know. In a positive way, to be clear. I mean, just sort of like, you kind of never know what's going to happen in an honors class, which I think is part of the excitement.

33:54But there's a whole community of students outside the seminar who are reading the same text. And so you have this shared basis of learning. But it's amazing to see the fruits that arise from that because they just go back to the dorm and they're all kind of wondering, like, what was going on in Plato's Symposium because it's a really strange text in so many ways. And, you know, they would spontaneously put on their own symposium. I think the secret sauce in honors really wasn't the specific text that we chose. It was just sort of the community and the mission and the integration of those two things.

34:36And the fact that even though it was really hard, it was where their friends were. Right. So if you look at the motto for honors, it was wisdom, virtue, friendship, which is like a very Aristotelian triad. But the friendship thing was really key because, you know, for Aristotle, the context in which wisdom is sought and virtue is cultivated and exercised is friendship.

35:13Ross Douthat:Hey, hold up. This is your minute. It's your minute in this life on this day. It's your day to play. To play, to make, to move, to move through, to explore. It's your morning to share, your weekend to shape, to cook, to soak, to listen, to, to wait. it's your body to rest to nourish to grow it's your mind you know it's your place your country your life to love to rise to dream to change it's your world as much as anyone's it's your world to understand the New York Times find out more at nytimes.com slash your world

36:09Ross Douthat:So, you know, you're obviously a biased observer. You clearly loved and appreciated the thing you put together. Not everyone loved and appreciated it, and it does not exist in the same way anymore. So what happened? So, I mean, that's an interesting and complicated story, and I've certainly talked about it elsewhere. But, you know, the short version is that the president who recruited me and hired me and his provost left. so there was a regime change and pretty much as soon as a new provost was installed I was just called in and said you know you're out and the honors would be restructured and I obviously wanted to know why that would be the case and I was just told that they needed to save money I mean eventually they just found other people to do it so so the program still exists.

37:14It still exists.

37:15Ross Douthat:You're not in charge of it. Correct. And just give me a theory of the case as to... I mean, it would be speculative and so I hesitate to do that. Well, let's put it this way. I feel like I would like to pull some general lessons about Sure. Why the challenges that the humanities face from your experience. It's possible that your experience doesn't offer those lessons. And it was just just a matter of, you know, you were, let's say, a favorite of an outgoing president and a new regime didn't want to keep you around. And it was all sort of just that kind of campus politics or faculty politics. Or it's possible that this experience tells us something about why it's hard to build and sustain the humanities on college campuses.

38:16Ross Douthat:So I think it's probably the second to some degree. I do. I agree as well with the caveat that obviously, like, it's speculative on my part because I was given really zero indication of what was really behind it. And I've not been privy to those conversations myself. But with that caveat, I would say that we can learn a few things. One is that student interest and demand simply does not matter. And it's important to see that because I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times. For the New York Times. People can read it. And my op-ed just basically said, hey, you know, there's the standard story that students can't do this and they don't want to do it.

39:09And I'm here to tell you that I think that story is false. and I think we should talk about the fact that it can be the case that students want to do this even though it's hard and very challenging and it's totally voluntary. They don't have to do this and it can still be disinvested. I mean so one clear implication was that you know our budget it was reduced by 92 % upon my leaving. And the faculty that I have hired are gone. In fact, literally everyone I hired is gone.

39:45Ross Douthat:So it's like there has to be some, what, ideological reason not to do it? What is the reason not to do it if students are interested in it? That's the million-dollar question. But we need theories as to why. You don't have to just be totally specific about Tulsa, but I would like you to generalize a little bit based on your experience about the kind of headwinds, and I mean political headwinds especially, that a project like yours faces. So I'll give you two theories and ask, I guess I'll try and ask you to react to both of them. So here's one theory would be that fundamentally the Academy has adopted a kind of left-wing perspective on the humanities that basically says greatness, like, you know, everything that we were talking about in the beginning of this conversation is just sort of a political construct associated with, you know, white male Western hegemony, and that the point of the humanities, to the extent there is a point, is to deconstruct and challenge and critique that.

41:05Ross Douthat:And that's what we're doing. That's what the humanities is supposed to do, right? And therefore, a program that says, no, long before you do that, you have to have this direct encounter with ancient Greeks and medieval Christians and so on. That's just reactionary, right? And that doesn't have a place in the modern academy. Is there a part of the left that's just sort of an enemy of the humanities, as you understand it? Okay, so I think that there are definitely people within humanistic disciplines that understand what they do very explicitly as a political project. And it is a kind of radical left-wing sort of thing.

41:46It's just a fact. No one can deny it. And so do those people love great books? Typically, no. And so that's like a real thing. I think, though, an actually bigger problem is the over-professionalization and hyper-specialization of the humanities. So the biggest resistance that I found wasn't necessarily ideological, although that existed, but it was this idea that you would teach us that syllabus. It was just like, no, I don't do that. And so part of that was, that's just not my expertise. I teach from a place of expertise. And great books is like the opposite of that. Am I a classicist? No. Can I teach Homer?

42:32Yes. Because the point isn't to create scholarship on Homer. That's not why we're there. If you wanted to do that, you should definitely major in classics where you will be trained to create scholarship. But we are there to have an encounter with that text in a way that is more than just a book club sort of thing. It's serious, but its goal is not sort of what Weber would call Wissenschaft, right? Its goal is more—

42:59Ross Douthat:What is a Wissenschaft? Please. Scholarship. Yes, thank you. And so there was that sort of resistance, right? Like, I'm a literature scholar. I can't teach philosophy or history. I'm like, it's just not my thing. And also, I'm a literature scholar, and I have a very narrow ambit in literature where I'm here to teach Victorian fictions in a, you know, anti-imperial or late imperial, you know, I'm in a very narrow frame of what teaching literature means. Yes, exactly. And so that is something that I want us to have a conversation about is sort of the way that specialization and really it's a conversation about the way the institutional structure of the research university has disadvantaged the humanities in particular.

43:50because if expertise, if scientific expertise is the gold standard of knowledge, which I think you can make a very strong case that that is the gold standard within the academy, the humanities really lose out, right? Because we're forced into a mold that maybe isn't the best for our flourishing. And so I think that's part of it. Yes, the hyperpolarization of all of our institutions has hurt the humanities, but it's also obviously hurt the university generally. If you look at statistics of trust in institutions of higher education, they're catastrophically low. I think it is simply a fact that one thing that has contributed to the loss of social trust is the very strong perception that our institutions have been ideologically captured.

44:43And so we need to reflect in a serious way, in a way that Yale, for example, is currently reflecting. I think the Yale report is a significant and interesting and an important document. I think most of its recommendations are good ones, ones that need to be made. So I'm very happy to talk about higher education reform, but I think it needs to be done in ways that really kind of strive for the common good. and less just about owning your enemies or dominating your enemies or winning the culture wars. That's not going to save the humanities. It's going to just be another nail in the coffin.

45:37Ross Douthat:Let's just talk about a different kind of ideological pressure from the right. It seems that there's a way in which the right in America and American culture has sort of two faces when it comes to the humanities. There's the face that wants to be in the business of defending and saving what you're doing against both sort of woke academia and hyper professionalization. Right. Like there's there's a side of conservatism that just people I've been in rooms with and spent years knowing and talking to just nods along with everything that you say. Then there's also a really important side of conservatism that is just like just is totally bought into a sort of professional model of education that is skeptical of anything that seems like useless, useless degrees.

46:36Ross Douthat:Right. The stereotype of the, you know, the the reckless graduate student who got the degree in puppetry and wants Joe Biden to bail to bail them out. Right. Is, you know, it's a very powerful. It's very powerful on the American right. So I'm curious how that like you were in a red state, you know, you were at a school, a school probably with an unusual number of Republican donors relative to maybe not relative to other liberal arts schools. Like which side of conservatism is more powerful? Is conservatism a friend of the liberal arts or an enemy? I mean, what an interesting question. Yeah, it's a small question.

47:12I think I don't need to tell you that, you know, conservatives are at war with one another about what conservatism really is right now. I've heard that. So that also affects, you know, conservatism and education in all of its forms. But I also think that there are disagreements about how to achieve higher education reform. But, you know, to your specific question about utility versus leisure.

47:41Ross Douthat:Yeah, that's question one. How much utilitarian hostility do you feel like you get from people on the right? I would say that you find this on the left and the right. So let us remember that it was the Obama administration that rolled out the scorecard of majors. So this is really this kind of utilitarian push is, I believe, bipartisan. Now, what you do see right now is red states like Utah and Indiana and Ohio and Texas passing legislation that disinvest or shuts down departments that don't have sufficient enrollment. And, you know, that has definitely hurt some, well, quite a few humanities departments.

48:33But, like, it's also brought down physics and math. So it's a very blunt instrument. But in all of those cases, what you will find is a rationale that says we need workforce alignment and we need to have sort of like work ready graduates. So there is that. And I think if you – but again, you have –

49:06Ross Douthat:to say, look, we can have liberal arts education that works in parallel with pre-professional education. You don't have to major in classics to get some kind of classical encounter. Correct. And I still, I mean, I still fundamentally believe that and I'm dedicated to that. Yeah. Right. But that didn't save you. No. Yeah. What about the question that you just mentioned of this argument on the right about how you get sort of effective change in higher ed, right? So prior guests on this program have included. I'm sure I've watched them all. Recently, former, you don't have to say that, you've got more important texts to encounter, but former U.S.

49:53Ross Douthat:Senator Ben Sasse, who was at the University of Florida and worked on a program that was set up by the Republican state government of Florida, designed not just to be about the liberal arts, but in part to sort of have a strong liberal arts tradition within a public university. I've also interviewed a while ago now Christopher Ruffo, right? He's a leading right-wing activist who just takes the straightforward view that conservatives inside academia are totally deluded if they think they're going to get anywhere without Republican state legislatures or Donald Trump coming in and saying to schools, you have to teach great books or Western civilization and so on.

50:38Ross Douthat:So Sass is a gentle voice. Rufo is a harsher voice. But they're both figures who see, I think, a pretty substantial role for politics in making a place for the humanities in higher ed. What's your take on that view? I mean, I think that when we're talking about public institutions, it's obviously political and it's very difficult to avoid this reality. However, I will say a few things. You know, there was a large scale disinvestment from states after 2008. And so the case is a little bit weaker. But just on the disinvestment front, are you suggesting basically that red state governments will maybe set up a school for civic engagement or civic thought or something that presents itself as sort of a place to preserve the humanities, but meanwhile, they're cutting the humanities everywhere else?

51:46Ross Douthat:I mean, that's a possibility. You know, the civic center movement, it's a relatively new movement. I definitely support it, but it's not going to save the humanities. The way that the civic centers are structured is they understand themselves as homes of disciplinary knowledge and expertise, right? Right. And civics like is is meant to be a specific kind of expertise. And that's great. I don't you know, the more the merrier. I don't have any I certainly have no problem with legislators investing in Hamilton or the School of Civic Leadership and things like this. Now, we can have a separate conversation about, you know, how they're being run and things like that.

52:37But a great book's education is on its face sort of simultaneously a liberal and a civic education. And so, of course, I support movements that seed that in our universities and give them money. But I don't think it's going to save the humanities. The only thing that might save the humanities is really getting serious and recentering undergraduate education again. And institutionally speaking, like we're not set up to do that. The research university is set up to incentivize research. how do we make general education liberal again right in that classical sense that's what I'm going to be doing next in my career I believe that we've really dropped the ball when it comes to general education in this country students have no sense that their education is anything other than this externalized instrumental means to an end.

53:46We have to look at how to recover that first. And honestly, we should, I'm not saying that we actually can, but like we should be able to do that in a bipartisan way. But we have to have people on both sides willing to kind of stop culture warring and find common ground. And that is something that is very difficult to do in our hyper-polarized political environment. And practically speaking, you know, a concern that I have is that the civic centers will just be seen as conservative outposts. Then it's like, it's a missed opportunity. I mean, something that was pretty magical about what we did in Tulsa is that we did actually have a lot of viewpoint diversity and difference of experience.

54:39And that was definitely reflected in our faculty. That was important to me in hiring faculty. And we worked a lot, a whole lot explicitly on having difficult and important conversations across deep differences. Differences of experience, differences of first principles, differences of visions of how to live and what's good. And I think the thing that I'm most proud about, honestly, is how wonderful that little experiment went.

55:11Ross Douthat:Except, again, for the fact that it ended, right? Well, sure. But then is the fundamental challenge that universities see themselves as businesses? And you were making the case earlier that students want it. It can be cost effective. You can do it while students are also majoring in electrical engineering. We were rounding in the budget. But the university mindset right now in a time where, again, there's going to be fewer students, lots of universities are going to be closing, right, might be show me how this yields the maximum number of graduates in the most remunerative jobs who then will give money to the university.

56:06Right.

56:07Ross Douthat:I mean, it seems like even more than sort of professionalization or politics, maybe that's the mindset that that you're up against, where it's like people might tolerate you. But if you can't tell a story about how reading Aristotle leads you to get an extra promotion that leads to more donations down the road, at best, you're going to be tolerated. You're never going to be a priority. Well, yeah, but I mean, that's the sort of disease that I'm trying to diagnose. But again, it's bipartisan. So in the state that I currently reside in, Oklahoma, our governor recently put out two executive orders, both relating to higher education.

56:51One of them sort of effectively ends tenure at public institutions except for OU and OSU. But the other one says that all academic review needs to be done in terms of workforce readiness. Like we'll look at wages earned and things like this and we'll do academic review on that basis. So that's, you know, just going to be something that's mandated. But the other interesting aspect of the executive order is that it asks the state's Board of Regents to investigate a 90 credit hour degree. So basically get rid of most of general education.

57:31Ross Douthat:And I mean, you get a degree that's purely, purely training, purely workforce training. Yeah. Just just get rid of all of that other stuff, you know, which is nonsense. And so, yeah, and it puts me in an interesting position because I myself am critical of general education. I think that we've dropped the ball. We've failed there. But I would ask people to reform that rather than get rid of it. Yeah. Last question. Yes. Small question. What does AI do to any of this? Yeah. Yeah, AI. I don't know. I go back and forth about AI and thinking that, you know, it's the apocalypse and then also noticing that, like, it can't even do an index of my book.

58:16So, you know, I think I'll worry more about AI when it can index my book. But I will say, I think that AI is obviously going to change every single institution in this country, including, obviously, institutions of higher education. And it will do things to the labor market that I think are going to be pretty wild. I mean, there's a huge sign outside the Times building that says, stop hiring humans. You see it, right, when you come out of the poor. I'm sure you've noticed.

58:47Ross Douthat:I've noticed. There's also the Jude Law. There's a billboard that is using Jude Law to sell legal AI. Yes. Like, that's the one for some reason that sticks in my mind. But yes, stop hiring humans. Yeah, stop hiring humans. Now, why stop hiring humans? Well, like, the obvious reason is because to err is human, right? We make mistakes. And obviously, AI makes mistakes too. But I think that the problem of sort of labor displacement leads people to make the wrong case for the humanities in an age of AI. So what you hear people saying now, and these are like tech industry leaders, but they're also like deans at prominent schools that say, well, because AI is changing the workforce in such and such a way, we now need the humanities for these soft skills that are now incredibly important.

59:43Ross Douthat:I may have said that to myself contemplating my own children's future. Yes, 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, right? If, again, liberal arts education, humanities education is just workforce training, you're not actually going to be able to fully benefit from the thing that you've instrumentalized. So I would say rather— Just in defense, though, of my own parental lizard brain, right? The work is a real part of human affairs, right? It's not some area where you cease to be human when you're at your job or relating to your coworkers or handling your producers who may be concerned that an interview has gone on too long, hypothetically, right?

1:00:39Ross Douthat:Yes. It is a zone of real and important human interaction. And if you say one thing that the humanities do is prepare you to exist in a corporate environment at, you know, a technology company, at a startup, at the New York Times, you aren't saying something that's completely different from Cicero saying the humanities prepare you to be a Roman citizen, right? Like there's I'm just saying there's a form of the humanities prepare you to work that I think is compatible with your understanding of the humanities. Well, I mean, what I would rather say, let me circle back to that in a minute. But what I would rather say is that AI is good for the humanities, because it clarifies in an especially forceful way, what is at stake.

1:01:32if we stop being invested in this project of cultivating our own humanity and we give ourselves over to the robots and the machines, right? Because what the machines can't really do well and that quite frankly, I think we don't want them to do well is to think about what our ends and our goals are. Like we don't want them to define for us, right? what we're aiming for. And the humanities, when done well, right, real humane learning is an investigation into what the goal of human society is. And so I think that what AI really clarifies is the absolutely fundamental existential cultural need for humane learning.

1:02:25and because it makes it so clear that if we give up our thinking to machines, what will be left, right? We will just be a bundle of desires, right, that are coming from outside and we will be a kind of slave to them. We will not really in any meaningful sense be free. I don't care what the political system is. If you haven't done that work of deep, humane reflection and self-cultivation, you are not really engaged in that project of becoming a person. And so when I talk to students about using AI in the class, I don't talk about how I'm going to punish them because one, it's impossible to prove.

1:03:09And two, I'm not actually interested in punishing them. What I remind them of in very clear terms is that if they outsource their thinking, they're simply outsourcing their own humanity. And like, you can do that, but I think you'll regret it. Because now is the time given to you to really invest. And God help us, robots are taking over in areas that, you know, we might want to really question whether they should take over, even if it does mean accepting more error. If we can't think about our own humanity, I just think we're so on the road to dystopia and a result that none of us is going to like or appreciate.

1:03:52And I think that artificial intelligence just makes that very clear. And in that respect, I'm grateful for it.

1:03:58Ross Douthat:I don't think there could be a better place to end. So, Jennifer Frey, thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me.

1:04:09Thank you.