A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.

Making the case for a “useless” education.

Hosted by Ross Douthat

Produced by Victoria Chamberlin and Sophia Alvarez Boyd

Mr. Douthat is a columnist and the host of the “Interesting Times” podcast.

What’s really driving the humanities crisis in higher education? As enrollment and reading decline, I asked Jennifer Frey, a professor of philosophy, what it was like to run a liberal arts program that was gutted. I wanted to know whether she thinks the age of A.I. could bring back the kind of education she says is fundamental to human formation.

A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.

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Ross Douthat: Jennifer Frey, welcome to “Interesting Times.”

Jennifer Frey: Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

Douthat: So I am, like you, a book person. And I feel like for basically, if not my entire life, at least my entire adult life, I have been living in the shadow of the decline of all that I hold dear in terms of novels, poetry, philosophy, essays and history.

Literacy is going down. Fewer young people read books every year. And the story of the academic humanities is basically a story of declining enrollment and disappearing jobs.

And now comes A.I., maybe as the final destroyer, burying Plato and Aristotle in a wave of slop. Or maybe — maybe — as a weird kind of savior, creating a world where suddenly having a broad understanding of history and human nature becomes important again.

And I have you here. You’re a liberal arts evangelist who built a college humanities program that was briefly quite successful. We’re going to talk about the decline of the humanities, if we can be optimistic about their potential rebirth, and about the career prospects for our kids.

Douthat: That’s a lot, that’s a lot. Well, we’ve got a little bit of time.

Frey: Let’s get to it.

Douthat: I’m going to start by playing the part of a skeptic. And I’m going to try and give you a little bit of a hard time about the vocation that you’ve chosen.

Suppose I didn’t have any kind of primal ancestral attachment to literature or the arts. Suppose I’m just a technically competent person who wants my kids to learn useful skills and be employable in 21st-century America.

Why should I care if my kids study the humanities? What’s in it for them?

Frey: That’s a fair and very important question. Your skepticism is obviously very widely shared. It was shared by my own parents and also by my husband’s parents — I married a philosopher and a professor. When both of us went to explain to our parents what we were going to study in college, it was not met so warmly or with affection. So I think the skepticism is fair.

I don’t know that it’s so much a focus on books, although I share your view that the purported death of literacy is a tragedy. But if we go back to the beginning of philosophy and Plato, I mean Socrates, of course, didn’t write anything and was very skeptical. It wasn’t a book culture because we didn’t have the printing press yet. So certainly I think humane learning predates our book culture. For me, it’s less about books, even though I’m a bookworm.

I think the deeper question is about what I would call liberal learning, a kind of learning that is the cultivation of the higher capacities in a person and the cultivation of those capacities as it were for its own sake, because it is good and important to cultivate them because we’re human.

The teleological question of, “What is it for?” is a very deep and important question for us humans. My concern is that we have lost our ability to understand the intrinsic value of engaging in that sort of self-cultivation. The Greeks would call it paideia. The Germans would call it Bildung. I might just call it liberal education or liberal learning, but it’s all the same sort of thing. It’s about what is it to contribute to and live in a flourishing human society?

Douthat: Is this a moral understanding? Because there are people who will say that Germany in the early 20th century was one of the most cultured societies in human history, in terms of its engagement with philosophy, literature, the arts, music — and yet, none of that obviously prevented highly cultivated Germans from participating in atrocities. So where’s the proof that people who go through this process gain some kind of greater moral awareness?

Frey: I think the proof is always in the student. But you also have to recognize that there is an ineliminable element of human freedom in education.

When we talk about teaching and learning, the learning has to come from the student. And a good teacher who has a good pedagogy is always going to be especially attuned to the student and what the student needs and how to draw out of the student the best that that student can achieve.

But you cannot — trust me, any educator will tell you this — you cannot force the student. You can incentivize. We do that through grades and credentials. But ultimately, they have to want that sort of self-cultivation.

When you look at a culture, and you want to ask yourself: “Well, how did we go from Weimar Germany to Nazism?” Obviously, education is going to be a part of that, but it’s not in any way going to be the whole of it.

I don’t buy that Nazism is proof that higher learning doesn’t work. The point of fact is that the Nazis were very much against higher education in many ways and wanted to constrain and control it.

Douthat: They had some very specific ideas, let’s say.

Douthat: But what about the idea that this kind of learning has to defend the value of engagement for its own sake, even if it doesn’t make someone a better person? Would you say that there is an inherent value in being able to read and engage with Plato’s “Republic,” or being able to listen to and experience Handel or Bach or anyone else who’s considered a great composer, that it’s just a thing unto itself?

Frey: Absolutely. Yes.

Douthat: So even if the person having that experience remains a bad person in their everyday interactions, they have still gained something valuable?

Frey: Absolutely. Yes. We’re all deeply imperfect, Ross, in a variety of ways. [Chuckles.]

I think the Nazism case is especially interesting — and here I’ll be maximally provocative because I think that it’s true. Something that was happening in higher education at that period of time was eugenics. If you look at institutions of higher education in the United States and in the U.K., you will find that eugenics was very popular and accepted almost universally.

I think that’s a very dangerous ideology, but that ideology was coming out of our fanciest institutions. And, of course, you can find it in Supreme Court cases and everything else.

That toxic ideology made its way into Nazi ideology. The Nazis were not unique in having this eugenic worldview, and institutions of higher education were not somehow inoculated from that either.

Douthat: But then isn’t there an argument, a critique of the humanities, that says that intellectual mentality and the eugenic mentality could fit together pretty naturally? It’s like: OK, to be human is to appreciate Bach and Plato, and only our smartest university students do that, so only they’re fully human — and so on down the eugenicist argument.

So tell me why that’s wrong, and why are the humanities actually for everyone rather than being a kind of rarefied pursuit?

Frey: Thank you for asking that. I think as a matter of fact, we have a lot of evidence. I tend to talk about liberal arts education rather than the humanities, but in the best case, they’re sort of the same expression.

This idea that a higher sort of learning and self-cultivation is truly liberating, that it helps people have a deeper sense of purpose and meaning in their life and also helps them to cultivate a space of genuine leisure — that is something where there’s a significant track record, whether we’re talking about Frederick Douglass or Anna Julia Cooper or W.E.B. Du Bois, or whether we’re talking about entire movements of the British working class really taking control of their education by whatever means.

We have this great cloud of witnesses who can attest to the fact that this has completely transformed their lives, not just materially or not principally for material gains, but spiritually.

Douthat: Can you say a little bit more about the liberal arts and the British working class? I think people are accustomed to the idea that you can pluck a poor person or an enslaved person who then turns out to be a genius of some kind, that that sort of individual talent exists, but it’s really striking to read about the role that the liberal arts played in these large-scale working class communities in the past.

Frey: It’s an absolutely fascinating history, and I don’t know why people don’t talk about it more — and not just in the British working class, but certainly there have also been similar movements in the United States. What you see really clearly is that this need that I’m talking about — the need for self-reflection, self-knowledge, understanding — that cultivating the life of the mind is a basic human need.

And it really connects to me personally because I did not grow up in a home filled with books. I did not have intellectual parents. My father drove a forklift in a paper factory, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. But they were good parents who took me to the library.

I just started reading on my own. I think I was 4 or something, and I really loved it. So they would find ways to make that more available to me. And I had this incredibly robust interior life as a kid — I mean, just off the charts.

Douthat: But what about your parents? Do you think that your parents were missing something that had been denied them in their own childhoods that you were just fortunate to achieve?

Frey: Certainly in my mother’s case. She left the house at 16. She came from a not-great home situation that she needed to get out of, so I think there was a practical imperative for her to make money and get settled down and things like that.

But, it’s also true that over time my parents had two children who were pretty intellectual — my brother is also a philosophy Ph.D. Somehow, miraculously, my parents sent two intellectual Catholics into the world. And it’s not like they were never reading. It’s just that a lot of professors come from families of professors. I am not one of them.

So this kind of history connects to me because my background is more working class, and my experience of deepening my own interior life, without having any sense that that was a project you engaged in — it was just something that I did — and that I later came to see it as the most essential thing that I ever did.

I think it’s incredibly precious, and we should do all we can to try to incentivize and encourage and protect that.

Douthat: But doing all we can, at least at this moment, seems to me requires making some claims that Americans in the early 21st century are pretty uncomfortable making.

Douthat: For instance, the idea that an encounter with Shakespeare is better than an encounter with Y.A. fiction, or that an encounter with “The Odyssey” is better, however good it turns out to be, than an encounter with Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey.”

And the skeptic says: Look, it’s a free country. There’s a marketplace of books and ideas. Back in the old days, when all you had was a Bible and Shakespeare, maybe people felt like they had to read those things. But now they read what they want to read, and maybe it doesn’t rise to your standards.

You have to make a case to me, the Philistine skeptic, that Shakespeare is better than John Grisham. Is Shakespeare better than John Grisham?

Frey: I haven’t read John Grisham since high school. [Laughs.]

Douthat: I haven’t read John Grisham in a while. I’m dating myself as a mid-40s person.

Frey: I’m right there with you.

Douthat: Give me a difference. What’s one qualifying difference that lets us tell that we should be reading “Hamlet” before or distinct from reading “The Firm” or “A Time to Kill”?

Frey: Wow,........

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