Artificial Intelligence (AI) is supposed to be the thing that sets humans free. Free to do what? What matters. To be more creative—and stop focusing on that boring tedium that makes up 99% of our knowledge-based jobs. It's a promise I used to proclaim about my own work using classical programming to automate things like removing unintended linebreaks in the middle of paragraphs when copying text from a poorly formatted PDF into HTML. Ain't nobody got time for hitting backspace 4,000 times per PDF.
And yet, what great spike in creativity have we seen come out of AI or AI-aided products? I tend to see more offloading—having the AI just do everything—rather than reclaiming time and space for creativity. To move past my anecdotal experience, we can take a look at what universities are doing to see what the smartest people are predicting about AI impact and creative fields like the humanities. (To be fair, the administrators of university programs may not be the smartest, but that's not my expertise to say either way...)
Consider the following tiny slice of news headlines:
- ‘Just not monetizable’: humanities programs face existential crisis at US universities
- China's Universities Cut 12,000 'Obsolete' Degrees Amid Race to Embrace AI Era (Aggregated news)
- University in talks to cut about 150 staff (University of Exeter)
It is clear to me that over the last few years, and picking up pace right now, the humanities are under attack. Universities are scrambling to cut out "redundancy" and remove "obsolete degrees." In the case of University of Exeter:
[A spokesperson for the University of Exeter's University College Union] added that although staff across the academic body were impacted, the cuts were "disproportionately concentrated in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), where 85% of all staff placed at risk of redundancy (445 out of 523 FTE) are based".
Just on the face alone, the idea of losing humanities because of AI sure feels ironic, but I think it also indicates the short-sightedness of the systems supporting higher education, including the public's perception of education and AI.
Irony of Ironies
Probably due to the huge amounts of push-back that AI is getting lately, companies market their AI-powered products as being a copilot or as something that keeps a "human in the loop." AI won't replace you, because you humans are so important. Or something like that. So we have marketing from corporations saying that humans are valuable, but colleges and universities are gutting humanities programs. It's like we're getting squeezed in the middle, and the more we're squished, the harder it is to see how we're actually that important or valued or that we even have a future to look toward.
For sure, things have been changing about the college-to-job pathway for a long time. Even when I was in college almost 20 years ago, it was clear that the days of choosing a major, getting a job based on that major, and working at that same place for 30 years was the tale of past generations. As Vincent Zhao said for the South China Morning Post, “The old path – where you study one specific major, find a perfectly matched job, and stay in it stably for a lifetime – simply does not exist any more” (Yang).
I completely agree with Zhao above. I went into the Graphic Design major expecting to become a graphic designer, couldn't find a job no matter how strong my portfolio was, and ended up a developer because everyone said, "You know HTML? That's what we need." It's not like I'm some great designer, but my experience reflects the same priorities of selecting tech over "art."
However, I think it's still missing the mark to assume that college should be setting you up for some kind of life-long track that you simply follow. That's the tension that plagues academia: what is the purpose of universities? Is it to get people into jobs? Or is it to educate and refine critical thinking skills (among other skills)?
AI muddies the waters further: Is AI supposed to augment human thinking? Or take it away? Is removing the humanities supposed to support more people now that AI fills in the gaps? Or is it removing the support beams?
More fundamentally, however, the state of the humanities and liberal arts reveals a widening conflict over the “value” of higher education – with increasingly corporatized universities favoring market-driven metrics for evaluation, and proponents of humanistic education stressing that its worth to both individuals and society at large cannot be measured that way. (Speri)
It's a very common perception to assume that because the humanities have no measurable value the way that tech, science, and business fields do, that the humanities have little to offer other than in politics or other "soft" applications. This is actually the opposite of what Marshall McLuhan argued in his essay, The Humanities in the Electronic Age, originally published in 1961. McLuhan saw the humanities as a critical path to building and improving the business world, including management. He optimistically states:
Just as business is discovering that higher and higher education is needed for the ever enlarging jobs of management, so the adult community in general has become aware of the life of learning as natural and delightful and as necessarily extended throughout adult life. (McLuhan, 16)
Not only does he continuously suggest that business benefits from the humanities (and especially the well-rounded, thoughtful leader), McLuhan goes so far as to suggest the artist is critical to the engineer and to solving problems. How ironic, indeed, that we are apparently racing to throw out the arts, social sciences, and other "soft" fields of study, just because AI can generate titles and summaries and thumbnails and video clips.
The humanist will observe, however, that no matter what period or technology is in question, the artist has always solved the new problem both for the engineer and for the human community, by his new advance models for sensibility and awareness. ... The ever new models of the artist are for the correction of the perceptual bias inflicted upon any human community by ever new technology. In the past century, indeed, we have come to rely almost wholly on art for the nutrition of fresh impulse and the alerting of hypnotized senses. No previous society ever regarded art this way. But no previous society ever underwent the successive brain-washings and hypnotic trances that ours has done from a succession of new technologies. (McLuhan, 10-11)
Instead of seeing humanities as being a part of the progress of technology, we often pit them against each other, as though art and science are oppositionally destructive. McLuhan has taught us before that the artist and their art help to reveal the invisible environment that surrounds us. The things we miss because we've become accustomed to them can be examined or seen in new light because of the arts (and social sciences). We can critique systems because of the humanities, we can ask if we're asking the right questions because of philosophy and art, we can remember our humanity even after being plugged in digitally all day because of poetry.
Even in the extremely practical sense, I can back up what McLuhan says in the workplace about how the artists help us engineers—and it's not just about type treatments and whitespace. The artists or designers or creative-thinkers help us all solve problems in collaboration. We all see different pieces to the problem and we all create something together that would be impossible otherwise.
Instead, we say things like "product designers are obsolete now" because AI can also draw pretty interfaces. Are they the right interfaces? Do they solve the problem? Impossible to know, because the people with the wisdom to determine rightness, appropriateness, and fitness are swapped for a machine that gives you a most likely answer.
Although contradictory to McLuhan's view that the arts support even the corporate model, Adam Rzepka, a professor of English at Montclair State, explains the ultimate problem of diminishing the already feeble hold of humanities in higher education:
“The humanities simply don’t fit a corporate model because they are just not monetizable in the same way the sciences or even the social sciences are,” he added. “And the deeper reason they’re coming under attack is that free thought and rigorous, free inquiry is dangerous to executive power.” (Speri)
That's the real concern. It's not that artists/humanists aren't valuable or important. It's that they're dangerous. They challenge the assumptions of man and machine. They ask the questions that businessmen don't want to ask: should we even be doing this?
If AI is the excuse for threatening and replacing the humanities, I suspect what's really going on is that the humanities have threatened AI—among other powerful systems at play right now. What does that tell us? To go where they don't want us to go. To invest in the humanities however you can: learning about them, investing in them, advocating for them. We can't directly control university decisions, but we can help remind the public why the humanities are so important.
Works Cited
McLuhan, Marshall. 1961. "The Humanities in the Electronic Age." In Marshall McLuhan Unbound, edited by Eric McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, 10–16. Gingko Press.
Speri, Alice. 2026. "‘Just not monetizable’: humanities programs face existential crisis at US universities." The Guardian, January 20, 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/20/universities-humanities-programs.
Zeltmann, Britta. 2026. "University in talks to cut about 150 staff" BBC, June 23, 2026. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2djnz3y47o
Yang, Carol. 2026. "China’s universities cut 12,000 ‘obsolete’ degrees amid race to embrace AI era." South China Morning Post, June 14, 2026. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3356913/chinas-universities-cut-12000-obsolete-degrees-amid-race-embrace-ai-era