Equal to the Condition of Freedom
Graham Burnett's refreshing spin on AI in the humanities
I’ve been restless lately about teaching and the humanities, about universities in general, and about what it means to study and learn in this disorienting age of generative AI. D. Graham Burnett’s recent New Yorker essay, “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?”—and his conversation about higher education on the Hard Fork podcast—cracked open a fissure in that restlessness: not one of collapse, but of possibility. Or maybe both. This might be a door I actually want to walk through.
The world of higher education, Burnett argues, is being overtaken by AI so fast that the rituals and assumptions built into the liberal arts are being rendered obsolete or hollow. But in that dismantling, there is potential. He doesn’t wallow in nostalgia. Instead, he urges us to reimagine what the humanities have always been at their best: spaces for grappling with value, being and freedom. He writes that he teaches in the hope of “giving shape to humans equal to the challenge of freedom.” The phrase is electric. It refuses despair. It says, if AI is shifting the ground under us, that doesn’t have to mean the humanities flatten into irrelevance or certificate-churning. It might instead force us back to the heart: what we ask of students as human beings, or as students learning to become something more.
One of Burnett’s most refreshing arguments is that the humanities have for too long followed the lead of the sciences. In the pursuit of prestige and relevance, they became research-oriented, article-producing, scientific, and data-driven rather than what they are uniquely suited to be: explorations into the human condition. History, literature, philosophy, art—these were never meant to mimic the scientific method, but to prompt and guide the growth of human beings as human beings. In other words, the humanities are not about knowledge production, but being, and about the questions that cannot be answered with data: how to live, what to do, and how to face a life that inevitably ends.
On the Hard Fork episode about education (which was interesting beyond this one interview), Burnett describes experiments already underway in his classroom. He has his students engage AI in conversation about difficult material and then edit and reflect on the results. These assignments aren’t gimmicks. They force students to see themselves through a new mirror. The work is still theirs. The challenge is not to beat the AI at reproducing facts but to recognize what it cannot do—to feel, to inhabit, to choose, to live with moral consequence. In doing so, students often learn more about their own beliefs, anxieties, and capacities than the usual essay assignment ever provokes.
This is not abstract for me. I teach English, Creative Writing, and Theatre at Yukon University. These questions are alive in my classrooms. Just yesterday I spoke with my students about the phrase “being equal to the condition of freedom.” Is this what they are studying for? Is this why the university exists? Does freedom atrophy and eventually cease if it is not exercised? I told them that the choice of using generative AI factors into this in a nuanced way: that freedom is not about prohibition but discernment. What is the point of labouring for weeks over the research, outlining, writing and revising of an essay if ChatGPT can do it all in seconds? What is the point of reading?
The answer cannot be to ban the tools and carry on as before. The answer has to be, as Burnett suggests, to reframe what we are doing in the first place: not producing knowledge, but shaping ourselves and each other. A novel, for example, is not about figuring out what happens—it’s not about the summary. If it was, the summary would be the novel and we could dispense with the rest. The novel, and so much else, is about the accumulation of meaning over time. The fact that it takes you a long time to read it, and that you have to do other things in between pages, is what makes it meaningful. To skip over all of this for a quick AI-drafted summary is certainly easier and simpler, but it’s also simply not the point.
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What does it really mean to “give shape to humans equal to the challenge of freedom”? The phrase is stirring, but who exactly gets to be shaped this way? To me it risks echoing the older language of liberal education that too often shielded itself from accountability, becoming more aspirational slogan than universal promise. Freedom in this sense can easily become the luxury of those already resourced, those who can afford the tuition and the time to cultivate it. Burnett himself gestures toward this tension when he notes that many of the police functions of academia—guarding against plagiarism, detecting cheating—are breaking down. That’s a release, but also a reckoning. What values remain when the scaffolding falls away, and who gets to decide?
And there’s the economic frame. Education has long been caught in the logic of return on investment. Parents and students still want jobs, and universities still need tuition. If the ideal of shaping people for a society built on individual liberty is to survive, it has to coexist with those pressures. Otherwise it remains what it has often been: a privilege of the few, not a project for the many.
This is where Burnett’s provocation about orality comes in. On Hard Fork he argues that we are moving past a culture of literacy and toward a culture of orality. We are indeed shifting away from long-form immersive reading toward conversation, remix, and immediate response. The machines don’t just produce text—they restructure our relationship to it. This might democratize learning: people who never trained in academic reading may now enter through dialogue and interpretation rather than plodding through dense prose. It might even restore value to oral traditions and forms of performance that the text-dominated university has historically marginalized. But it also threatens the discipline of deep reading, the capacity to sit with difficulty, to sustain attention across hundreds of pages. We risk a culture of fragments without coherence, of speed without depth.
Can the university still be the place where students learn to wrestle with being and freedom, or will that work migrate elsewhere—into new schools, workshops, or communities beyond the academy? Burnett suggests that much of this kind of formation may move outside the traditional diploma-driven system. And yet, universities can still hold this role if they have the courage to reimagine themselves. They must become less about reproducing knowledge that machines can generate or regurgitate, and more about creating the conditions where students confront the limits of what machines can do—or perhaps just the limits of their own minds. They must design assignments that push students into reflection rather than reproduction. They must remain community spaces for moral and civic formation, not just job preparation. And they must do all this while ensuring access and equity, or else the renewal will be a trick of privilege.
Perhaps, after all, the humanities will survive, but not unchanged. This survival may demand new forms of humility and generosity. Maybe education, in the university sense, will become more porous, hybrid, and collaborative with institutions outside the ivory tower. But at its core the ambition remains: to shape persons, to hold them to what freedom requires. To learn from AI—not as rivals but as mirrors—and let our human work grow sharper because of it.
I don’t want to believe that our best hope is slow irrelevance, or that only the well-resourced will continue to experience meaningful formation. I want to believe that this rupture can become a renewal. That the humanities can return to their heart, and that a university worthy of freedom—freedom for all, not only for the privileged few—is still possible. Burnett’s piece makes me think that maybe it is.
Did you enjoy this piece? What do you want to see more, or less of, in the future? Let me know!
Quote of the Week
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.”
— WB Yeats
Thoughtful information Ben that helped me understand AI a little more.