Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email sigal.samuel@vox.com. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

I am a university teaching assistant, leading discussion sections for large humanities lecture classes. This also means I grade a lot of student writing — and, inevitably, see a lot of AI writing too.

Of course, many of us are working on developing assignments and pedagogies to make that less tempting. But as a TA, I only have limited ability to implement these policies. And in the meantime, AI-generated writing is so ubiquitous that to take course policy on it seriously, or even to escalate every suspected instance to the professor who runs the course, would be to make dozens of accusations, some of them false positives, for basically every assignment.

I believe in the numinous, ineffable value of a humanities education, but I’m also not going to convince stressed 19-year-olds of that value by cracking down hard on something everyone does. How do I think about the ethics of enforcing the rules of an institution that they don’t take seriously, or letting things slide in the name of building a classroom that feels less like an obstacle to circumvent?

Dear Troubled Teacher,

I know you said you believe in the “ineffable value of a humanities education,” but if we want to actually get clear on your dilemma, that ineffable value must be effed!

So: What is the real value of a humanities education?

Looking at the modern university, one might think the humanities aren’t so different from the STEM fields. Just as the engineering department or the math department justifies its existence by pointing to the products it creates — bridge designs, weather forecasts — humanities departments nowadays justify their existence by noting that their students create products, too: literary interpretations, cultural criticism, short films.

But let’s be real: It’s the neoliberalization of the university that has forced the humanities into that weird contortion. That’s never what they were supposed to be. Their real aim, as the philosopher Megan Fritts writes, is “the formation of human persons.”

In other words, while the purpose of other departments is ultimately to create a product, a humanities education is meant to be different, because the student herself is the product. She is what’s getting created and recreated by the learning process.

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