An Interintellect salon with Anastasia Berg and Jennifer A. Frey
With literacy seemingly on the decline and AI insinuating itself into every stage of education, the humanities are facing yet another formidable crisis. Join Point editor Anastasia Berg and Point contributor Jennifer Frey at an online Interintellect salon next week to ask: Can the humanities be saved? And what is it we’re seeking to defend through the humanities anyway? Click here for details, and to purchase a ticket.
To accompany the salon, we’re sharing some nonrequired reading from the magazine on higher education and its crises, AI and otherwise, including by Anastasia and Jen.
Universities, more than any other institution, shape our conception of what constitutes worthwhile knowledge. Therefore, if we want philosophy to thrive in the contemporary university, we will need to clearly articulate a very different vision of what a university is for, one that does not instrumentalize the life of the mind to pragmatic ends and that does not hold up expertise as the paradigmatic form of knowledge.
In these committee rooms—unless you are unlucky enough to be on a committee with me—discussions about the aim of humanities education being a personally transformative experience are probably not happening.
Anastasia Berg and Hollis Robbins debate AI in higher ed
“The problem isn’t that AI poses a risk to some special value or some very kind of romantic way of looking at ourselves. The problem is that it is making students dumber.”
Since it was founded in 2009, The Point has remained faithful to the Socratic idea that philosophy is not just a rarefied activity for scholars and academics but an ongoing conversation that helps us all live more examined lives. We rely on reader support to continue publishing.
