How the Liberal Arts Became Countercultural (and Essential) in the Age of AI

Sophie White: Hey everyone. I am so excited to share this EDUCAUSE Shop Talk episode with you. This one is a personal favorite for me. In it, we talk about the value of the humanities in our current age of AI. As an English literature student, I really appreciated this conversation for a lot of reasons. You'll see that our guests, Jason Gulya, Deseree Probasco, and Bethany Smith are really enthusiastic about the topic, and in it we talk about how humanity's skills translate and help communication across domains including from non-technical to technical audiences, why the humanities are really important for developing these crucial skills to support our work as humans like critical thinking and curiosity and imagination and why in this time things like process oriented learning and understanding ethical judgments are really important. This conversation kind of evolved into a larger discussion about the role of higher ed in this time and then how we can communicate that role for higher education to prospective students, current students, and across our institutions. So I hope you enjoy it.

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Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White, content marketing and program manager at EDUCAUSE and one of your hosts for today's discussion.

Jenay Robert: Hi everyone. I'm Jenay Robert. I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE, and I'll be your co-host today.

Sophie White: Great. So I will introduce our three fantastic guests today and then we will jump into the discussion. Today we are talking about the value of humanity skills in this age of AI that we found ourselves in. And I am really thrilled about this topic. I have a personal attachment to it, so I'll talk about that in a minute. But first of all, I'll introduce our guests for you today. We have Deseree Probasco. Deseree is Associate Vice Chancellor of IT Governance at Lone Star College, where she leads work at the intersection of data governance, AI readiness and institutional transformation. With a bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University and a master's in English from Sam Houston State University, she brings a humanities informed perspective to emerging technology, emphasizing critical thinking, language, context, and ethical judgment as essential skills in the age of AI. Thanks for being here, Deseree.

Deseree Probasco: Thanks for having me.

Sophie White: Great. Next up is Bethany Smith. Bethany is director of instructional support and training in DELTA at NC State University, where she leads faculty development and instructional technology initiatives that support innovative teaching and learning. With more than 20 years of experience in higher education, she specializes in digital learning, faculty support, and course quality improvement. Bethany's a frequent presenter on topics, including online learning, instructional technology, and faculty engagement. Thanks for being here, Bethany. And can you just tell us what DELTA stands for, what that acronym-

Bethany Smith: Oh, I'm so sorry.

Sophie White: No worries.

Bethany Smith: Digital education learning technology applications.

Sophie White: Perfect.

Bethany Smith: In education we love our acronyms.

Sophie White: We do. I feel like a lot of people know some of the more well-known ones, but that one was new to me.

Bethany Smith: Yep. Yep. Sorry about that.

Sophie White: No, you're fine. Thank you. And then last but not least, we have Jason Gulya. Jason is a professor of English and media communications at Berkeley College, where he is also the chair of the AI and Academic Integrity Committee and member of the AI Task Force. He's currently finishing a book on process focused teaching in the age of AI under contract with the University of Oklahoma Press. Thanks, Jason, and good luck with your new book.

Jason Gulya: Thank you. I have to actually go in and finish writing it.

Sophie White: Okay. So you're almost there.

Jason Gulya: Almost.

Sophie White: Great. Okay. So thinking about today's discussion, I mentioned I have a personal connection. I currently work for EDUCAUSE, which supports higher education technology professionals. I have a background in English. I was a double major in undergrad in political science and English literature and then got my master's degree in English literature. And I feel like I've had this sense for a while that these English skills were translating in some way to the work that I'm doing with higher education technology professionals, but I hadn't really been able to kind of understand the pulse of why that was. And then recently there've just been these kind of interesting coincidences where Deseree, we were chatting a couple weeks ago in relation to your Ellis project at Lone Star College, which has to do with academic advising and using AI. And after we stopped recording, you said something about, "Oh, and I think that my English major background really helped me with communicating about these technology projects." I was like, "That's interesting." And then I was at our cybersecurity conference and I was talking to Donna Petherbridge who works with Bethany about her English major skills, her time as an English teacher.

She's now a vice provost and is on our EDUCAUSE board. Our own EDUCAUSE president, John O'Brien, has a PhD in English and talks about his time as an English major quite a bit. So I have this sense of like, what is this English major to technology leader pipeline that seems to be emerging and why are these skills so valuable even in a time that we're seeing liberal arts funding decreasing, we're seeing humanities programs shuttering and losing funding and at the same time I'm hearing about this value of these skills that we have. So that's why we're here today to talk about like, what is this thing going on? Why are these skills so important as we look at how AI is really taking over in the world and what can practitioners learn, but also students who are thinking about learning about the humanities take out of this moment that we find ourselves in.

So big question, but want to dive in there. I'm curious if anyone wants to just kick it off with talking about maybe your experience, Deseree, you were nodding as I was telling my story. So I'm curious if maybe you can expand a bit on why you think your leadership in technology is really informed by your English background

Deseree Probasco: Yeah, I'd love to. In fact, your political science and English double major is like my dream. That's what I wanted to do. There's only so much time in the whole world that you can do. Yeah, I'm an accidental techie. So this has sort of been like my lived experience for a long time and I love talking about it and I am alumni interviewer from my college and I talk to a lot of kids. They're going into engineering or computer science or even medical fields and I'm like, "Read your books. Make sure you're taking your English classes seriously because those are just sort of like they are sleeper skills. They are absolutely sleeper skills." And so yeah, I'm an accidental IT nerd. I was an English major. I started out at Lone Star as a grant writer and it sort of touches a lot of data and data and analytics.

And so I moved into our analytics and institutional research. So data analysis department very accidentally was actually invited and I said, "I don't know how to do a pivot table. Never done a pivot table." And my then ABC was like, "No worries. I can teach you everything that you need to know. " And so there's an interesting niche where especially in higher ed academics where a lot of the times IDT departments and academic departments or even operational departments lack that sort of translator bridge. And so tech people have a really hard time describing what it is they do to the users and users have a really hard time describing what it is they need to tech people. And so just because we're so far afield in the academic industry. And so my particular niche at Lone Star was being able to sort of code switch between the two and explicate what was needed on one side and bring it over to the other side.

And as it's evolved over time, I had a really interesting experience learning to write SQL code in which it just sort of at some point it clicked because like, oh, it's a grammar. As long as the commas are in the right place, I pick my four main characters my field and I say where they're going to go and what they're going to pull from and then what they're going to do after that. And then I check my results and it was a fun little game to play as an English major just laughing the whole time thinking if I told my younger self this is what I was going to be doing for a living, like never would've thought. But it was an interesting niche to fill that I see being filled more readily as we sort of understand how to communicate technology and innovation with our academic partners in higher ed, especially with all of these emerging technologies and things that appear very abstract.

The benefit of having a communications person or a humanities person or someone who sort of understands those abstract concepts and how to make them concrete and speech helps sort of realize the invisible impact of tech because a lot of the things that we do in IT are invisible. They are upgrades, they're in the cloud, they're not tactile at all. And so there's a tactile benefit for having report printed out from your reporting software, but without sort of context and things attached to that, then it's not really usable. There aren't usable metrics there. And so I've been an advocate for that for my whole twenty years that I've worked at Lone Star is that it's great to have technical skills, but you also need to be able to communicate what it is that you're doing. And so it was really interesting. So I worked in IR for about twelve years and then I moved into administration and now doing IT governance.

And in IT governance, it is the framework. Governance is about understanding how, and especially data governance is about how data are an asset and then how those data translate to real world impacts. And so it's that translation opportunity that is really where the humanities and your English background come in because literally there's nothing more abstract than trying to tell a professor why the portrait of an artist as a young man reads the same way as a Jackson Pollock painting, which reads the same way as a 600-page avant-garde poem by Kenneth Goldsmith. If you can write that down in a ninety-page paper, you can literally articulate any idea that you ever want to have ever. And so I really feel like there are some hidden skills there that we are taught as being passionate about English and literature and looking at those things because we are required to sort of quantify those abstract ideas.

Jenay Robert: And I love that you came in strong with that humanities nerd joke. Thank you for that. That gets us off on the right start.

Deseree Probasco: You want to talk about Jackson Pollock and James Joyce. And my real tech nerd friends here at my institution love it when I interject James Joyce into our conversation. It's their favorite thing.

Jenay Robert: Jason and Bethany, I mean, where are you sitting with it? I'm sure you have a million thoughts swirling in your head, so where do we go with this?

Jason Gulya: I do have a very similar experience when it comes to the position of liberal arts where we have this field that is both we're talking about it as essential, right? Even the AI company CEOs are talking about the liberal arts as an essential skill. So we have that, but it's also fundamentally being discounted. People are saying, "Well, liberal arts doesn't, we can't slot it into a field." And one of the reasons I think this happens is at least for me at its core, the liberal arts as a discipline is pretty countercultural. The whole thing, the whole project is slowing down. It's hitting pause and saying, "I'm going to just hover over this thing." And that's an incredibly countercultural move, especially now with our technology and AI where it's an age of convenience. It's all about hyperefficiency. And so we have a field that is all about let's not do that.

Let's hold that at bay, let's slow down. And that's how you start to really in many ways start to recapture your value. One of the things that I ask my students is, can you really think about value, values, principles, intention if you're always in a rush You really can't. And that in many ways, that kind of captures the dynamic I think at the heart of what liberal arts has to offer right now because I think that we have this field where we're discounted because we're not moving as quickly as we can, but at the same time, that's what we have to offer. It's incredibly helpful if you get used to doing that, figuring out when to hit pause and say, "I'm going to use the next hour and try to figure out blank, whatever it is. " Even if it's just identifying the values you have, that's incredibly helpful because once you have that down as a foundational skill, well, then you can figure out how it slots into an age of hyperefficiency and everything else.

But I think that's how I sort of understand the place of liberal arts and that's why I think we're both discounted, but also essential.

Bethany Smith: Yeah. And I guess to kind of go on that, so much of what I run into at a very engineering heavy institution is so much about job prospects and it's students coming in and what are the jobs that I'm going to get when I get out and why do I have to take this liberal arts course? What's the purpose of this and how does that make me better, more competitive on the job market? And I think for me, a lot of times it's like, well, what's the purpose of education, of higher education? This well-roundedness that we talk about, how do we get that through a liberal arts education? And maybe it's not majoring so much in English, but it's making sure that all of our programs, we're not two year tech programs where we're only focusing on skills. We're actually really trying to focus on a well-rounded student that will become a citizen of this country, that will have informed opinions, that we want them to be able to make ethical decisions.

We want them to be able to do those things. And that doesn't happen by just learning to program, right? That happens by all of these pieces kind of working together. And I think that value I think is important for us to think about as a former ... So I was a former high school teacher. I used to work a lot in the College of Education and we would talk about that a lot. What is the purpose of education of our students having this education? And for so many students, it's the next step. It's to get into college, then it's to get a job. And it's like, well, what if it's more than that? What if it's more about creating great people that are becoming voters that are able to do some of these things and make these decisions? And I want these people to be empathetic and I want these people to be able to have those critical thinking skills and to understand some of these ethical dilemmas. And that's where I think the liberal arts shine.

Jason Gulya: Yeah. And I see two obstacles here and I'm curious that other people think about this. One obstacle is metrics. It's not always an obstacle, but sometimes it can be. How do you deal with metrics when you have something like the liberal arts and all of the skills we've been talking about, critical thinking, judgment, all this stuff that is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. It's very, very difficult to nail down. And then we have a metric fixated culture and that's one of the reasons I think we're left out. The other thing that I think is an obstacle here is over the last 30 plus years, many colleges, mine included, have really gone into the pipeline, right? Let's find the pipeline that gets us from college to the job, to career. And one of the things I think will be really interesting, I don't know how it's going to work out, is arguably if we are moving into this phase where that pipeline is cracking, where we really don't know what those jobs and careers are going to look like in five years, ten years, twenty years, if the pipeline starts to crack, how does that change?

Does that change whether we understand the value of something like liberal arts? I don't know. I think it can go either way, but I do think that that pipeline, which has been really firmly established in many institutions, we're starting to see it crack, maybe shatter at some point. I don't know if anyone really knows what that's going to look like, but that'll be one of the interesting things I think to track over the next decade or so.

Bethany Smith: Well, you add that with the demographic cliff that's happening. And I think that's just a very interesting thing. And I think back to what Deseree said something about, if you would've told my undergraduate self that I would've been doing this, there's no way. Same here, right? There's no way that I thought I would be in this position twenty, thirty years ago, or even that jobs like this would exist. And that's really what it is. We're preparing students for jobs that don't exist yet. And so what does that look like? How do you look at those skills? And I agree, Jason, so many of those skills are not quantifiable and so many people have tried to quantify critical thinking or tried to quantify those things and it is so difficult. We do know that there are things that project-based learning and portfolios and there's ways that we can look at some of these things, but I agree and I would love to hear what Deseree thinks because you seem to be really big into data and analytics.

How do we do that?

Deseree Probasco: Yeah, it's interesting. I agree with the metrics point. Everything has to have a KPI, an OKR, something that's measurable and measurement is fine, but what we do lack is the curiosity. So liberal arts and English and history and learning sociology and anthropology and all those skills enhance your curiosity. And so when we're going towards an idea of emerging tech is more like a mind than any other tech in history and it operates more like our brain and it is curious and it learns things and it's nonlinear. And so when you have a students in a pipeline that is, you learn this and then you learn this and then you learn this and get a job, that they become disenfranchised or they become disenchanted with that pipeline and that job very quickly because they don't see anything past the job. And so when we sort of deintroduce, even with data and stats, if you sort of deintroduce this idea of imagination and curiosity among those, then you sort of cease innovation because not, like you said, the jobs don't exist.

The tech doesn't exist yet. We can't even know what is going to come. And so we have to be training. We need to train students to have imagination so that they can see what's coming. They're not stuck in a thing that they have to do over and over repetitively. And I get into this debate all the time with people who are, and I don't want to say not readers, but they like a particular kind of book and they're like, "We don't read novels and we only like nonfiction or whatever." And I was like, "Well, how exactly do you learn about the trouble you can get into with technology if you don't read a novel? If you don't read 1984, if you don't read Frankenstein, if you're not familiar with what can happen in, I don't know, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we will get blown up immediately if you don't understand what our place is in the universe.

And the way to test that scenario is by reading it in fiction. And so I think that we devalue a lot of those things our students do or maybe institutions do. And I'm seeing that coming from a community college where we are a two-year pipeline. We're a two-year pipeline to transfer. We're like the tiptoe in for most students who are just testing out the education waters and then they end up going somewhere else or they graduate with a workforce degree and they go into a career pathway. And I feel like we are doing them disservice if we don't sort of introduce them to those ideas. No matter whether you're going to be a welder or a machiner or a nurse or whatever, you still need to know what AI can do and sort of the way that we do ... Honestly, how many of us kids from the 80s or whatever, we're very aware of what would happen if we don't sort of adhere to the prime directive. We watched all those sci fi-

Bethany Smith: We watched Star Trek. Yep.

Deseree Probasco: We watched Star Trek. Don't cross the streams. If you don't encounter those kind of cultural and curiosity, those test scenarios, which is what really literature is, is like testing the human condition, then we're really not preparing well-rounded students. And then they kind of fall off that cliff, the cliff that you're talking about where they just get to the end and they don't know what's next because they can't create it. And so what we don't want to do is have AI create it for them. We want them to understand that AI is a tool, a very sophisticated tool, but a tool nonetheless. And all of the things that emerge around them have taught that tool how to be. It didn't come into existence without writers and authors and poets and artists and journalists and anthropologists and sociologists and all of those things. It doesn't exist if there's only math.

Jenay Robert: Yeah, for sure.

Bethany Smith: Yeah. Margaret Atwood came to speak to our genetics department because of her MaddAdam-

Deseree Probasco: I'm literally going to die. I am going to be

Bethany Smith: Yeah

Sophie White: So jealous.

Bethany Smith: So

Deseree Probasco: Cool.

Bethany Smith: So she was speaking about her MaddAdam Trilogy, which is a genetics themed series of books and about genetic manipulation. And she's like, " My job to speak to all of you scientists, because we have CRISPR on campus and we have all of these big things was like my goal as a writer is to think through the things that you might ethically have to think about one day and to think through the consequences of what those things are so that you can see how those play out." She says that she was describing how her whole family is scientists and that that was really important for her to show that thought process. And it was a very impactful speech to hear her talk about it. And it reminds me of, because I am also a big Trekkie, grew up in a big Trekkie family and thinking about that idea, I love that people have invented things because Star Trek thought of them.That's what's inspired them to do it.

Or even reading books, there are books that predict the internet before we had an idea of what the internet really was and thinking about what those things are. If I think about Ender's Game has this whole thing about student laptops and devices on their desks and how they interact with them and how they talk with them. And it was in the early 1980s and I talked to my students and they're just like, how did they know the internet was going to exist and that it would going to be looked like that. And it's that whole chicken and egg thing. Does it look this way because this person envisioned it this way or is it the other way around? How does that come in? And I think that's another really great point about how liberal arts and humanities and reading in particular, which I'm very passionate about, I think are so important for imagination and empathy in this technical world.

Deseree Probasco: A hundred percent. I just finished reading Cosmos. So Carl Sagan, I had read it a long time ago and then my husband and I are doing a book club and so I've been assigning him these books. I'm like his English teacher. I'm like, " Here, read these books. "And there's a very interesting segment in Cosmos where he describes that science wasn't always science. Science was imagination at some point.

Bethany Smith: And magic.

Deseree Probasco: It was magic. It was absolutely magic. As Jason was saying is until you could quantify something, until you could put something concretely on paper, science didn't exist. It was, how did he describe it? We figured a few things out and then we said, and then a divine being did this part and then we figured a few more things out. So all the things that were unexplainable were sort of assigned to a deity and then we figured a few of those things out and then we just go to the next gap that we can't explain and then that's where magic lives and that's sort of where that imagination and curiosity lives until we can quantify it. And it's interesting because you have this argument that like, oh, well your science kills imagination, but it really doesn't. It sort of perpetuates imagination because there are always gaps to fill.

There's always gaps in knowledge and curiosity is just the fruition that you feel when you don't know something and you want to know.

Bethany Smith: Yeah. I think science kills imagination and as somebody that's a former educator working with that because we've sometimes taught it that way. You had to know how your hypothesis was going to end up before you could do your science experiment and do your thing. There wasn't room in a lot of the standards for curiosity or failure in a way that true science should have.

Deseree Probasco: But now we know in tech that that's just user acceptance testing. You just have to know what the user's going to get and they have to go ... Yeah.

Bethany Smith: And then just roll an update in two weeks and we'll be fine.

Deseree Probasco: Exactly. And that's really all it is. It's just we just update every millennia, we update what our knowledge is. And it's really interesting. So what is Sagan's philosophy is humans are the way that the universe understands itself. And I love that idea that tech and humanities really aren't separate. They just have different languages and you just have to figure out how to translate between the two languages and one would not exist without other.

Jason Gulya: And that's the project of the liberal arts, right? I was spending some time this morning and trying to figure out what defines the liberal arts. And what I kind of came up with was that we refuse to be defined, right move around. So when I did my dissertation, I did my dissertation on 18th century British allegory. And so I went and I said," Well, what am I going to need to do to figure out this thing?" I read literature obviously, but I had to go into a deep dive into history, a deep dive into theology, I had to do a deep dive into science. I had to go and I had to move all these different things and the rule for me was go wherever you needed to go to figure out blank, what I was trying to do. And so for me, that's like what the liberal arts does.

The fact that we look at these different fields and we put them in contact with each other and try to figure out how they connect, where they connect, where they don't connect. I think that's a lot of what the project is. And I think that the big thing here, and I was thinking about this with Deseree with your example of Margaret Atwood, that so much of this comes to translation. How do we translate that value for our students versus society action and basically front load intentionality and say," This is why I'm asking you to read this 200 page book instead of popping it into ChatGPT and getting an AI generated summary, right? This is why I'm asking you to do that. "And I think we need to really, really push that because what we're really doing a lot of the times we're saying you could do something in five minutes or you could spend the next five days reading that book and we have to show the value of that.

And I think that on top of that, we have this system that is very product focused, that students are very much interested in how do you create the product? Usually it's a paper, it might be a presentation. It's all about that thing that you create. And so what ends up happening is that we lose the process, but the process is where the learning happens. I mean, for a long time, even when I was teaching just conventional papers, the paper was sort of important, but what I really cared about was what they learned as they went and created and so I think that we have to do some work in translating the value process, translating the value of the liberal arts in general to a bigger audience, whether it's just our students or society more broadly. I think that's something we just need to do consistently.

Bethany Smith: Your process driven is one of the number one recommendations I have with faculty when it comes to AI, that it's all about the process and having your students showcase their process, walk it through. I mean, I never thought that a 50% of a grade should be a final paper anyway, philosophically didn't do that. But now there's an even better reason why you should have them go through, turn things in as part of the process, reflection that goes with that, peer review that goes with that. All of these things that I've always thought were really good strong teaching things are things that in the age of AI, that's what we're encouraging more faculty to kind of do when they're rethinking their assignments because all they want to do is AI proof their assignments. And so it's like, okay, not possible. Let's talk about all the other ways that we can show you as part of that learning process.

But I completely agree. I think the process is so important. And I also think that students reflecting on that process at this stage or the feedback that I get from somebody or what am I going to do with this? Did I take it? Did I not take it? Those decisions and thinking about those decisions that thinking about thinking, that metacognition is just going to be really, really powerful.

Deseree Probasco: Oh, I totally agree. We can't ignore it. I mean, it's here. AI is here. And I think the educators that are most successful, especially in English or writing intensive things is not to ignore it, is to have your students interrogate it. Argue with the AI. That's what it's for. It's a tool. It doesn't have feelings. Ask it a question and then argue that question. I mean, I remember being handed back a million papers with a big, so what? Who cares? Is this right? And it didn't matter whether the statement was actually right or not. It was the challenge of prove to me that it's right. And so the fact is that we can use AI as students. I have teenage kids. I have a daughter that just graduated from college and we try to find creative ways that were inside of her parameters to use the AI as a tool.

Okay. Well, have the AI grade your paper. Argue back with it. Argue back, well, I made my point. Here is the resource, here's the source, here is my thoughts. And the AI's thoughts do not have to trump your thoughts. And I think that in this modern age that we have to help students understand that their brain ... We understand that the brain is trained by challenge and the AI removes a lot of the challenge. So you have to reintroduce the challenge. It's one thing to use a tool, but in order to get really good at the tool like kicking soccer goals or hitting a baseball or riding a horse or doing cartwheels or whatever, you have to practice it. You have to actually analog do the motions over and over and over again. And I think that we kind of go away from, because we're used to this pipeline and because we're used to sort of fast tracking and students want things fast tracked or the institution wants things fast tracked that we forget.

What Jason was talking about, we sort of forget that it is the repetition. It's the analog, it's the tactile, it's doing that thing over and over again.

Sophie White: I feel like this argument, we've been talking lately about the value of higher ed in general.That came out a lot in our horizon report that was recently released. And for me, this argument we're talking about in the liberal arts vein right now, but it expands to all of higher ed. When there's a credentialing program where you can do some kind of eight-week bootcamp and get a credential as opposed to a four-year degree, there is a very real argument to be made of what's the point. But I think what we're talking about is this curiosity and these skills and how lasting they are is really why we're so valuable as higher ed, that we are able to teach students how to adapt in this world that's changing so quickly. So I'm curious, Jason, I'll direct this one to you, but I'm trying to think about how we communicate this to students.

I'm thinking back to my own time as an undergraduate. I can remember a specific argument I had with a friend who was a physics major and he went on to get a physics PhD at MIT. He is a very smart guy in the STEM field. I remember him saying, "Why are you an English major? What are you learning from this? " And I don't think I could articulate it that well, but I knew intrinsically that what I was learning was helpful, but I could not communicate that. And I'm also thinking about from a privileged perspective, if you have a family who is spending so much money on college, we know there's a huge price tag on higher education in the US. There are funding challenges everywhere. What do we say to this student and their family who says, "Well, what kind of job can you get afterward?

What is my return on investment of this degree?" when we know there is on there but we can't articulate it well. How are you talking to your students about this now?

Jason Gulya: Yeah. And I don't know if I have a firm answer. I'm experimenting with it. I'm trying to figure out with my students how we can bring that to the forefront. One of the things that I often do with my students is I call things out. I bring things into the class and we work through them together. So in my literature class, one of the things I did last week was I showed students a email that ... So Kerra AI is an AI program that was created by an undergraduate student at Notre Dame and they sent out an email to 10,000 Notre Dame students that basically said, "College is not for learning. That is not why we're here. The classes don't matter. What matters is the degree and the network. That is it. " And so it sent out to 10,000 or so Notre Dame students. It got a thousand signups very, very quickly.

And so I printed it out and I brought it to my students and I said, "Let's talk about this. " And what I tried to do is I tried to work them through exactly that sort of self-explication. Why are you here? What are you getting out of it? Because I think one of the best things we can do is to, and it doesn't have to be with that as an example, but find some way to get students to just try to articulate it. I think one of the reasons it's so hard to talk about it is that we're asked in that high pressure moment, right? Someone says, "Well, are you in? I'm going to graduate and go into $150,000 job. What are you going to have to show for it? " And that's the first place where we're asked to grapple with that and that's really hard.

So I think part of it is constantly giving students a chance to articulate it, try again, give it another go and doing it pretty consistently because I think that's going to how students start to see the value and also how I get a sense of how I can help them see that value. So that's kind of where I am in terms of bringing things out to light like that, really using them to spark those conversations. I think a lot of it is just learning again and trying again and again again to articulate. And I think that's going to be how we move in that direction together.

Bethany Smith: And I kind of think it's important for every faculty member and every instructor to be very transparent about what they're doing in their class and showing objectives mean something, right? I know we feel sometimes that they don't, but showing students the number of students that we talk to about AI, because I'm really passionate about discussion forums and online courses and they were like, "Oh, I'd never use AI in my class." But of course I use it for discussion forums because those don't count because they're talking about the papers, really good. I get that, but discussion forums are just busy work, right? They're just like the thing that we have to do that nobody likes to do. And I'm like, "No." I think that there's ... So having faculty using frameworks that say, "Hey, this week we're doing this, this, and this, and this is why I want you to read this article because it connects to this.

I want you to do this activity because it connects to this. " Showcasing that it's not like I'm trying to fill up the nine hours to meet the requirement for this three hour course. It's really about these activities are learning activities that will help you to be able to do this objective, to be able to meet the course objectives, to be able to meet this final thing that I want you to be able to do because I think so many students come to us full of busy work that they've had to do in their lives because there's been so much of focus on seat time and now all of a sudden they're required to do so much work outside of a classroom in a way that they haven't really thought about being really productive before. And even just like what we're talking about with like, why am I having you read a science fiction book in a technology class? Talking about those things, I think we don't translate that well to our students.

Jason Gulya: And I think too, we can shift that approach depending on the context. Early on we might say, "Here's the why, here's the why, here's the why," and model it for them, give them that as a scaffolding and then gradually give them more and more agency over that. "Here's something, you tell me why. Why do you think we are doing that? "And you can even go so far as doing a role playing scenario, saying," We're reading blank. Imagine you want to go into coding and you want to create a video game. How will that apply?" So sort of like modeling how to do that sort of work, which for me, I was never taught how to do that. And so I'm a big believer in gradual release when we give students these scaffolds and we gradually give them more and more ability to, they can find the why because that's part of it.

That's part of why, well, why I think so many of us love teaching, we have a why in the background whether we're articulating it or not. And so I ask my students, even if it's just a guess, why do you think this is valuable, this is something to work on, this is something we're doing. And I think that the process of doing that is really valuable even if they're not creating a great explanation. What matters is that they're searching for that explanation. Right.

Bethany Smith: They're doing that thinking about thinking of metacognition, right? They're doing that aspect of it. They're putting in the work that becomes so critical to learn.

Deseree Probasco: They're learning about discourse. I love it. I think it's such an excellent point. I don't teach any classes right now, but in the term of that sort of translation for tech, I have a lot of people that work for me and they toggle switches and they look at networks and they do data and analytics and they do a lot of things that seem very concrete and have an answer. And so when they are faced with something that does not have a concrete answer, that's where they need some support. They need support. And I think students are the same. They are undeveloped and so they need that support to understand that there's not always going to be an answer and sometimes you create the answer and the answer is not one singular answer. And that is probably the best thing that I learned throughout my eight years of English literature training is that anything that I can argue well is the answer.

I never had a professor come back and say, "This is wrong." I mean, they would say, "I would not have written this," but that was not a wrong answer. It is whatever you can argue well is the answer. And so when we translate that, when I have a group of analysts and they're like, "We don't know how to fill out our performance evaluations because we don't know how we impact student success." Well, let's think about how you impact student success. Let's look at the whole giant picture of everything that you would do as a student and where do you fit? Where does your skills and where your skillsets plug into that? And the same thing as trying to teach your students, yes, you want to become a mechanical engineer. Well, how does that better the world? Or how do you translate those things or how do you become curious or become imaginative or be innovative in that field when there's not a set answer?

How do you go outside of those set answers? And the training that we give them so specific to be able to do that thing very well that we sometimes forget to build in the, well, how do you make that thing better? You can do the thing really well, but how do you make it different? How do you change it? How do you adapt it? How do you become adaptable to that? And I think those humanity skills, which give you a lot of latitude, they give you a lot of latitude to think freely about things and add to discourse because that is the biggest thing. Your freshman professors in your English class are like, "You have to add to the discourse. You can't copy someone else's discourse. You have to have your own thoughts. They don't have to be original thoughts. They don't have to be groundbreaking thoughts, but they have to be your thoughts." And so it's the idea of we have these students who grow up connected to everything.

I did not grow up connected to everything. I hand wrote notes. We only had computers in a lab. We did not have access to the internet or note-taking devices or whatever. If I had have a pencil and a piece of paper and if I forgot to write it down, I did not study it for the test. And so we have to think about they're connected all the time and everything comes really easy for them and they think that there's no original thought. Everything's been said. How many of us in the English field are going, "I don't have anything original to say. Everyone has already said the thing that I wanted to say." And then you have to power through that. And so with our students now in these really short and truncated pathways, we don't give them the latitude to sort of power through that.

I am adding to the discourse. I personally can add something to my career path or whatever. And it's such an interesting thought whenever we're onboarding fresh out of college students into our organization and they're like, "Tell me what to do. " And I was like, "You tell me what you're going to do. Tell me. "

Jason Gulya: Oh, sorry, go ahead. I didn't want to cut you off. Go ahead.

Jenay Robert: Oh, I think I was at ... Oh, go ahead, Jason.

Jason Gulya: You go ahead.

Jenay Robert: All right, let's do this. Since we only have five minutes left, I thought it might be fun to end off on returning to our original question, which was why do humanity skills matter in the age of AI? And I've heard so many good ideas from all of you. What would be the one word response that you would give in response to that question? And remember, you don't have to encompass all the ideas in one word. We did just have an hour conversation and the viewers and listeners will hear it, but what's one thing you'll take away and you hope that our audience takes away as why humanity skills matter in the age of AI?

Bethany Smith: So I was going to say one thing. I would've said empathy before I came here. That was what I feel strongly about. But now after our discussion, I really think imagination is where I would go.

Jenay Robert: I heard that too. Yeah.

Jason Gulya: I'm going to go with humanity. Okay. I'm not going to give any clarification.

Bethany Smith: No context. I love it. I love it.

Jason Gulya: No context.

Bethany Smith: Don't forget the human.

Deseree Probasco: Yeah, that's right. Human in the loop. I will have to piggyback off imagination. I was going to say curiosity. So that ephemeral I want to learn sort of drive that we have when we're kids that we should retain when we're adults.

Jenay Robert: Love that. Sophie?

Sophie White: Oh, I didn't know I was answering this so I haven't been thinking.

Jenay Robert: Oh! On the spot.

Sophie White: Curiosity. But this one I feel like maybe encapsulates all of them, but I think sustainability in terms of these skills are helpful into the future and sustaining humanity, sustaining curiosity, sustaining imagination. And Jenay, I appreciate that you're a researcher in the room to bring us back to, what does this mean? Let's do some research on this.

Jenay Robert: Let's go back to the research question. Yeah. Well, which I think everyone did an amazing job of answering the question throughout, but it's always nice to sort of reflect a little bit. Yeah. And I agree, I think with this imagination thread that multiple people have brought up over the course of the whole hour, that might just be because I live in Central Florida, so I'm near Disney World and I just think of imagination all the time. But yeah, I think that's one of the big take homes from this conversation for me.

Sophie White: Great. Same here. Well, thank you all. I feel like we were all so energetic about this topic, so I appreciate all of the energy and ideas and curiosity that you all brought to this. I think this is such an important thought about why higher ed matters, why the humanities matter, why students should study these things. And then also why as professionals, we should keep honing our own humanities skills so that we can better show up in the world and for our institutions. So thank you all so much for the time today.