The Future Is Humanist: AI in Humanities Higher Education

Justin Neuman • Professor of Literary Studies, The New School

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 students can generate a clean, competent analysis of Kafka without reading Kafka. Kant without ever reading Kant. The prose comes back polished. And it's the same at scale with homework and term papers.

The response has been predictable: universal University panic. AI detection software. Doubling down on honor codes and scapegoat punishments. Or the luddites call to ban the laptops, forbid the phones, and bring back the blue books. 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.

Those assignments were already failing before AI arrived. They rewarded summary over insight, compliance over conviction.

Most students wrote for the assignment, not to think. AI just made that transaction faster and more obvious.

Part 2: The Prognosis

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.

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.

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.

Tenure-track English jobs have declined by roughly 55 percent since 2007–08. The steepest single-year drop came in 2020–21. Students are not irrational to avoid a discipline that cannot employ its own apprentices.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.