← Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.
01:03:07
What’s really driving the humanities crisis in higher education? As enrollment and reading decline, I asked Jennifer Frey, a professor of philosophy, what it was like to run a liberal arts program that was gutted. I wanted to know whether she thinks the age of A.I. could bring back the kind of education she says is fundamental to human formation.
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- [00:00]
Sam
This wildfire season, Smokey Bear has a reminder for all of us.
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Jennifer Frey
Only you can prevent wildfires.
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Sam
For more than 80 years, he's taught us how to prevent unwanted wildfires through his tips, like using the Drown Stir, Drown Feel method for putting out campfires. Every responsible action makes a difference. Learn wildfire prevention tips@smokeybear.com brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council.
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Jennifer Frey
So what you hear people saying now? Well, because AI Is changing the workforce, we now need the humanities for these soft skills that are now incredibly important.
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Sam
I may have said that to myself, contemplating my own children's future.
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Jennifer Frey
Yes, yes, this is exactly the wrong case.
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Sam
Okay, Jennifer Frey, welcome to interesting times.
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Jennifer Frey
Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
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Sam
So I am, like you, I think, a book person. And I feel like for basically, if not my entire life, at least my entire adult life, I have been living in the shadow of the decline of all that I hold dear in terms of novels, poetry, philosophy, essays, history. Right. Literacy is going down. Fewer young people read books every year. And the story of the academic humanities is basically a story of declining enrollment and disappearing jobs. And now comes AI maybe as the final destroyer, burying Plato and Aristotle in a wave of slope, or maybe, maybe as a weird kind of savior, creating a world where suddenly having a broad understanding of history and human nature becomes important again. And I have you here. You're a liberal arts evangelist who built a college humanities program that was briefly, quite successful. And we're going to talk about the decline of the humanities. Maybe if we can be optimistic about their potential rebirth and maybe just about the career prospects for our kids.
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Jennifer Frey
That's a lot.
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Sam
That's a lot. It's a lot. Well, you know, we've got a little bit of time.
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Jennifer Frey
Let's get to it.
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Sam
But I'm going to start by playing the part of a skeptic. And I'm going to try and give you a little bit of a hard time about the vocation that you've chosen. So suppose I didn't have any kind of primal ancestral attachment to literature or the arts. Suppose I'm just a technically competent person who wants my kids to learn useful skills and be employable in 21st century America. Why should I care if my kids study the humanities? What's in it for them?
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Jennifer Frey
Yeah, that's a fair and very important question. And your skepticism is obviously very widely shared. It was shared by my own parents and also by my husband's parents. So I married A philosopher and a professor. And when both of us went to explain to our parents what we were going to study in college, it was not met so warmly or with affection. So I think the skepticism is fair. I don't know that it's so much a focus on books, although I share your view that the purported death of literacy is a tragedy. But if we go back to the beginning of philosophy and Plato, I mean, Socrates of course, didn't write anything and was very skeptical. And it wasn't a book culture, right, because we didn't have the printing press yet. So certainly I think humane learning predates our book culture. So for me it's less about books, even though I'm a bookworm. But I think the deeper question is about what I would call liberal learning or a kind of learning that is the cultivation of the higher capacities in a person. And the cultivation of those capacities, as it were, for its own sake, because it is good and important to cultivate them because we're human, right? The question, the teleological question of like, what is it for? Is a very deep and important question for us humans. And so I think, you know, my concern is that we have lost our ability to understand the intrinsic value of engaging in that sort of self cultivation, right? The Greeks would call it paideia, the Germans would call it Bildung. I might just call it liberal education or liberal learning. But it, but it's all the same sort of thing. It's about what is it to contribute to and live in a flourishing human society.
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Sam
Is this a moral understanding? Because there are people who will say Germany in the early 20th century was one of the most cultured societies in human history in terms of its engagement with philosophy, literature, the arts, music. And yet none of that obviously prevented highly cultivated Germans from participating in atrocities. So where's the proof, I guess, that people who go through this process gain some kind of greater moral awareness?
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Jennifer Frey
Well, I mean, I think the proof is always in the student, right? But you also have to recognize that there is an inimitable element of human freedom and education. So when we talk about teaching and learning, right, the learning has to come from the student. And you know, a good teacher who has a good pedagogy is always going to be especially attuned to the student and what the student needs and how to draw out of the student the best that that student can achieve. But you cannot trust me, and any educator will tell you this, you cannot force the student. You know, you can incentivize. We do that through grades and credentials. But ultimately they have to want that sort of self cultivation. Now, when you look at a culture, right, and you want to ask yourself, okay, well, like, how did we go from, you know, Weimar Germany to Nazism? Obviously education is going to be a part of that, but it's not in any way going to be the whole of it. But I, I don't buy the Nazism as a proof that higher learning doesn't work. I mean, the point of fact is that the Nazis were very much against higher education in many ways and wanted to constrain and control it.
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Sam
They had some very specific ideas, let's say. But what about the idea that this kind of learning has to defend the value of engagement for its own sake? Like, even if it doesn't make someone a better person, would you say that there is a inherent value in being able to read and engage with Plato's Republic or being able to listen to and experience, you know, Handel or Bach or anyone else who's considered a great composer that just is a thing unto itself?
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Jennifer Frey
Absolutely right.
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Sam
So even if the person having that experience remains a bad person in their, like, everyday interactions, they have still gained something valuable.
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Jennifer Frey
Absolutely, yes. I mean, you know, we're all deeply imperfect, Ross, in a variety of ways. And I think the Nazism case is especially interesting, and here I'll just be maximally provocative because I think that it's true. Something that was happening in higher education at this period of time was eugenics. So if you look at institutions of higher education in the United States and in the uk, what you will find is that eugenics was very popular and accepted almost universally. Now I think that's a very dangerous ideology. But that ideology is coming out of our fanciest institutions. And of course, you can find it in Supreme Court cases and everything else. Now that toxic ideology makes its way into Nazi ideology. The Nazis were not like, unique in having this eugenic worldview. And institutions of higher education were not somehow inoculated from that either.
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Sam
But then isn't there an argument, a critique of the humanities argument, that says that intellectual mentality and the eugenic mentality could fit together pretty naturally? It's like, okay, to be human is to appreciate Bach and Plato, and only our smartest university students do that, so only they're fully human. And so on down the eugenicist argument. So tell me why that's wrong and why are the humanities actually for everyone rather than being a kind of rarefied pursuit?
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Jennifer Frey
Yeah, thank you for asking that. So I just think, as a matter of fact, we have A lot of evidence that. Well, I think I, you know, I tend to talk about liberal arts education rather than the humanities, but in the best case, they're sort of the same expression. You know, this idea that a higher sort of learning and a kind of self cultivation is truly liberating, that it helps people have a deeper sense of purpose and meaning in their life and also helps them to cultivate a space of genuine leisure. Right. That is something where there's a significant track record, whether we're talking about Frederick Douglass or Anna Julia Cooper or W.E.B. du Bois, or whether we're talking about entire movements of the British working class. Right. Like really taking control of their education by whatever means. We have this kind of great cloud of witnesses who can attest to the fact that this has completely transformed their lives, not just materially or not principally for material gains, but spiritually.
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Sam
Can you say a little bit more about the liberal arts and the British working class? Because I think people are accustomed to the idea that you can pluck a poor person or an enslaved person who then turns out to be a genius of some kind, that that sort of the individual talent exists. But it's really striking to read about the role that the liberal arts played in these large scale working class communities in the past.
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Jennifer Frey
No, I mean, it's an absolutely fascinating history and I don't know why people don't talk about it more. And not just in the British working class, but certainly there have also been similar movements in the United States. What you see, I think really clearly is that this need that I'm talking about, the need for self reflection, self knowledge, understanding, cultivating the life of the mind, this is like a basic human need. And it really connects to me personally because I did not grow up in a home filled with books. I did not have intellectual parents. My father drove a forklift in a paper factory and my mother was an elementary school teacher. Um, but they were, you know, good parents who took me to the library. Um, I just started reading on my own. I think I was four or something. And I really loved it. And so they would sort of find ways to make that more available to me. Um, and I had this like, incredibly robust interior life as a kid. I mean, just like, like off the charts.
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Sam
But what about your parents? Do you think that your parents were missing something that had been denied them in their own childhoods that you were just fortunate to achieve?
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Jennifer Frey
You know, certainly in my mother's case, you know, she left the house at 16. She came from like a not great home situation that she needed to get out of. And so I think there was a practical imperative for her to make money and get settled down and things like that. But it's also true that over time, my parents had two children who were pretty intellectual. My brother's also a philosophy PhD. Somehow, miraculously, my parents sent two intellectual Catholics into the world. And it's not like they were never reading. It's just that, you know, a lot of professors come from families of professors. I am not one of them. And so this kind of history, it connects to me because, you know, my background is more working class and my experience of kind of deepening my own interior life without having any sense that that was like a project you engaged in. It was just something that I did and that I later came to see as the most essential thing that I ever did. I think it's incredibly precious and we should do all we can to try to incentivize and encourage and protect that.
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Sam
But doing all we can, at least at this moment, it seems to me, requires making some claims that Americans in the early 21st century are pretty uncomfortable making, such as about the idea that, just for instance, that an encounter with Shakespeare is better than an encounter with, you know, ya fiction, or that an encounter with the Odyssey is better, however good it turns out to be, than an encounter with Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the Odyssey. And the skeptic says, look, you know, it's a free country. There's a marketplace of books and ideas. And back in the old days when all you had was a Bible and Shakespeare, maybe people felt like they had to read those things, but now they read what they want to read. And maybe it doesn't rise to your standards, but you have to make a case, right? To me, the philistine skeptic, that Shakespeare is better than John Grisham. Is Shakespeare better than John Grisham?
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Jennifer Frey
Yes.
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Sam
Why?
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Jennifer Frey
I haven't read John Grisham since high school, though. I haven't.
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Sam
I haven't read John Grisham in a while. Um, I'm just plucking. I'm dating myself as a mid-40s person, that. That it's better, that Shakespeare is better. Give me a difference. What's 1, 1, 1 qualifying difference that lets us tell that we should be reading Hamlet before or distinct from reading the Firm or A Time to Kill, Because Hamlet.
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Jennifer Frey
Wow, the Firm. Sorry, I just actually read that.
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Sam
Taking us back to the 1990s, I
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Jennifer Frey
also read a lot of trash, just FYI. Read like all of VC Andrews, for example. Anyway, so I would Say that. I mean, let's just look at the language. First of all, Shakespeare's language is justly globally famous, right? As just a very high form of English. And what he's doing with language is to this day, like so astonishing. It's really. It somehow never loses its power to surprise and sort of invite you to think about what language can do. I mean, I think the best writers do this. And also, you know, Shakespeare really challenges you. And I enjoyed the fern, just to be clear, it was entertaining, but there's a difference between being amused and entertained. Entertained and I think really experiencing maybe what we would call great art or high art. Because great art or high art really calls you, I think, to those transcendentals, right? Truth, beauty and goodness. And it calls you to them in a way that asks you to ascend to something that is clearly, like demanding and that takes sort of more deep modes of reflection. Right. If you're gonna read like a, like a Dan Brown novel, it's very difficult to imagine having sustained conversations about Dan Brown novels, like over years. It's quite easy to imagine doing that with Shakespeare. I do that. Like, it's just so rich. And so I think we should not shy away from saying that there is a kind of depth in great art that demands our attention in a way that is absent in Dan Brown.
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Sam
But. So that is a defensive hierarchy, right? Which is in some way undemocratic. And there's a.
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Jennifer Frey
No, I disagree with that. I'm sorry.
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Sam
Say more.
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Jennifer Frey
Sorry. Yeah, okay. I mean, yeah, of course there's a hierarchy of goods, but I just think that if you have no sense of higher. Then it becomes very difficult to talk about higher education generally whenever we're talking about goods in life, right? There are trade offs and we need to balance things. But as a matter of fact, the sort of like, let's just take kind of great books education. You'll find great books education in community colleges. You find great books education still completely outside of institutions of higher education. You find great books education in certain high schools. I mean, I think these things don't necessarily. They don't have to be luxury goods. And I think it's a choice that we make politically to say that they are. And we can debate that choice, but that's just a choice that we have because it's. I mean, this isn't like a science lab. I don't have a microscope that costs $30,000. It's really just, you need some books. And they're pretty cheaply available these days.
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Sam
And it can be done, but you also don't have. You also don't have a way of definitively measuring because you don't have a microscope, and proving this is valuable. This is not. In the humanities, you have to rely on claims that I think make sense to a lot of people but are not the most rigorous scientific claims. And if we were sitting here and we invited Plato into the conversation, that would be wild. He might say, listen to this. You know, listen to this woman who wants. Who thinks that, like, an encounter with greatness and truth can be mediated by a playwright. Playwrights, this should all be banished from the ideal city. Right? But all that I'm suggesting is that if we're trying to figure out what this thing is and who should be exposed to it, even the classics themselves do not agree. Right. This is itself contested within the very tradition you're defending, for sure.
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Jennifer Frey
So I just finished teaching a class called the History of Liberal Education in the university, and we started with Plato and we ended basically with Weber. And there's all kinds of disagreements or different formulations. You know, some people, like Cicero, are more invested in sort of the civic aspect of humane learning, where it's enabling
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Sam
you to participate fully in politics.
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Jennifer Frey
Oh, yeah, right. And he is. He is writing explicitly in this kind of republican ideal. And. But I think there's a remarkable kind of red thread running through all of that, which is this idea that there is something really essential and important not just to individuals, but to culture and society in having something that is more than an education that we would call professional and that they would call servile. You know, Aristotle, interestingly. And this always, like, really strikes students because they just think it's so wild. Like, it's just so unbelievably wild. But Aristotle says the goal of education is leisure. And we forget that the Greek word, the root for school is leisure. And Aristotle says, look, you know, we wage war for peace. Like, we work for leisure, but leisure is not idleness or amusement. And it's definitely not just resting up so you can get back to work. It is that space that we need to set aside to cultivate the highest parts of us. And so I just think there is this red thread there. And you're right, there's lots of disagreement, right? Nobody who's ever had any encounter with any kind of great books learning experience comes away thinking like, oh, yeah, like the West. That was like, one thing, just one, one idea.
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Sam
Plato to NATO, Right? So, okay, so we're not in a world where we educate for leisure. I Think that's fair to say, but we should know. But whatever has happened in American education and American higher education in the last three or four decades has seemed pretty unremittingly hostile to that mentality and that you can see this in just the numbers of people studying the liberal arts. You can see it in, you know, lots of colleges are gonna close over the next 30 years, but it's liberal arts colleges that are sort of on the chopping block first. And then there's this, I think, political and cultural polarization that's eaten away at the humanities from both sides, with the left critiquing the very idea of a canon, that it's all just dead white male privilege. The right saying, these liberal arts academics, they're all just irredeemably woke and they should be defunded in favor of more useful subjects. Right? Ye to talk about those forces. But I want you to tell me about your own experience first before we talk about the left and the right. So tell me why you left the University of South Carolina and moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2023, was it? Yeah. Tell me about what you did.
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Jennifer Frey
Yeah, it was kind of wild from beginning to end, really. So if you look at sort of the decline of the humanities, you see spikes. So there was the Great Recession, and then there was Covid.
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Sam
These are downward spikes.
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Jennifer Frey
Oh, yeah. And the trends obviously predate Covid. At the University of Tulsa, for example, they had this initiative which thankfully failed, but it was called True Commitment. And the idea was basically to take the College of Arts and Sciences and kind of consolidate it and make TU a sort of explicit trade school. And so the philosophy department was shuttered along with many other departments and programs. And I was complaining loudly about all of these things. And at some point in 2021, I was dissing the University of Tulsa for true Commitment. And I got this reply on Twitter. Actually, it was May 2021, I got this reply, and the reply said, hey, Jen, like, we're just not that bad. And I was like, who's that? And it was the president of the University of Tulsa, which was slightly the
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Sam
magic of social media in action.
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Jennifer Frey
And I just sort of sheepishly said, you know, did I say anything wrong? And he said, no, it's not that you said something wrong. He was like, but you should come visit us. Like, we're not that bad. And so actually, I did go visit them. Subsequently, I went and I gave a talk on the university and the liberal arts. And that university president said, oh, I want to start an honors college. Like a mini St. John's you know, I want it to be, like, great books.
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Sam
I wanted to be St. John's just for listeners who don't know, there's two colleges, one in Annapolis and one in Santa Fe, that are explicitly great books. Undergraduate programs.
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Jennifer Frey
Yes, Great books all the way. And I was like, oh, well, that's. Yeah, you should totally do that. That would be amazing. I would definitely be cheering you on. And he was like, well, would you want to run it? And I said, well, I'll think about it. And then, obviously, I agreed to do it. But I wasn't in any way looking for an administrative job. I was not looking to move to Oklahoma. I was, you know, recently tenured and very happy where I was and very invested in my own projects. But once I was given this, what I thought would surely be an unrepeatable opportunity to sort of put my ideas into practice, which, as a philosopher is, like, exciting, but also, like, very dangerous. You know, like, being good at thinking and, like, doing. It's not necessarily the same skill.
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Sam
So the philosopher queen is an important figure in.
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Jennifer Frey
Yes. So after contemplating the forms, I decided to move to Tulsa and try to realize this thing. I thought it would work, but I really had no idea. I mean, it was kind of terrifying, but it did. It did work. It really attracted a lot of students and donors and foundations, and we were just incredibly excited about everything that was happening. And I think.
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Sam
And just for background, Tulsa is a private university.
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Jennifer Frey
Right.
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Sam
It's not a state school.
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Jennifer Frey
Right. It's sort of the private liberal arts school in Oklahoma.
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Sam
Right. And so how many students does Tulsa have?
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Jennifer Frey
A little less than 3,000.
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Sam
I think it's undergrad or.
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Jennifer Frey
Yeah, I think if you throw in grad students, it's more like 4,000.
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Sam
Okay. And so how many kids, roughly, did you end up enrolling in the honors college?
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Jennifer Frey
So every year, we were somewhere between 26 to 28% of incoming freshmen.
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Sam
Okay.
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Jennifer Frey
Yeah.
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Sam
And what did the. Just very quickly, what did the overall program look like?
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Jennifer Frey
So you'd be signing up first and foremost for the core. So that's four semesters of great books. You can think, like, From Homer to Hannah or rent. So first seminar is the three ancient cities, Athens, Rome, Jerusalem. And, you know, you read Plato and Aristotle and Greek Tragedy and some Greek history. And then you do the same for the Romans. And then, of course, you read some of the Bible, and then you go into long Middle Ages, and that's basically Augustine to the Reformation. So we start with the Confessions, and we go all the way into Luther and Calvin. And then your second year in the core, it's the birth of modernity. So there's where you.
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Sam
That's a big year.
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Jennifer Frey
Yeah.
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Sam
A lot going on.
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Jennifer Frey
Yeah, no, it's a fantastic course. So that's basically Machiavelli to Mary Shelley. And then the last sequence is 19th and 20th century. And that starts with De Tocqueville. And then actually it ends. The professor gets sort of like a free choice about where it ends. So I always say Homer to Hannah Rent. Cause I think Hannah Rent is the last required reading. So like St. John's it's a set curriculum. And that was very important that everyone be reading the same books because it was also a residential experience. And like we didn't force you to live in the honors dor. Most students wanted to. And so I think we had like sort of three pillars. When I would address incoming freshmen as dean of Honors, the first thing that I would remind them is that they are going to die. And that recognition of this was the first step towards wisdom. So strong mission and vision. Right. So we are not here to prepare you for a job. We are here to prepare you for life and for being a human being. Secondly, community. So it was very. It's very important to me because I think that it's true that liberal learning take place in a community. And then the third thing is we took very seriously, in a way that very few people are willing to do, the connection between an education for freedom and the need to cultivate character. Right. That helps you to be free. We had these sort of virtues of liberal learning that we would name and talk about explicitly. And they were things like humility and civility and fortitude. And then also curiously old fashioned ones like studiousness, where that has nothing to do with hitting the books studios. He tosses sort of like cultivated attention. So sort of like training that desire to know so that it's focused on the good stuff as opposed to like looking at TikTok for five hours a day or you know.
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Sam
Yeah, hypothetically.
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Jennifer Frey
Hypothetically.
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Sam
I've never done that. Just say something about the kind of students that you got. This is a plain state university, like who is signing up for this program at Tulsa?
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Jennifer Frey
You know, we got students from all over the country, first and foremost, although obviously a healthy number from the states that circle around Oklahoma, so like Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, et cetera. And they were mostly STEM students.
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Sam
So you were not their major?
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Jennifer Frey
No, absolutely not.
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Sam
So this was a program that they did parallel to their major.
- [32:36]
Jennifer Frey
Yeah. I mean, I think this was like a sort of stroke of genius on the part of the president, who sort of saw an honors college as a really great way to recenter liberal learning within general education. Because the point is to give that general education, that liberal foundation upon which you can specialize, which is, you know, how the medieval university is structured. Everybody goes through the arts curriculum before they can study theology or medicine or canon law.
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Sam
Right. The real sciences. But most gen ed requirements in American higher education are not the most super rigorous things. Right. So I'm just curious how students who were studying mechanical engineering balanced that pretty rigorous course of study with the kind of intense, communal Socratic style that you were trying to build.
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Jennifer Frey
Yeah, I mean, they loved it. I mean, is the short answer. You know, they would always say things like, none of my other classes are like this, you know, in a positive
- [33:46]
Sam
way, to be clear.
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Jennifer Frey
I mean, just sort of like, you kind of never know what's gonna happen in an honors class, which I think is part of the excitement. But there's a whole community of students outside the seminar who are reading the same text. And so you have this shared basis of learning. But it's amazing to see the fruits that arise from that because they just go back to the dorm and they're all kind of wondering, like, what was going on in Plato's Symposium. Because it's a really strange text in so many ways. And, you know, they would. They would spontaneously put on their own. Their own symposium. I think the secret sauce in honors really wasn't the specific text that we chose. It was just sort of the community and the mission and the integration of those two things and the fact that even though it was really hard, it was where their friends were, right? So if you look at the motto for honors, it was wisdom, virtue, friendship, which is like a very Aristotelian triad. But the friendship thing was really key because, you know, for Aristotle, the context in which wisdom is sought and verse, who has cultivated and exercised, is friendship.
- [35:13]
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Jennifer Frey
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Jennifer Frey
Stand still. Not a chance.
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Jennifer Frey
Keep going further. Capella University what can't you do? Visit capella.edu to learn more.
- [36:58]
Sam
So, you know, you're obviously a biased observer. You clearly loved and appreciated the thing you put together. Yes, not everyone loved and appreciated it. And it does not exist in the same way any. Anymore. So what. What happened?
- [37:14]
Jennifer Frey
So, I mean, that's an interesting and complicated story and I've certainly talked about it elsewhere. But, you know, the short version is that the president who recruited me and hired me and his provost left. So there was regime change and pretty much as soon as a new provost was installed, I was just called in and said, you know, you're out and the honors would be restructured. And I obviously wanted to know why that would be the case. And I was just told that they needed to save money. I mean, eventually they just found other people to do it.
- [38:00]
Sam
So the program still exists?
- [38:02]
Jennifer Frey
It still exists.
- [38:03]
Sam
You're not in charge of it.
- [38:05]
Jennifer Frey
Correct.
- [38:06]
Sam
And just give me a theory of the case as to.
- [38:13]
Jennifer Frey
I mean, it would be speculative and so I hesitate to.
- [38:20]
Sam
Well, let's put it this way. I feel like I would like to pull some general lessons about the challenges that the humanities face from your experience. It's possible that your experience doesn't offer those lessons and it was just. Just a matter of. You were, let's say, a favorite of an outgoing president and A new regime didn't want to keep you around. And it was all sort of just that kind of campus politics or faculty politics or. It's possible that this experience tells us something about why it's hard to build and sustain the humanities on college campuses. So I think it's probably the second to some degree I do.
- [39:07]
Jennifer Frey
I agree as well with the caveat that obviously, like, it's speculative on my part because I was given really zero, zero indication of what was really behind it. And I've not been privy to those conversations myself. But with that caveat, I would say that we can learn a few things. One is that student interest and demand simply does not matter. And it's important to see that because I wrote an op ed for the New York Times.
- [39:44]
Sam
For the New York Times, people can read it.
- [39:47]
Jennifer Frey
And my op ed just basically said, hey, you know, there's the standard story that students can't do this and they don't want to do it. And I'm here to tell you that I think that story is false. And I think we should talk about the fact that it can be the case that students want to do this, even though it's hard and very challenging and it's totally voluntary, they don't have to do this. And it can still be disinvested. I mean, so one clear implication was that our budget was reduced by 92% upon my leaving and the faculty that I have hired are gone. In fact, literally everyone I hired is gone.
- [40:34]
Sam
So it's like there has to be some, what ideological reason not to do it? What is the reason not to do it if students are interested in it?
- [40:42]
Jennifer Frey
That's the million dollar question.
- [40:44]
Sam
But we need theories as to why. You don't have to just be totally specific about Tulsa, but I would like you to generalize a little bit, based on your experience, about the kind of headwinds, and I mean political headwinds especially, that a project like yours faces. So I'll give you two theories and ask. Well, I guess I'll try and ask you to react to both of them. Right. So here's one theory would be that fundamentally the academy has adopted a kind of left wing perspective on the humanities that basically says greatness. Everything that we were talking about in the beginning of this conversation is just sort of a political construct associated with white male Western hegemony. And that the point of the humanities, to the extent there is a point, is to deconstruct and challenge and critique that. And that's what we're doing. That's what the humanities is supposed to do. Right. And therefore a program that says no, long before you do that, you have to have this direct encounter with ancient Greeks and medieval Christians and so on. That's just reactionary. Right. And that doesn't have a place in the modern academy. Is there part of the left that's just sort of an enemy of the humanities as you understand it?
- [42:18]
Jennifer Frey
Okay. So I think that there are definitely people within humanistic disciplines that understand what they do very explicitly as a political project. And it is a kind of radical left wing sort of thing. That's just a fact, no one can deny it. And so do those people love great books? Typically, no. And so that's like a real thing. I think though an actually bigger problem is the over professionalization and hyper specialization of the humanities. So the biggest resistance that I found wasn't necessarily ideological, although that existed. But it was this idea that you would teach us at syllabus. It was just like, no, I don't do that. And so part of that was that's just not my expertise. Right. I teach from a place of expertise and great books is like the opposite of that. Am I a classicist? No. Can I teach Homer? Yes. Because the point isn't to create scholarship on Homer. That's not why we're there. If you wanted to do that, you should definitely major in classics where you will be trained to create scholarship. But we are there to have an encounter with that text in a way that is more than just a book club sort of thing. It's serious. But its goal is not sort of what Weber would call Wissenschaft. Right.
- [43:46]
Sam
Its goal is what is a Wissenschaft? Please?
- [43:50]
Jennifer Frey
Scholarship. Yes. Thank you. And so there was that sort of resistance, Right. Like I'm a literature scholar, I can't teach philosophy or history and it's just not my thing.
- [44:02]
Sam
And also I'm a literature scholar and I have a very narrow ambit in literature where I'm here to teach Victorian fictions in a, you know, anti imperial or late imperial. You know, I'm in a very narrow frame of what teaching literature means.
- [44:19]
Jennifer Frey
Exactly. And so that is something that I want us to have a conversation about. Sort of the way that specialization and really it's a conversation about the way the institutional structure of the research university has disadvantaged the humanities in particular. Because if expertise, if scientific expertise is the gold standard of knowledge, which I think you can make a very strong case that that is the gold standard within the academy, the humanities really lose out. Right. Because we're forced into a mold that maybe isn't the best for our flourishing. And so I think that's part of it. Yes, the hyperpolarization of all of our institutions has hurt the humanities, but it's also obviously hurt the university generally. If you look at statistics of trust in institutions of higher education, they're catastrophically low. I think it is simply a fact that one thing that has contributed to the loss of social trust is the very strong perception that our institutions have been ideologically captured. And so we need to reflect in a serious way, in a way that Yale, for example, is currently reflecting. I think the Yale Report is a significant and interesting and an important document. I think most of its recommendations are good ones, ones that need to be made. So I'm very happy to talk about higher education reform, but I think it needs to be done in ways that really kind of strive for the common good and less just about owning your enemies or dominating your enemies or winning the culture wars. That's not going to save the humanities. It's going to just be another nail in the coffin.
- [46:24]
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- [47:53]
Sam
NEWS let's just talk about a different kind of ideological pressure though, from the right.
- [47:59]
Jennifer Frey
Sure.
- [48:00]
Sam
It seems that there's a way in which the right in America and American culture has sort of two faces when it comes to the humanities. There's the face that wants to be in the business of defending and saving what you're doing against both sort of woke academia and hyper professionalization. Right. Like there's a side of conservatism that just people I've been in rooms with and spent years knowing and talking to that just nods along with everything that you say. Then there's also a really important side of conservatism that is just totally bought into a sort of professional model of education that is skeptical of anything that seems like useless, useless degrees. The stereotype of the reckless graduate student who got the degree in puppetry and wants Joe Biden to bail them out. Right. Is very powerful on the American right. I'm curious how that, like you were in a red state, you know, you were at a school for a long time, red states, probably with an unusual number of Republican donors relative, maybe not relative to other liberal arts schools. Like which side of conservatism is more powerful? Is conservatism a friend of the liberal arts or an enemy?
- [49:27]
Jennifer Frey
I mean, what an interesting question.
- [49:29]
Sam
Yeah, it's a small question.
- [49:30]
Jennifer Frey
I think I don't need to tell you that conservatives are at war with one another about what conservatism really is right now. That also affects conservatism and education in all of its forms. But I also think that there are disagreements about how to achieve higher education reform. But you know, to your specific question about utility versus Leisure.
- [49:59]
Sam
Yeah, that's question one. How much utilitarian hostility do you feel like you get from people on the right?
- [50:08]
Jennifer Frey
I would say that you find this on the left and the right. So let us remember that it was the Obama administration that rolled out the scorecard of majors. So this is really this kind of utilitarian push is, I believe, bipartisan. Now what you do see right now is red states like Utah and Indiana and Ohio and Texas passing legislation that disinvests or shuts down departments that don't have sufficient enrollment. And that has definitely hurt some, well, quite a few humanities departments. But it's also brought down physics and math. So it's a very blunt instrument. But in all of those cases, what you will find is a rationale that says we need workforce alignment and we need to have sort of like work ready graduates. So there is that. And I think if you.
- [51:15]
Sam
But again, but you set your program up at Tulsa, it seems like in an effort to actually kind of try and preempt that kind of critique, to say, look, we can have liberal arts education that works in parallel with pre professional education. You don't have to major in classics to get some kind of classical encounter. Correct.
- [51:35]
Jennifer Frey
And I still, I mean, I still fundamentally believe that, and I'm dedicated to that. Yeah, right.
- [51:41]
Sam
But that didn't save you.
- [51:43]
Jennifer Frey
Yeah, yeah.
- [51:44]
Sam
All right. What about the question that you just mentioned of this argument on the right about how you get sort of effective change in higher ed? Right. So prior guests on this program have included. Yes, I've watched them all recently. Former. You don't have to say that you've got, you've got more important texts to encounter. But former U.S. senator Ben Sasse, who was at the University of Florida and worked on a program that was set up by the Republican state government of Florida, designed not just to be about the liberal arts, but in part to sort of have a strong liberal arts tradition within a public university. I've also interviewed a while ago now, Christopher Ruffo. Right. It's a leading right wing activist who just takes the straightforward view that conservatives inside academia are totally deluded if they think they're gonna get anywhere without Republican state legislatures or Donald Trump coming in and saying to schools you have to teach great books or Western civilization and so on. So Sass is a gentle voice, Rufo is a harsher voice, but they're both figures who see, I think, a pretty substantial role for politics in making a place for the humanities in higher ed.
- [53:12]
Jennifer Frey
Yeah.
- [53:14]
Sam
What's your take on that view?
- [53:17]
Jennifer Frey
I mean, I think that when we're talking about public institutions, it's obviously political and it's very difficult to avoid this reality. However, I will say a few things. There was a large scale disinvestment from states after 2008, and so the case is a little bit weaker.
- [53:42]
Sam
But just on the disinvestment front, are you suggesting basically that red state governments will maybe set up a school for civic engagement or civic thought or something that presents itself as sort of a place to preserve the humanities, but meanwhile they're cutting the humanities everywhere else?
- [54:03]
Jennifer Frey
I mean, that's a possibility.
- [54:05]
Sam
Yeah.
- [54:07]
Jennifer Frey
You know, the civic center movement, it's a relatively new movement. I definitely support it, but it's not going to save the humanities. The way that the civic centers are structured is they understand themselves as homes of disciplinary knowledge and expertise. Right. And civics like is meant to be a specific kind of expertise, and that's great. I don't, you know, the more the merrier. I don't have any. I certainly have no problem with legislators investing in Hamilton or the School of Civic Leadership and things like this. Now we can have a separate conversation about how they're being run and things like that. But a great book's education is on its face sort of simultaneously a liberal and a civic education. And so of course I support movements that seed that in our universities and give them money, but I don't think it's going to save the humanities. The only thing that might save the humanities is really getting serious and recentering undergraduate education again. And institutionally speaking, we're not set up to do that. The research university is set up to incentivize research. How do we make general education liberal again in that classical sense? That's what I'm going to be doing next in my career. I believe that we've really dropped the ball when it comes to general education in this country. Students have no sense that their education is anything other than this externalized instrumental means to an end. We have to look at how to recover that first. And honestly, we should. I'm not saying that we actually can, but like we should be able to do that in a bipartisan way. But we have to have people on both sides willing to kind of stop culture warring and find common ground. And that is something that is very difficult to do in our hyper polarized political environment. And practically speaking, you know, a concern that I have is that the civic centers will just be seen as conservative outposts then. It's like it's a missed opportunity. I mean, something that was pretty magical about what we did in Tulsa is that we did actually have a lot of viewpoint diversity and difference of experience. And that was definitely reflected in our faculty. That was important to me in hiring faculty. And we worked a lot, a whole lot explicitly on having difficult and important conversations across deep differences, differences of experience, differences of first principles, differences of visions of how to live and what's good. And I think the thing that I'm most proud about, honestly, is how wonderful that little experiment went.
- [57:29]
Sam
Except again for the fact that it ended right well. But then is is the fundamental challenge that universities see themselves as businesses. And you were making the case earlier that students want it, it can be cost effective, you can do it while students are also majoring in electrical engineering.
- [57:58]
Jennifer Frey
But we were around in the budget.
- [58:01]
Sam
But the university mindset right now, in a time where again, there's going to be fewer students, lots of universities are going to be closing might be show me how this yields the maximum number of graduates in the most remunerative jobs who then will give money to the university? It seems like even more than sort of professionalization or politics, maybe that's the mindset that, that you're up against where it's like people might tolerate you, but if you can't tell a story about how reading Aristotle leads you to get an extra promotion, that leads to more donations down the road, at best, you're going to be tolerated. You're never going to be a priority.
- [58:50]
Jennifer Frey
Well, yeah, but I mean, that's the sort of disease that I'm trying to diagnose. But again, it's bipartisan. So in the state that I currently reside in, Oklahoma, our governor recently put out two executive orders, both relating to higher education. One of them sort of effectively ends tenure at public institutions, except for OU and osu. But the other one says that all academic review needs to be done in terms of workforce readiness. We'll look at wages earned and things like this, and we'll do academic review on that basis. So that's just going to be something that's mandated. But the other interesting aspect of the executive order is that it asks the state's board of regents to investigate a 90 credit hour degree. So basically get rid of most of general education.
- [59:50]
Sam
So you get a degree that's purely, purely training.
- [59:53]
Jennifer Frey
Purely training, workforce training. Yeah, Just, just get rid of all of that other stuff, which is nonsense. And so, yeah, and it puts me in an interesting position because I myself am critical of general education. I think that we've dropped the ball, we've failed there. But I would ask people to reform that rather than get rid of it.
- [60:15]
Sam
Yeah. Last question. Yes, Small question. What does AI do to any of this?
- [60:20]
Jennifer Frey
Yeah, yeah, AI. I don't know. I go back and forth about AI and thinking that it's the apocalypse and then also noticing that it can't even do an index of my book. So I think I'll worry more about AI when it can index my book. But I will say I think that AI is obviously going to change every single institution in this country, including obviously institutions of higher education. And it will do things to the labor market that I think are gonna be pretty wild. I mean, there's a huge sign outside the Times building that says stop hiring humans. You see it right when you come out of the pool. I'm sure you've noticed.
- [61:05]
Sam
I've noticed. There's also the Jude, Jude Law. There's a billboard that is using Jude Law to sell legal AI. Yes, like that's the one, for some reason that sticks in my mind. But yes, stop hiring humans.
- [61:17]
Jennifer Frey
Yeah, stop hiring humans. Now why stop hiring humans? Well, the obvious reason is because to err is human, right? We make mistakes, and obviously AI makes mistakes too. But I think that the problem of sort of labor displacement leads people to make the wrong case for the humanities in an age of AI. So what you hear people saying now, and these are tech industry leaders, but they're also deans at prominent schools that say, well, because AI is changing the workforce in such and such a way, we now need the humanities for these soft skills that are now incredibly important.
- [62:01]
Sam
I may have said that to myself, contemplating my own children's future.
- [62:05]
Jennifer Frey
Yes, yes, this is exactly the wrong case to make for the humanities because it denatures and destroys the thing that it's supposed to be promoting. Right? If, if again, liberal arts education, humanities education is just workforce training. You're not actually going to be able to fully benefit from the thing that you've instrumentalized. So I would say rather, just in
- [62:35]
Sam
defense though, of my own, like, don't.
- [62:37]
Jennifer Frey
Just don't do it, Ross.
- [62:38]
Sam
My own parental lizard brain, right. Work is a real part of human affairs, right. It's not some area where you cease to be human when you're at your job or relating to your co workers or handling your producers who may be concerned that an interview has gone on too long, hypothetically, right?
- [62:57]
Jennifer Frey
Yes.
- [62:58]
Sam
It is a zone of real and important human interaction. And if you say one thing that the humanities do is prepare you to exist in a corporate environment at a technology company, at a startup, at the New York Times. You aren't saying something that's completely different from Cicero saying the humanities prepare you to be a Roman citizen. Right. I'm just saying there's a form of the humanities prepare you to work that I think is compatible with your understanding of the humanities.
- [63:33]
Jennifer Frey
Well, I mean, what I would rather say. Let me circle back to that in a minute. But what I would rather say is that AI is good for the humanities because it clarifies in an especially forceful way what is at stake if we stop being invested in this project of cultivating our own humanity and we give ourselves over to the robots and the machines, right? Because what the machines can't really do well, and that, quite frankly, I think we don't want them to do well, is to think about what our ends and our goals are like. We don't want them to define for us, right. What we're aiming for and the humanities, when done well, right, Real humane learning is an investigation into what the goal of human society is. And so I think that what AI really clarifies is the absolutely fundamental existential cultural need for humane learning. And because it makes it so clear that if we give up our thinking to machines, what will be left, right, we will just be a bundle of desires, right, that are coming from outside, and we will be a kind of slave to them. We will not really in any meaningful sense be free. I don't care what the political system is. If you haven't done that work of deep humane reflection and self cultivation, you are not really engaged in that project of becoming a person. And so when I talk to students about using AI in the class, I don't talk about how I'm going to punish them because one, it's like, impossible to prove and two, like, I'm not actually interested in punishing them. What I remind them of, in very clear terms, is that if they outsource their thinking, they're simply outsourcing their own humanity. And, like, you can do that, but I think you'll regret it because now is the time given to you to really invest. And God help us, robots are taking over in areas that, you know, we might want to really question whether they should take over, even if it does mean accepting more error. If we can't think about our own humanity. I just think we're so on the road to dystopia and a result that none of us is going to like or appreciate. And I think that artificial intelligence just makes that very clear. And in that respect, I'm grateful for it.
- [66:16]
Sam
I don't think there could be a better place to end. So. Jennifer Frey, thank you so much for joining me.
- [66:21]
Jennifer Frey
Yeah, thanks for having me, Sam.
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Jennifer Frey
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