Confusion of Ends

No, we will not save the humanities by pretending they can help us stop cyberattacks

According to Daniel Diermeier, chancellor of Vanderbilt University, the liberal arts are in need of a firmware update. We now live in the “digital age,” the “innovation age”; computer technology has altered the position of humanity in the cosmos such that “we can no longer deem as educated a student who knows their history, literature and a second language, but doesn’t know anything about statistics, data analytics or the fundamentals of computing.” A new kind of liberal education is necessary, he argues in a new article, one that leaves behind “outdated models” in favor of “bold new directions” that “do justice to this age of convergence” between “humanistic inquiry” and technology: he cites as examples of such boldness anthropologists using AI to scan satellite imagery for hidden archaeological sites and historians using it to digitally preserve fragile documents. Or consider his example of undergraduates working with a humanities professor to conduct “original research on the cyberattacks known as phishing”: “Applying the lens of humanistic inquiry while working with cybersecurity experts,” he writes, “the team gained insights into what makes people open emails and click links they shouldn’t.”

It's a weird and frustrating article, but it reveals something about why a college education has become, for many people, such a weird and frustrating experience. What, after all, is this “humanistic insight” that university researchers and undergraduates should be wedding to this all-important “power of technology”? What actually is this “liberal arts education” that has “been called into question by the digital age”? Most basically, nowhere in the piece does Diermeier elaborate the content of the “liberal arts” or how they differ from the non-liberal, servile arts from which they have traditionally been distinguished; the closest we get are a few references to “skills,” “disciplines,” and “concepts,” all of which are to be understood as instrumental for goals such as “creating societal value” or “informing how we design, interrogate and translate AI tools.” (One wonders if whoever at the Peabody College of Education and Human Development sent out an AI-generated email blast about last year’s Michigan State University mass shooting had applied a humanistic lens in their implementation of this bold new technology.)

Schools like Vanderbilt are, of course, in a tough spot. As the “Ivy Plus” continues to swallow up more of the elite higher ed market share—not only nationally, but globally—second-tier elite universities (a group that includes Tulane, where I study and teach) are struggling to adjust. Elite enough to charge some of the highest tuition in America, but not elite enough to attract students from genuinely aristocratic backgrounds, these universities have over the past few decades become white-collar vocational schools, populated largely by ambitious students looking to retain their membership in the upper middle class. “One letter to a newly admitted Vanderbilt University engineering student,” the New York Times reported in April, “showed an all-in price—room, board, personal expenses, a high-octane laptop—of $98,426.” (For what it’s worth, Vanderbilt Engineering ranks somewhere in the 40s nationally, just 10 or so slots above the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.) With the tuition investment growing ever higher and the return becoming ever less certain, students and parents alike are growing anxious about the product: “the first (prescreened) question that Vanderbilt’s chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, answered on family weekend this past fall was about whether Vanderbilt should invest even more in career advising in the wake of the school’s five-spot decline in the annual U.S. News rankings.” (I didn’t watch the full Q&A, but I wonder if anyone asked about Vandy’s $55 million payout for their participation in a tuition price fixing scheme.)

So the leader of a school in such a position can perhaps be forgiven for mealy-mouthed platitudes. Still, the platitudes should not be treated as anything other than platitudes. Philosophers, scientists, and poets have always striven to untangle the riddle of the cosmos; the “bold new direction” envisioned here, however, is stopping cyberattacks. That is to say, it’s about institutional grants and white-collar jobs. Statistics, data analytics, and the fundamentals of computing are necessary for a certain kind of employment in the contemporary white-collar labor market. If there were piles of money to be made in starfish milking, you could expect the Vanderbilt press office to urge students to consider the mystery of the sea.

There is nothing wrong, of course, in suggesting that students of the liberal arts should learn more things. I am a graduate of St. John’s College, one of the rare schools in America that understands mathematics and natural sciences to be a part of what we call the liberal arts; I take the enterprise of liberal education to be fundamentally about opening up the soul to a life in pursuit of knowledge—of both the world and oneself alike—and purging the opinions and passions that frustrate this pursuit. A liberally educated person should, then, welcome all opportunities to learn anything, including computer science, statistics, cybernetics, whatever. I was lucky to be invited into such an education at a small, provincial state school in southern Indiana—which, as I argue here, is likely a better place to receive such an education today than at elite universities (of all tiers) focused on “global impact.”

Aristotle taught us over two thousand years ago that when it comes to human things, the that-for-the-sake-of which is determinative. Putting “philosophical concepts” to use for the sake of technology is just as much “doing philosophy” as using a computer to type this essay is computer science. As regards the ends of education, when the chips are down, one cannot serve two masters: your goal can either be the cultivation of the learner or “impact.” The two ends should not be confused—especially for someone obligated, ostensibly at least, to preserve the dignity of both.

Further Materials:

“What It’s Like to Get a PhD in Literature,” by

Isaac Kolding

“It is this juxtaposition—sacred and profane, utopian and banal-dystopian, free and limited—that really defines what it feels like to get a literature PhD.”

“The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” by Rose Horowitch

“High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text. […] A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.”

“Schooling Myself,” by Elisa Gonzalez

“Few teachers are as honest as the philosophy professor who, during my first semester at Yale, silenced a room of ambitious eighteen-year-olds by saying, ‘You are being indoctrinated. Yale is indoctrination. Education is indoctrination. So you should choose what you are being indoctrinated with.’”