Only the Humanities Can Save the University from AI  

Pope Leo XIV warned in his first address to the College of Cardinals that “the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.” In other words, we’re living through a new technological upheaval—one that, like the Industrial Revolution, threatens to reshape not just how we work, but how we understand human purpose, value, and formation. No institution will escape this reckoning.  

Indeed, the university is in the midst of its reckoning. Students are outsourcing most of their work to AI—at least, anything being done at home. And many of those same students are disillusioned to discover that their professors are using it too. All of this has left many in higher education asking, “What is it we are even doing here?” The university now finds itself not merely in need of reinvention, but of remembering what it was meant to be—what it should be.  

The Collapse of the Credentialing Model  

Ask college students why they are at university, and they will probably tell you: to help them get a job, to distinguish themselves in the labor market, to be credentialed by an accredited institution. And this isn’t just a student perception—most universities market themselves precisely this way. “Preparing you for the future of work,” says NYU’s School of Professional Studies. Mass credentialing. Skill acquisition. The transmission of knowledge. Preparation for the workforce. This has long been the dominant narrative in American higher education: universities are job preparation factories.  

If that’s the narrative, they’re writing themselves out of the future. They will lose the mass credentialing, job-prep game—and we all know to what: AI. An AI can grade an essay and solve a calculus problem faster than any professor (albeit not always correctly). It can give highly specific, personalized feedback to students looking to strengthen their writing or rehearse a speech. And if universities keep pushing the skill-acquisition narrative, they’re missing the writing on the wall: this is no longer a viable value proposition. AI will do it faster, cheaper, and at scale—especially when professors are using AI themselves to generate content and grade work. Why keep the more expensive humans in the loop?  

Understandably, many are scrambling to articulate the sine qua non of higher education in light of this reality. The answers most commonly offered are woefully inadequate. Let’s consider a few of them.  

Prestige and “Brand” Recognition?  

Presenting an Ivy League undergraduate degree on a résumé may open doors for some. But there are only a handful of institutions with that kind of door-opening brand recognition. There are more than 3,000 colleges and universities in the US without it. And that prestige comes at a price—often upwards of $80,000 a year. If someone could get a job in big tech without paying that premium, many would. Just ask the hiring managers at Google or Amazon who are increasingly valuing graduates from niche, skill-specific bootcamps like Hack Reactor. Oddly enough, even this justification for the university’s existence by way of prestige is yoked to one’s job prospects.  

Professors as Empathic Educators?   

Some argue that while professors teach those skills needed in the ever-changing job market, they should do so with care, connection, and mentorship. That is the differentiator—not merely what is being taught, but how. Call it the “Skillbuilders Plus” model. But conversational chatbots are already convincingly mimicking emotional nuance. They affirm, encourage, and even remember previous responses. They may not care, but they simulate care convincingly. And if the primary goal remains skill acquisition, the faster, cheaper, AI-driven route will ultimately win. Convenience has become a cultural value in its own right—often eclipsing substance, depth, and the discomfort that real learning requires. When education is reduced to performance metrics and outcomes, it becomes indistinguishable from a service economy optimized for speed.  

The Need for Community and Connection   

The undergraduate years clearly offer a unique time for building connections and fostering networks of peers and alumni. But meaningful communities can be found elsewhere: in CrossFit boxes, churches, fandoms, Discord servers, book clubs. Universities may offer community, but they don’t have a monopoly on it. An impressive list of student clubs doesn’t necessarily drive enrollment; it won’t keep doors open either.  

So: prestige, emotional connection, community—none constitutes a stable or coherent supplement to the skill-building telos. They are stopgaps at best, distractions at worst. The only viable path forward is not to retrofit the mass-credentialing model, but to abandon it in favor of a fundamentally different vision. The university must recover its original purpose: the formation of persons oriented toward truth. Not merely the production of employable or networked graduates, but intellectually serious, morally awake, truth-seeking human beings.  

Recovering the Love of Truth  

This has always been the university’s highest calling. As John Henry Newman wrote in The Idea of a University, the university “[educates] the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.” Western universities were born out of this loving grasp. Harvard’s motto is simply Veritas. Scholars at the very first western universities once gave their lives to engage in painstaking disputations about the problem of universals. Who cares about the ontological status of essences, you might ask? People who care about the truth. And those were the people universities were built for. These should be the people universities now try to form: people who care about the truth. This is especially the case in this post-truth world that is longing for something real—something more than curated feeds and optimized distractions.  

This deep calling—of forming intellectual virtue—is also something fittingly human. It is something AI cannot do. It cannot model the sacrifice, toil, or grit required to seek answers to life’s hardest questions. It cannot sit with students in aporia—those moments of disorientation when they realize what they don’t know. It cannot decide when to push or when to pause in a Socratic seminar. It cannot help students discover when it’s time to take a stand or how to dialogue across disagreement. AI is a fluent, tireless assistant—but it is also a sycophant.  

Consider what the role of the professor ought to be—not a knowledge dispenser, but an intellectual exemplar. Someone who loves, seeks, and sacrifices for the truth and teaches his or her pupils to do the same. The professor is someone who lives the kind of intellectual life students might want to imitate. And the university, at its best, is the only institution designed to give such exemplars the time, protection, and community they need to do this work well. It offers the slow, cumulative space where formation can unfold—not just performance, but practice. Not just information, but transformation.  

Of course, universities do not always live up to this vision. Grade inflation, politicized classrooms, lazy relativism, and the drive for scalable credentialing have blurred the mission. But that is all the more reason to reclaim it. If we want to justify towers of learning, book-lined libraries, and human professors over online modules and chatbot graders, we must articulate this purpose clearly. They—the professors, the physical classrooms, the stained-glass halls—are all there to inspire the kind of love that builds virtue. That’s what it is all for. Without that aim, the university will collapse under its own hypocrisy.  

Why the Humanities Might Save the University 

Ironically, it’s the humanities—often deemed the least practical or most peripheral of the disciplines—that are best suited to lead this renewal. They are the disciplines that train students to ask not just how to do something, but why it matters. They demand slow reading, careful listening, and the cultivation of judgment. These are precisely the habits AI cannot form and the ones our culture most desperately needs.  

Universities that fail to elevate the humanities will be the first to shutter when AI tutors make credentialing faster, cheaper, and more convenient (as they already are beginning to). But those that center the humanities may survive—not because they resist technology, but because they resist the dehumanizing logic of reducing education to productivity.  

The strategic plan for every university in the age of AI should resist the temptation of instrumental reasoning in missions, mottos, and marketing. Instead, they might make the in-person Socratic seminar central, require philosophy and ethics, demand sacrifice and struggle, claim a canon and debate it, create space for disorientation and dialogue—genuine, open, and honest dialogue. Ultimately, they must define the intellectually humble, tempered, and principled graduates they hope to send forth. Chasing the mass-credentialing narrative is a short-term, shortsighted strategy. It may work for another decade at best, but it will fail eventually. If that wasn’t evident three years ago, it is surely evident now. Students are feeling cheated upon realizing that professors are employing AI to keep up with the demands of their work, as a recent New York Times article makes clear. And the system isn’t serving students, either: the degradation of critical thinking and intellectual growth aside, those leaving college with undergraduate degrees simply aren’t waltzing into white-collar jobs. In fact, their unemployment rate is higher than the national average.

Theoretical and Productive Knowledge 

It bears clarifying that this vision doesn’t demand that professional or vocational training be exiled from the university altogether. Job readiness per se is not the problem. The problem is when such training is absorbed into the logic of the mass credentialing model—when it becomes a pipeline for mere marketable skills and a means of careerist gain. This is why even pre-professional programs and the hard sciences must be couched within the humanities. Without philosophy, history, and religious studies to orient them, these programs risk devolving into technocratic credentialing schemes—training students to be efficient rather than excellent, and competent rather than wise. It also just happens to be the sort of training AI is best suited to provide—efficient transmission of information.  

The corrective I propose is not about excluding vocational training or hard sciences from the university proper, but about reordering it under a unifying vision: one in which all acquisition of knowledge is ordered toward the pursuit of truth and the cultivation of wisdom. That, and not mass credentialing, is what justifies the university’s continued existence. 

It’s also worth considering where vocational schools fit in this return to truth narrative. There are two things worth noting here. First, the vocational school is qualitatively different from the university. The two institutions serve different functions—the attainment of productive knowledge and theoretical knowledge, respectively. Thus, what I outline here about forming a love of truth and the professors modeling the sacrifices of intellectual life to that end is not an appropriate value proposition for vocational schools. The vocational school has its own value proposition, which brings me to my next point.  

The vocational school is less vulnerable to a hostile AI takeover precisely because of its function. It isn’t because it prepares students for a specific career. It is because the sort of knowledge it imparts is embodied and requires the mastery of tools that manipulate physical things—like learning to use a welding torch, for instance. It often requires an apprenticeship model that cannot be abstracted or simulated by AI. You cannot know how to use a circular saw until you use a circular saw. Someone might need to guide you in using it so you don’t cut off your thumb.

If students who were enrolled in a trade school were not learning how to be mechanics and electricians, and were instead reading existentialist philosophy with their mentors, we would say the school was not serving its proper function. This isn’t to say there aren’t great examples of schools that combine learning trades with humanist discovery. The College of St. Joseph the Worker is a great example of this. But the vocational school’s primary mission is to teach trades. It isn’t to produce theologians, economists, and scientists. Again, this is the difference between productive and theoretical knowledge, respectively. There is a need for both in any functioning society; both need to be preserved.  

This helps us understand even more deeply what the university needs to reclaim, and why it is vulnerable to being outpaced by AI. Unlike vocational training, which remains robust against AI due to its embodied and productive nature, the university has hollowed itself out by embracing disembodied, abstract credentialing—leaving it exposed. Setting up asynchronous online classes, feeding students information, having them repeat it on a test, calling it learning, and dispensing degrees: this is all a tremendous disservice to students. The university is badly positioned in this intellectual revolution because it has failed to live up to its formative telos. And that telos is not dispensing of information in service to a job credential. The disciplines and practices that the university as an institution was created to preserve are fundamentally oriented toward truth. And it ought to admit students with the intent of forming them to love that truth through exemplary struggle and sacrifice. This requires wrestling with ideas, contemplating them, and debating them. Even the professional fields—medicine, law, and beyond—must do the same. There can be no good doctors without truth-seeking health. No good lawyers without truth-seeking justice. 

So AI may be able to grade an essay with precision and quickly dispense a literature review on Aristotelian metaphysics, but it cannot model or form truth-seeking virtue. This is what can and should distinguish the university during this AI era. The humanities can help them do it.  

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