Last fall, in a humanities capstone course, a student generated a paper with artificial intelligence. He was to present it to his classmates and professor the next day in order to develop, and receive detailed criticism of, an idea relevant to his research. The professor found out; the student was barred from the rest of the class’s meetings. Shortly after, tales of newly sanctioned access to ‘Gemini App’ hit the student inbox, dressed in the trappings cliché of breathless corporatism—“landscape,” “evolving,” “opportunities,” “complexity,” “community,” “responsible use.” (The idiom of the drug, already present.) That May, the student graduated with a BA in the department he defrauded. Nowadays, I’m told there’s some sort of Working Group working as a group to integrate AI into the College; while they’ve been deliberating for the past year, entire departments have more or less stopped assigning essays in the face of a deluge of artificial garbage.

That liberal education (education in the liberal arts) is under attack is nothing new: in recent memory, a greedily callous economic regime combined with the flailings of a petty and vindictive executive branch has effected the blinkered attitude in collegiate administration that education is reducible to job training, its value therefore expressible in pecuniary terms. This attitude has already done immeasurable damage to the liberal arts. What is novel about the AI threat is not that it places in doubt the value of liberal education. Instead, it raises the question: is the human even necessary to the liberal arts in the first place? Unfortunately, old routes of forestalling this question—‘ChatGPT just isn’t good enough yet’—no longer apply, and we are thrown back on the questions themselves. What are we here to do? Why?

The aforementioned Working Group is eerily mute on these questions. Composed, as it is, predominantly of bureaucrats who live and work almost entirely outside the classroom, this fails to surprise. And so we are in a strange position wherein the College’s administration and its constituent departments seem stubbornly unwilling to assert their own purpose. The privilege of articulating the function of our institution therefore falls to us.

The term ‘liberal arts’ comes from the Latin term artes liberales, or ‘the arts of free people.’ They were so named because the inner freedom inculcated by liberal education was thought to prepare one for political freedom. Of course, this notion of predicating political freedom on certain qualities of mind is rather antiquated, but the point stands that the purpose of the liberal arts is to effect improvement along certain dimensions in the minds of its participants, an improvement not implausibly summarizable as freedom from ignorance. Liberal education serves to free one from the tyranny of received dogma; from a cloistered and culturally-bounded sense of possibility both worldly and conceptual; from an inability to introspect about one’s own beliefs, hopes, and worries; from credulity in the unplumbed surface of things; from an inability to face directly the world and understand it as intellectually tractable; from a very basic unawareness of the sorts of questions that can and ought to be grappled with, questions like “what ought I live for?”, questions that every one of us will face in the course of our one and only human life.

Such an education does not consist in the transmission of facts from the informed to the naive; rather, it aspires toward a much softer change in the student themself. All this is what Foster Wallace meant when he said: “The real value of a real education… has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time…”

Liberal education does all that, or tries to, by attempting to provide the intellectual tools and inculcate the intellectual virtues—humility, charity, others—conducive to reflective life. In the end, it aims to impart a certain clarity of vision both inward and outward; a sort of self-knowledge. This may seem abstract or rarified—but the aspirations of liberal education are salient only from within, and it is a further goal of liberal education—and its encompassing institutions—to induct students into a form of life in which those aspirations are intelligible.

This difficult work occurs, primarily, through the processes of reading, writing, and discussion. We read to do the difficult work of coming to inhabit the world of another; we write to reify our own world on the page such that the deficiencies, strengths, depths, aesthetic quirks, and contours of that world come into view, and so that those thoughts might be communicated to others with clarity, pathos, and force; and, having done so, we meet each other in the real college classroom and attempt to make mutual sense.

With this conception of liberal education in view, it should be clear, indeed trivially obvious, that AI is strictly incompatible with every instrument and every aspiration of an education in the liberal arts. The delegation of one’s work to a corporatized machine renders impossible the edification of mind that is the true and final end of everything the liberal arts are for.

Though in this essay I have tried simply to make clear what it is that we lose when we ‘go Machine,’ the question remains: what are we to do? Certain reforms in assignment structure seem appropriate, as do new practices of detection and discipline.

I believe also that a certain Machiavellian ethic is at this point due: we must create a culture of harshness and shame around the use of AI. Users—connotations of addiction and intemperance intentional—should be recognized as deceitful and lazy; when discovered by their peers, they should be ‘ratted out’; professors should implement deterrent penalties for the production of artificial trash (grades of F, barring students from class, public announcements); when caught, all of a user’s professors and advisors should be notified; the same with graduate schools. Use, for academic work, should induce academic and perhaps social disgrace. Importantly, this must not be confused with a vulgar wanton cruelty. It is, instead, the expression of a sincere commitment to the purpose of our institution. So far from cruelty, this is, in the end, a commitment to each other.

Far more important than that, though, is this: the College must make attractive to us students such visions of education as I have presented. To do this, it must first commit to some conception of its own purpose, any at all. I have furnished just one vision of institutional telos. There are surely others. Of course, I happen to think this one is entirely right—but if not, it is at least something. It is, at least, better than nothing. Without a purpose, we are naught but a group of some 2000 young people, engrossed in strange sacraments of chalk and beaker, quartered within an $800 million real-estate portfolio, attached to a $3.9 billion investment fund, learning little, doing nothing. With a purpose, however, we could be students, pursuing an education.

It may seem, ye who heralds the castration of the human intellect, that my lauding of the liberal arts is lofty and melodramatic; my criticisms of AI use, overly harsh. My thought, however, is this: what better than high-minded language in response to a technology that indulges our basest inclinations—laziness, dishonesty, ignorance, perhaps even a revelry in subjection? The time is now for earnestness, even pretension; the time is now for zeal. Seek not abjection in the machine. ■

— Anonymous