Welcome to the first ever guest post at Big iff True!
I’m delighted to share this piece by Kerah Gordon-Solmon, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University — and one of my favorite philosophers in the game.
If you’d like to see more guests, let me know in the comments.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that this is terrible moment for higher education — especially the humanities. AI mission creep is one culprit. Budgetary strain is another. They function in tandem like the trash compactor in the original Star Wars — grinding to an inevitable crunch.
We could weather one without the other. AI first: the extent to which students can too easily outsource their writing and reading to generative AI is extensively documented. But (and I write with certain pride in my colleagues), many of us are problem solving around it, not eliminating but containing its harms.
Examples: in my own teaching, I’ve weighted attendance more heavily than any other component. I keep track by having students hand-write and submit a reflection on our discussion every meeting. Screens are prohibited. For a decent course grade students must, at minimum, show up and pay enough attention to have something to write down. I’ve experimented with oral assessments: a group oral midterm (worthwhile) and individual essay oral defences (gloriously worthwhile). A chorus of us are demanding page citations in essays. These matter for reasons beyond hall monitoring. AI-generated text is a buffer between human users and original sources. Exact citations are a connective thread to those sources; they enable others to retrace one’s steps through them. They connote authority.
The intention is not only to offset the incentives nudging students toward AI-cheating, but also to anticipate what will mark someone as educated in an AI-drenched world. It’s a reasonable bet that this will be oracy skills — speaking and listening, live in real time.
So, I don’t believe generative AI is, by itself, an existential threat to humanities education, at least not yet. The problem is the best solutions are predicated on in-person interaction, and that only scales with commensurate resources. We have options in a class of 25 or 60 that we lose with higher numbers. Individual essay oral defences: doable for 30 students. Group oral midterms: doable for 60 students. And so forth.
This is where budget cuts devastate. At Queen’s University (where I teach in the Philosophy department) cutting costs means cutting faculty, and concomitantly, increasing student-to-faculty ratios. Tactics include hiring freezes, incentivizing early retirement for senior faculty, and reducing adjunct teaching positions — while clawing back TA funding and striking lower-enrolment courses from the books.
The upshot: our best strategies for mitigating the threat from AI are being systemically undermined by the institutional response to budget pressures.
Our administration (like so many others) enjoins us to stop worrying and embrace AI in our teaching: do less with less; be ‘the university for the future [sic]’; advance the ‘strategic goal’ of ‘leveraging new technologies...so as better to prepare students to have impact in their chosen careers.’
These urgings are rooted in a conception of the university as a market actor. Our job is, first, to deliver a product our student-clients want, and second, to yield products (that is, graduates) employers will want to hire. It is, third, to serve society, e.g. through medical research. The focus is on the instrumental value of the university, its usefulness as a means to achieving valuable ends.
But being useful is not the only way of being valuable. There is intrinsic value, which is what we have in mind when we speak of the value of human life. There is also constitutive value, which refers to being an integral part of a valuable whole.
Elaborating on these is worth the digression. The significance of intrinsic value, in contrast with instrumental, comes out in thinking about our relationships with other people. We want our friends to value us for ourselves, and not because (say) they know we’ll always pay their way or get them into good parties. If we found out a friend only valued us for those reasons, we would feel used (or, instrumentalized). The “friendship” would be over.
Constitutive value presents more subtly. We invoke it when we praise something as ‘more than the sum of its parts.’ Think of an iconic music track with multiple instruments in its arrangement (any genre will do). If you isolate a single instrument’s contribution, it might not sound special or memorable. But the track would be the worse without it. This is constitutive value: it’s not freestanding, and it’s perceptible only in the context of the whole. It’s the introvert among the ways of being valuable.
What happens when we view universities as sites of intrinsic and constitutive, alongside instrumental, value?
The historical university goes back centuries, endowing us with centuries’ worth of accumulated scholarship and disciplinary practices. Contemporary universities are the collective bearer of that legacy. This confers a responsibility to preserve it, not only through research, but also through conferring onto new generations of students the knowledge and skills to appreciate and carry it forward, themselves.
The philosopher Agnes Callard writes of this eloquently:
In my early twenties, I entered a doctoral program in Classics at Berkeley.... I fought through thousands of pages of translation; I composed Greek prose in the style of Herodotus, Demosthenes, and Plato; I wrote about symbolism in Horatian Odes; I memorized dates and places for history exams; I learned Italian.... I became a citizen of a place that vanished thousands of years ago.... [A] feeling I remember vividly from that time is gratitude. Generation after generation of scribes had, as I saw it, copied those manuscripts for me, so that I could eventually read them. And this gratitude gave rise to a sense of responsibility: I too was a kind of scribe, tasked with keeping these texts available to and relevant for a new generation.
I enjoyed a frisson of recognition and appreciation reading this passage (and recommend the uncut original for its full effect). I want to pound the table and declare: “Intrinsic value!” But I’ll dig deeper, to the wellspring of the experience Callard describes.
No two academics will locate that wellspring in the same place. In surveying the ground for this piece, I kept rereading excerpts from two novels. (I could not have said why, except I felt compelled.) I reproduce those excerpts here, in abridged form.
The first is a descriptive passage from A.S. Byatt’s Still Life:
He considered the tree.
It had a dense, disorderly sheaf of twigs and suckers round the base of its trunk, and between these, and indeed under them, for many of them were attached above ground, the great, rigid, gripping lumps of the roots grasped the earth and went into it. He looked up the trunk which rose, scarred, cracked, knobby, and yet essentially direct into the air, a deliquescent trunk which forked and forked again into many repeated trunks, reaching or travelling up. This solid fountain had multiple crowns of thick secondary limbs, dividing into long twigs, fine twigs, leaflets, leaves, shoots.
He knew there was an inner geometry: Jacqueline had showed him drawings of the cambium layer: but he began to see an outer geometry.
Carefully contemplated, the growth of leaves from twigs, twigs from limbs, limbs from bole, showed to a geometric eye a persisting regularity in all this gnarled idiosyncrasy. The leaves grew out of the twigs in alternate ranks, at 180° from each other, and the twigs too could be mapped — given broken ends, scars, variations in girth, blemishes — as growing out of the branches on a regular spiral at the same angle. Marcus stared and mapped, stared and mapped, learning the tree.
The tree seen was solid geometry, meeting light. The tree, thought about, was contained and moving force and energy, stable yet changing.... Jacqueline had said apple trees drank four gallons per tree per hour. The water rose, not through suction, nor from pressure, but because it was an uninterrupted cohesive column, drawn up from base to crown. For a moment he saw the geometric fountain of rising water, a twisting and branching rope, the inner figure — no, an inner figure, there must be many — of its life and shape.
Light travelled from the sun at 186,000 miles per second, and the green he saw was refracted light, for the chlorophyll absorbed the red and blue-violet waves from the sun. The green was the light the tree did not consume. He saw in his mind’s eye the drama of the tree, the undifferentiated light pouring, silently, at terrible speed, meeting the solid rising column of water in the living and dead form of the tree.
Geometry he saw. The water, the properties of light, he knew. He must learn more. Plain curiosity is simpler and clearer than desire, and closer to life....
The second excerpt is a stretch of conversation among academics in a social setting, from Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night. The conversation has turned to practical conflicts of values:
‘How about the artist of genius who has to choose between letting his family starve and painting pot-boilers to keep them?’
‘Well — he could stop painting. That, if he really is a genius, would be a loss to the world. But he mustn’t paint bad pictures — that would be really immoral.’
‘Why?’ asked Miss Edwards. ‘What do a few bad pictures matter, more or less?’
‘Of course they matter,’ said Miss Shaw. ‘A bad picture by a good painter is a betrayal of truth — his own truth.’
‘If you can’t agree about painters, make it someone else,’ [said Harriet]. ‘Make it a scientist.’
‘To take a concrete instance— ‘ [said Wimsey] ‘somebody wrote a novel called The Search —’
[‘I read it’] said the Dean. ‘It’s about a man who starts out to be a scientist and gets on very well till, just as he’s going to be appointed to an important executive post, he finds he’s made a careless error in a scientific paper. Somebody finds out, and he doesn’t get the job. So he decides he doesn’t really care about science after all.’
‘But,’ said Miss Chilperic, ‘if it was only a mistake—’
‘The point about it,’ said Wimsey, ‘is what an elderly scientist says to him. “The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalise false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.”
‘In the same novel,’ said the Dean, ‘somebody deliberately falsifies a result – later on, I mean – in order to get a job. And the man who made the original mistake finds it out. But he says nothing, because the other man is very badly off and has a wife and family to keep.’
‘[D]oes anybody here approve? A false statement is published and the man who could correct it lets it go, out of charitable considerations. Would anybody here do that?’
‘Of course one couldn’t do that,’ said Miss Barton. ‘Not for ten wives and fifty children.’
The first, Byatt, passage unfurls an epiphany, experienced mid-novel by a teenage boy. Marcus is intensely introverted, hyper-sensitive to sensory stimuli, and a former child math prodigy who retains an intuitive sense of geometry. He is alone in an elm grove, staring at one of the trees. As he looks, it morphs from being visually overwhelming, even threatening, into a coherent, intricate world unto itself. It reveals itself partway to his understanding, and invites — entices — both a state of detached contemplation and a commitment to its renewed, expanded study.
The shift in vision happens when he overlays his intuitive perception of the tree’s geometry onto facts he has learned (from his friend Jacqueline) about its biology. This is the holy grail of academic study: one’s internal capacities (and propensities) react with knowledge one has acquired to light up something outside of oneself — to reveal it as potentially endlessly interesting, and accessible to investigation, which it spurs. This is a vivified but detached way of seeing: one is lit up, oneself, with ‘plain curiosity’; one’s personal concerns and desires (and so forth) are sifted out.
The Sayers passage is completely different in content and tone. It features an after-dinner conversation amongst academics (plus one detective and one novelist) in a fictional Oxford women’s college in the 1930s. The conversation has turned to conflicts between worldly commitments (feeding one’s family), and fidelity to the truth in scientific research. The assembled are unanimously on the side of truth — not only in science, but as a grounding principle in all academic research, even painting. (Truth in painting is flagged as the ‘truth’ of one’s aesthetic vision: ‘he mustn’t paint bad pictures — that would be really immoral.’)
I plant my flag in these literary cloisters. The deepest source of universities’ intrinsic value is our commitment, first, to enabling the luminescent quality of vision Byatt conjures, and second, to cultivating, and holding ourselves accountable to, an ethos of pursuing the objects of that vision with exacting care and fidelity.
The institutional university has a responsibility to provide a conducive and protected habitat.
This responsibility implies an imperative. One can hardly open a newspaper or magazine (print or digital) without encountering a think piece on the decline of literacy among university students. Reading complex texts, never mind old, long, complex texts, is portrayed increasingly as beyond their capacity. Similar points are being made about students’ writing abilities. AI is not the cause, but it is an accelerant.
A university’s purpose is to produce, disseminate, and preserve knowledge. We produce it through original research, disseminate it by publishing and teaching, and preserve it through archival work and, again — teaching. That means, in part, guiding students through canonical literature, and acclimatizing them to the norms and standards internal to academic disciplines. This is how we give them the foundation to develop scholarly expertise, themselves, should they want it. It is also how we orient them to perceive the scholarly expertise as valuable, as worthy of pursuit and preservation.
(A note on disciplines: when I was in graduate school, a fellow philosophy student observed a difference between ourselves and a friend in Comparative Literature. On encountering a new idea, our [philosophers’] reflexive response is to assess its truth, say, by considering the reasons that favour or oppose it, or pinpointing the assumptions that underly it. Our friend’s would be to locate it in a network of associations, rhyming ideas that had arisen in different contexts. These are different dispositions and different styles of reasoning — analytic vs. associative — prioritized within our respective fields. We were at that time refining, and coming more fully to inhabit, the particular cognitive skill-sets that distinguished our disciplines — ones that imprinted on us in undergraduate study.)
This is all part of the constitutive societal value of the university. A person can live a life rich in value without reading or intensely discussing Jane Austen, or John Stuart Mill, or Audre Lorde. One can engage thoughtfully with the world without a well-honed set of discipline-specific cognitive tools. But we want always for there to be some people doing these things. Our current cultural moment does not conduce to coming to them on one’s own. The university’s job is to enable it. When they’re out of fashion (which is their perennial fate), part of that job is to be their champion.
Scholarship that lacks an obvious practical application, high-level literacy, and skill sets internal to academic disciplines might not be highly marketable. (‘They must be marketable!’ say our administrators. ‘Teach them proficiency with AI tools.’) But marketability is only one kind of value. There are some things universities are uniquely suited to do. We should take seriously that it is our duty do them.
But if the job of the university is to protect, preserve and disseminate knowledge, this is a job done by only the few students who ultimately end up being academics.
The others may have benefitted more from more applicable skills, which humanities degrees teach to some extent, though it varies significantly by the degree and the university (this is not really the case as much in non-humanities subjects).
I guess the relevant question as it pertains to budget cuts is: on the margin are we educating too many humanities students, or too few? I have my perspective but if one disagrees one ought to say why.
(Though of course, I personally greatly enjoy and have benefited from the humanities, for the reasons so beautifully elucidated in this piece <3. But it is difficult to ignore in discussion of cuts/funding/students the societal function of universities today)
Marvellous, I 100% agree and it’s important we keep hammering on the importance of other kinds of value, not just instrumental, to those who undermine academia.