Dear Colleagues,

As I continue to meet with different groups across the college and plan our yearly goals, a recent report from the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Building a Thriving Humanities Program," has been a valuable resource and a central topic of conversation. In analyzing the challenges facing the Humanities and Social Sciences, the report states, "the rise of generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, which has prompted fundamental questions about the purpose of learning—especially in the humanities. With students able to swap a few keystrokes for their own research, writing, and multimedia projects, some observers wonder if the humanities can even continue to exist."

This is a legitimate question—and an opportunity for all of us, across every discipline, to reflect on our purpose and whether our current approaches still serve it effectively. This question of purpose is fundamental—and too broad for a single note. For today, I want to focus on one crucial angle: how education expands our curiosity and imagination.

I'm fond of David Foster Wallace^[1]’s characterization of liberal education: "the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get … isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about." He explains that an educated person is capable of thinking about questions beyond individual needs and interests, beyond the here and now. Their education expands their capacity to think about broader and deeper questions and develops their habits of mind to do so. Ultimately, it’s less about the answers we find and far more about the questions we're equipped and choose to ask.

David Deutsch, the physicist, takes this even further, positing that “all progress, both theoretical and practical, has resulted from a single human activity: the quest for what I call good explanations.^[2]” In other words, asking questions and seeking explanations. Human curiosity, according to him, distinguishes us from all other species. “Many animals display curiosity when something unfamiliar appears. Humans alone can be curious about the familiar. Like the nature of the night sky. Or of love. Or of curiosity.”

Image generated using Adobe Firefly. Originally featured in Co-Intelligence, by Ethan Mollick: a Summary. 

However, as we all know, these tools can also bypass the transformative process of wrestling with the question itself. This intellectual struggle is where true development, growth, and expansion occur. It’s not simply about getting answers, but about the profound exercise of holding the tension a question creates and engaging in that challenging intellectual work.

Parker Palmer, in Healing the Heart of Democracy^[3] attributes most of our social and political problems to our discomfort with holding tension; we treat it as a condition to be relieved rather than a creative energy to be held and processed. He writes, “A good education teaches us to hold contradictions reflectively rather than reactively, …[Good scientists] know that only by holding such tensions over time can we advance our knowledge.”

Generative AI tools represent an additional resource with the potential to be a multiplier for humanities education. Yet, they also carry the significant risk of becoming another easy way for our students to relieve intellectual tension rather than engaging with it. True education is what empowers us to ask hard questions, frame them in multiple ways, and imagine multiple solution spaces, allowing us to fully leverage AI's computational power. As educators, we now have a powerful new tool at our disposal, along with the significant responsibility to teach our students to leverage it thoughtfully rather than becoming its victim. It's up to us to highlight and strengthen this potential symbiosis, ensuring we and our students don't relinquish learning and agency. This isn’t an easy task, but it’s a critical one for all of us.

With my best regards,

Fatma

P.S. I gave the above text to Google Gemini, and it made some editorial suggestions. I used or accepted most of them.

[1] David Foster Wallace, This is Water https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw

[2] Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. Penguin Publishing, 2011.

[3] Palmer, Parker J. Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, Wiley 2011.