While the glitches and weaknesses of ChatGPT have been pointed out, these presumably will be corrected over time as the AI technology improves and its data set enlarges. There has also been discussion about cybersecurity and the economic and political implications that AI poses for societies. But most of the public discourse so far has been about higher education.

Unlike most academics who are skeptical, suspicious, or resigned about ChatGPT, I am hopeful, believing that AI could offer a genuine path for liberal education to revitalize itself in the university. Keep in mind I am not arguing from some techno-utopian perspective where transhumanism is the answer to everything—I also have reservations and concerns about the ubiquitous adoption of technology in our contemporary lives. But I do think technologies like ChatGPT could return American higher education to the fundamental questions of human identity, meaning, and flourishing that have been pushed aside the past fifty years for economic credentialing.

The Reactions So Far

For those not familiar with AI programs like ChatGPT, they are chatbots—computer programs to simulate conversations with humans—that predict what words and phrases should come next. As AI, they continually learn as they gather more data from human interaction and from texts like articles, books, and websites. The GPT-3 model, for example, was “trained” on a text set that included 8 million documents and over 10 billion words. While there are other AI chatbot programs, ChatGPT received the most attention when its third prototype launched this past November. That’s mainly because its technology convincingly mimicked human writing, though the business also had a superb marketing strategy that resulted in an estimated $29 billion valuation of OpenAI, ChatGPTS’s parent company.

The most common response from the academy has been resignation mixed with suspicion. Faculty know there is nothing they can do to stop AI from entering the academy. All that is left is to adjust and accommodate in the hope professors can retire before human teaching is entirely replaced. Recommendations include in-class writing examinations, assigning content behind a paywall, adopting show-and-tell exercises, and employing AI to teach students how to write better. While these suggestions are useful in identifying what constitutes human writing, they are only stop-gap measures before AI passes the Turing Test.

Strangely, one response to ChatGPT that is notably absent is an eagerness to discuss how AI can help students with disabilities in their writing. One would think that ChatGPT could help students with disabilities to learn how to write better or do their writing assignments. AI could possibly open the doors of higher education to a new set of students who may have difficulty completing writing assignments, for example, those with dyslexia or dysgraphia. In this sense, AI could expand access to higher education in ways that were previously not thought possible.

A second response has been skepticism. AI will not replace human writing because AI does not interact directly with the world and, therefore, cannot represent it as humans do. As John O. McGinnis puts it, “ChatGPT is just connected to the words people have written about the world, not the world itself. It floats on the vast sea of verbiage we have created and is not connected directly to the actual sea.” Practically, this is evident when, after entering a writing prompt in AI, professors evaluate them as acceptable in structure (for example, English’s composition five-paragraph essay) but point out factual mistakes or raise aesthetic questions about its writing, like its “voice” or its inability to engage the reader emotionally. According to this group, ChatGPT is a good facsimile of freshman undergraduate writing, but it is only a facsimile.

I suspect, however, that these obstacles will be overcome in time as the technology in AI improves. Its neural network will eventually process data more efficiently, and its learning capacity will improve as it gathers more data from additional texts and human interactions. It also raises the philosophical, Philip K. Dick type of question of what constitutes human writing if an AI can do it as well as people (a question better pursued another time). Regarding AI not being connected to the “actual sea” of reality, humans have been interfacing with AI for years, from purchasing airline tickets to visits to the doctor. Unfortunately for our skeptics, AI has been here for a while and is not going away.

A third response, a variation of the second, has been the belief that ChatGPT will never replace human skills like critical and creative thinking. AI may replace human writing, but not human thinking itself. But this may not be true, as evidenced by AI programs like AlphaGo, which has defeated the best Go players in the world, a feat that required both critical and creative thinking. If AI can think critically and creatively, there is no reason it couldn’t be designed to educate students in these skills in the near future.

In fact, ChatGPT’s ability to convincingly mimic human writing is actually a reflection of critical and creative thinking. Like numerical manipulation, writing is essentially about solving problems, whether they are about politics, policy, philosophy, aesthetics, or something else. What makes ChatGPT so unnerving to so many is that writing is perceived as a uniquely human endeavor, unlike numerical calculations. But both tasks—whether solving interpolation problems or writing philosophical essays—are fundamentally the same. They are solving problems—to think critically and creatively. AI programs can now do this both numerically and linguistically, albeit the latter imperfectly at the moment. With the advent of AI, the rationale that only humans can teach students critical and creative thinking has a limited shelf life.

Perhaps more controversially, it is not clear that universities actually teach critical thinking to their students. With every college course now required to articulate its student learning outcomes (SLOs)—outcomes that have to be quantified and measured—in order to demonstrate students are learning, one wonders, are these SLOs really telling us anything of value? Now that assessment drives academic content in American universities, the result is a flat account of critical thinking, where one number represents excellence and another number mediocrity. As one essay’s subheading about ChatGPT states, “In a world where students are taught to write like robots, it’s no surprise that a robot can write for them.”

Embrace the Future

The conversation about ChatGPT so far has mainly focused on the effects it will have on the humanities. Putting aside the ideological nature of the humanities and the problems that assessment poses to student learning, I think that humanities professors will be relatively better off compared to their faculty peers when AI is fully adopted by the university. The problem won’t be the mass unemployment of English, history, philosophy, classics, or theology professors (this already is a problem); rather, the problem will be the mass unemployment of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) and pre-professional faculty. AI presents a greater threat to faculty teaching courses like Fixed Income Securities, Health Assessment, and Biochemistry than to faculty helping students understand and enjoy the texts of Homer, Aquinas, and Nietzsche.

In other words, the subjects taught by STEM and pre-professional faculty appear to be most likely to be replaced by AI in the future. These subjects require numerical critical thinking in making assessments about populations—something that AI does as well as, if not better, than humans now. For example, some AI programs have better diagnostic accuracy than human doctors, and last year an AI’s stock picks generated a higher price return than the S&P 500. Some are currently discussing whether AI will replace engineers, nurses, and accountants in the near future. The question that parents should ask their college-aged children now is not what they are going to do with that English degree, but rather, will there even be a job available when their civil engineer, nursing, or accounting major graduates?

Even more depressing for STEM and pre-professional faculty is the rise of alternative credentialing programs. Businesses like Google, Bank of America, GM, IBM, and Tesla have removed the college degree requirement for any positions in their companies. In some states, one can become a teacher at a private school without having an education degree. As AI improves its numerical and linguistic critical thinking skills, companies are likely to incorporate AI into their pre-screening and training of employees. There is also great potential for growth in alternative credential agencies, which can certify students in certain skills, and much will likely be available free online. All these trends challenge the university’s primary status as a credentialer and signaler to employers who can think and write.

This, in turn, raises the question of why parents should shell out tens of thousands of dollars every year for their children to attend college when they can learn free online, get accredited elsewhere cheaper and quicker, or be trained by their employer. For the elite universities—the Harvards, the Yales, the Stanfords—this is not likely to be an issue because the opportunity to network with children of the elite will outweigh any financial cost or lack of learning. But for those institutions in the mid-and low-tier, such as public regional comprehensive schools, AI poses an existential threat, especially if their funding model is based on STEM and pre-professional students. Granted, this process may take a few generations or a few years, but at some point in the future, the rationale for universities to teach STEM and pre-professional students will be weakened, if not outright disappear.

If the news about AI is bad for schools that rely on their STEM and pre-professional programs, it could be good for those universities that have a clearly defined mission and identity rooted in liberal education. If liberal education is to study something for its own sake in order for us to reflect upon who we are and what our purpose in life is, then this can be best accomplished by studying the humanities. By reading and discussing literature, history, philosophy, and other traditions of the humanities, students learn the inherent value of liberal education—to be free from the demands of necessity and call for utility in order to be connected to what authentically makes one a human being.

With AI, the point of university education might shift. It is no longer about the acquisition of economic or critical skills but about becoming a free and reflective human being. One enrolls in college because it is primarily understood as an intrinsic good for human flourishing. If you want a job, go learn AI on the Internet (although conceivably, AI could be incorporated as part of a liberal education). Strangely, we may, in the future, return to Plato’s Academy and Bologna University, where higher education was about contemplative learning, allowing students to reflect upon the fundamental and existential questions of identity, meaning, and purpose in their lives.

One potential concern is whether liberal education would be reserved only for the elite—really reflecting Plato’s Academy, where only the upper class could participate—while most of the populace is being trained by or replaced by AI. This is particularly problematic in a democratic society where inequality is currently a prominent topic in the public discourse. But it is also possible that a widely accessible liberal education may be available, as evident in the rise of the classical school movement, which places the humanities at the heart of its curriculum, or looking at past attempts like Robert Hutchins’ and Mortimer Adler’s Great Books program which believed liberal education was necessary for the survival of democracy.

Since the turn of the century, concerns about the place and relevance of liberal education in the American university have continued unabated. ChatGPT appears to put another nail in the coffin of liberal education; however, a closer look suggests it could be the key to liberal education’s resurrection. With employment demands, assessment requirements, and skill training gone, what is left for the university to do in the age of AI? To study things for their own sake—and only liberal education can provide that.

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Yes, education should prepare our children to be successful in the future.  Yet, if these voices got their way, American children would be hindered and handicapped in ways these voices don’t realize because they so despise sports they fail to see the central role they play in society.  They see that such programs are not found in Asian societies, which seem to have greater success in creating very studious math students than in the US. But sports is more than a game, especially to those playing on the field; it is about teaching spatial reasoning and how to work collectively yet doing different jobs and how all of these things, although separate when they cooperate, can win together. Also, they learn how to fail and not let failure define them. Hence, we see where there are strong traditions of team sports in schools, we can be assured that the needed skills of learning how to build and form social capital are being learned and built–through firsthand experience.

America inherited its sporting culture from our British colonial past and the public school culture of the 18th and 19th centuries.  This tradition of school athletics is why there is a strong civic society and social capital in the Anglo-American societies compared to those of Continental Europe.  Most Continental European societies only offer sporting education beyond basic gymnastics for those attending Athletic training schools to be professional athletes.  These students go to special schools and are usually separated from other students.

During my two decades living and teaching in post-communist Central Europe, I noticed students here lacked the ability to work and cooperate that I, as a student, was surrounded by every day. I noticed that unless the University officially organizes things, students have little gumption to start a group or an association. While such things occur, it is less often than one would experience in the United States. These students generally lack the kind of ties and bonds to their schools that students would have in America.   Yes, they might have a strong attachment to their class or group of fellow students within their class, but not to the school itself.  Alumni networks are wholly absent here. But so, too, are sporting teams. We can say other variables are at play–but we ought not dismiss this.

Plato’s Republic teaches us that education of the young is not only about the mind; it needs also to be about the body as well.  Modern society tends to dismiss much of Plato’s advice on education, asserting that such advice was needed for the world of Greek warring cities, not for large commercial nation-states.  Commerce, not war, is what will employ our citizens.  But here again, this misses the point.  Sport education is not just about the building of the body of the students, it teaches them how to live and work within a society of people who are not your kin and family.  It helps them to learn how to form bonds with them and work together with them for a common interest.  It teaches them teamwork and how to work together. Thus, it offers a social force to help balance the power of individualism in the American setting.

Again when one looks as the effect of sports engagement on youth while at school, the data makes a strong case that shows such engagement in sports by youth leads to more civic engagement.  Mark Lopez and Kimberlee Moore, for the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), University of Maryland, published in 2006 a Fact Sheet (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED495209) that shows the connection between youth involvement in sports and greater civic engagement.  The summary of their report says:

One reason to offer sports in school is to teach youth the values, skills, and habits that will make them more active, engaged, and responsible citizens. Past evidence on the civic effects of sports is mixed but points to some potential positive civic effects. This evidence comes from recent data from the 2002 National Youth Survey of Civic Engagement to identify some important positive relationships. Generally, the researchers found that on some dimensions of civic engagement, such as voting, volunteering, and news attentiveness, youth who are involved in sports report higher average levels of civic engagement than their counterparts who do not participate in sports. Researchers found that young people aged 18 to 25 who were involved in sports during high school were more likely than non-sports participants to have volunteered in the community (32 percent vs. 21 percent); registered to vote (58 percent vs. 40 percent); voted (44 percent vs. 33 percent in 2000); and followed the news closely (41 percent vs. 26 percent). Results suggest but do not prove that sports have positive civic effects on people.

Echoing Lopez and Moore, Ian E. Ritz, in a 2006 report on “Playing for an Active Community: Sports Participation and Civic Engagement,” found that participation in youth sports indeed leads to civic engagement later in life. Ritz finds that “there still is an indirect positive correlation between team sports participation and volunteering as a young adult.  [The data] indicates that sports participation as an adolescent significantly accounts for sports participation as a young adult, which in turn influences volunteering.”  One must remember what Tocqueville said in Democracy in America about the role of American volunteering to form associations, which is the basis upon which American civic society rests.

Besides teaching the youth to cooperate, student athletics also gives them a place where future leaders are forged. It is clearly on the playing field one sees the difference between a leader and a boss, as leadership is not only present at the level of the coach but also on the field. Such school sports team leaders usually are chosen among the players (by the players). The process teaches leadership lessons—what can and doesn’t work that they never could learn in the classroom. Thus, student athletics provides lessons about leadership and teamwork and, in doing so, builds habits they will need when they enter society. When one looks at who is active and engaged in society after graduation, we see those who were engaged in student life, especially in student athletics, tend to step up and take the lead in life–be it in business, society, or politics.

Thus, other social associations also arise from the team-building that occurs because of athletics.  Yes, some activities directly correspond with the various sporting activities, such as Cheerleading, Band, and the various forms of student organizations to deal with events surrounding the execution of these sporting events. Yet, in this social interaction and forming environment, associations arise outside of those directed to sports as well. It is the learning ground that Americans learn about civil society, and how it works firsthand.  They learn how to form new associations with their peers.  Even limited compulsory team sports in Physical Education time at school give children important lessons in practical areas of teamwork and occasions to develop leadership skills as well that many of them will benefit from possessing in their future as Adults.

The critics of sports in public education fail to appreciate the opportunities for youth to learn skills they will need to survive as free and independent adults in a democratic society.  They learn not only how to win but also how to fail and not be destroyed by it.  Thus, they come to learn that life is not a “zero-sum” game and that by cooperating with others, they can learn to achieve victory in ways that the mere individual could not.

By working together in teams, young people learn the value of technical reasoning and the importance of building prudence and character.  For all the criticism of student athletics, there are abuses. Some have placed winning and money in positions of primary importance. We must remember the benefits it provides to those playing and those who observe the activities.

Echoing what Robert Putnam pointed out in his 2005 book Bowling Alone about the connection between the decline of people forming bowling groups and other such groups and the decline of social capital, the 2014 study by the Sports Industry Association points to a “significant decline in the number of children participating in sports across the United States” (https://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2015/08/10/In-Depth/Lead.aspx). The cuts to sports programs in American urban cities are one of the factors causing what is viewed as a general social decline. Yet, urban areas alone are not seeing this decline in participation by the young. If the trend of declining participation in youth sports continues, it presents Americans with an ominous warning about a further decline in American civic culture.

Given how poorly our American education system deals with Civics education, I would argue any attempt to reduce or cut spending for one of the few things that gives real-life civics lessons to American students is to imperil the future of our society.  Such a move will condemn future generations of Americans to the curses of radical individualism and social isolation while limiting the tools needed to overcome the forces driving us in that direction. We did not address the implications of this problem for public health and well-being issues.  So, instead of opposing funding for sports education, there should be a greater investment, both public and private, to provide opportunities for engagement in organized team sports.

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