Monthly Archives: August 2025

teaching in the era of AI (thoughts for fall 2025)

Artificial Intelligence is already disrupting education, especially in the humanities and portions of the social sciences. It is part of the “toxic brew” that makes my friend Austin Sarat, an Amherst professor, say that he’s “not ready to return to the classroom” this fall.

Students can use AI to extend their learning–to pose demanding and advanced questions or to summarize bodies of material so that they save time for reading other texts closely. But they can also use AI to reduce the total amount of valuable effort that they would have otherwise committed to a course, thereby learning less from it. As Clay Shirky writes, “If the student’s preferred working methods reduce mental effort, we have to reintroduce that effort somehow.”

I think writing and reading are distinct issues.

AI can assist writers in valuable ways. It can be a thought-partner, a preliminary reader, a copy-editor, and even a drafter of routine passages. Writing for school or college–writing to learn–is a special case, because the goal is not to generate the text but to develop one’s understanding and skills. There can be no substitute for struggling mentally with this task. A student can use AI to help, but a reliable question for students to ask themselves is whether they have invested effort in the document that bears their name. If not, they can’t have learned much or anything.

To some extent, we instructors can alter incentives so that students write without relying on AI. In a course that I am co-teaching this fall, we’ll require an in-class midterm. Oral presentations and exams are worth considering. A new independent study finds that commercial tools are quite good—right now—at detecting AI-generated text.

Nevertheless, students will probably get away with learning less by relying on AI to write in college. My general philosophy is that you can lead the horse to water but not make it drink. Capable college students have always been able to cut corners to the detriment of their own learning. I did so, to some extent, long before AI. (I would sometimes read summaries in secondary sources instead of hard primary texts.) The main question is whether we can inspire and guide students who want to learn to work intensively on forming and expressing their own ideas.

Reading seems more problematic to me. Using AI to summarize texts is both more tempting and harder to monitor than using it for writing. When I open any PDF document in Chrome right now, Adobe pops up to tell me that it can summarize the file for me. ChatPGT usually does a credible job of producing notes on a text, including a whole book–and including whole books that I have written.

Once again, we can use these tools to extend learning. I sometimes use AI to summarize material that (frankly) I do not deeply respect but feel I should dip into. Although I don’t use the time that I save as well as I should, I do reserve some of it for close-reading hard texts.

The case I would make for reading is fundamentally spiritual. We are at grave risk of being caught inside our own limited heads. When we read carefully, we follow someone else’s thinking for a significant time. We are not merely notified of the authors’ main points; we learn how they think, word by word and paragraph by paragraph. We learn what counts as a persuasive point or a telling example or a provocative question for another human being.

I think that many people would concede this point if the author is a literary genius. If you’re going to study Shakespeare at all, you obviously must read his work, because his language is admirable and integral to his project. But I want to make the same point about routine academic authors.

The typical contributor to the Journal of Politics is no William Shakespeare. Yet each competent scholarly author has a distinctive way of constructing an argument, and each subfield or scholarly community has its own shared ways. (Linguists would say that authors have idiolects of their own and dialects for their groups.) Struggling to make sense of a routine yet capable piece of academic writing is a way of getting out of one’s own mind. Of course, it is not the only way. Among many other activities, we should listen to people speak. But reading is one way to escape solipsism, which is a form of spiritual death.

See also: what I would advise students about ChatGPT (my 2023 iteration of these points); a collective model of the ethics of AI in higher education

The Art of Solitude

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I first explored similarities between Montaigne’s Essays (1580-88) and the ancient Buddhist texts called the Pali Canon (particularly the “Chapter of Eights”) on this blog in August 2024. I have been developing these ideas into a longer article or perhaps a portion of a book. One shared theme (among several) is that we should be committed to other people rather than to our own ideas. We can be unattached to our opinions while still deeply caring.

Last week, I discovered and read Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (2022), which emphasizes precisely the same pair of texts. He translates the whole Chapter of Eights and discusses Montaigne at length.

Batchelor is a great writer on solitude. He does not define it as being alone, but rather as being deeply attentive to what’s going on inside yourself. In fact, you can hide away in your room or retreat to a forest and yet be mentally consumed by other people and events, or you can genuinely talk and listen to others while retaining an inner space. Montaigne makes these points well, as does the Pali Canon.

Montaigne, a Renaissance European, knew nothing of Buddhism, but he was impressed–at least during a phase of his life–by the Skeptical philosophy of the Greco-Roman author Sextus. The Skeptical School traced its origins to Pyrrho of Ellis, who had visited India with Alexander the Great in 327-326 BCE and may even have become a Buddhist. In my view, the strongest evidence of Buddhism’s influence on Greek Skepticism is this passage, which purports to represent Pyrrho’s teaching:

Whoever reflects on how to attain happiness must see three things: First, what are matters like by nature? Second, in what state should we approach matters? And last, what happens to those who are in this state? … Matters are without an essential nature, unmeasurable, and unfixed, and for this reason neither our senses nor our opinions are true or false. For this reason, therefore, do not believe them, but be without opinions and without biases and without agitation. …

Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio Evangelica, 14.18.1-4 (my trans)

Christopher Beckwith (2017, p. 32) shows that this text “is so close to” a specific, early Indian Buddhist text “that it is virtually a translation of it,” and he argues that some of the Greek words were coined to translate Sanskrit words that were important in early Buddhism, such as anatman (without an essential nature) and duhkha (unsteady or unstable).

At any rate, Greek Skepticism developed during a period when Greeks were in dialogue with Indian Buddhists in a large region where many schools and sects taught overlapping ideas. And Montaigne was strongly influenced by Greek Skepticism.

Batchelor is less interested in such historical links and influences than in sheer similarities. He presents Montaigne as having rediscovered principles of solitude, meditation and compassion from personal experience and experimentation, which is how Montaigne describes his own journey.

Montaigne is far more empathetic and compassionate than Sextus, who often tries to attain inner peace by ridiculing the various views of past philosophers. There are more than 1,300 quotations from Latin alone in Montaigne’s Essays (Selevold 2010), and his usual mode is to demonstrate that he appreciates the quoted author’s stance without necessarily endorsing it. By introducing compassion to Sextus’ Skepticism, Montaigne actually moves closer to Buddhism (without knowing anything about that tradition).

There is pretty good evidence that Montaigne also remained a believing Catholic, in private as well as public life, which means that some of his deepest commitments were incompatible with Buddhism. But he could write long passages in which his religious commitments appear irrelevant and he is fully guided by ideals that we could call compassion and mindfulness. Just for example:

When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been absorbed by external events for part of the time, I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude and to myself.

Montaigne, 3:13 (“On Experience”), my trans.

Batchelor beautifully translates this and other relevant passages–as I can attest, since I have been translating an overlapping set of excerpts from Montaigne for my own use. (I do wish, however, that the Yale Press book provided notes or other references, because it is quite a task to locate Batchelor’s original texts.)

Batchelor also writes about meditation and his own experiments with hallucinogens. Those sections are engaging and interesting but beyond my capacity to evaluate.

Sources: Stephen Batchelor’s The Art of Solitude (Yale University Press 2022); Christopher I. Beckwith, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (Princeton, 2017); Sellevold, Kirsti. “Quotation in Montaigne’s Essais: communication across time and contexts–A case study,” Symbolae Osloenses 84.1 (2010).

holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important

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Two points are valid, in my opinion, and we should address both:

First, the Trump Administration is using almost every available tool, including unconstitutional methods, to harm universities and to interfere in their internal affairs. At my university, they literally abducted a beloved graduate student because she had written a completely appropriate op-ed in our student newspaper, thus suppressing speech on our campus.

The Administration receives support from people who think that higher education has been intolerantly leftist (or biased against Israel). Trump and his close associates may believe those complaints. However, their campaign against higher education is top-down and self-interested and closely resembles that of other “personalist” authoritarian regimes around the world today, which range across the ideological spectrum:

“Under the [right-wing] authoritarian leadership of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the government has started a culture war to dismantle the independence of academic institutions.”
“As Modi’s [Hindu nationalist] BJP tightens its grip, India’s universities become political battlegrounds where academic independence is sacrificed to ideological loyalty.”
In Venezuela, “The main public universities, in particular, have paid a heavy price as a consequence of their defense of democratic values and academic freedom, as they have been defunded by the government” (which is left-wing).
“Much of the structure of Turkish higher education” is being dismantled “through purges, restrictions, and assertions of central control, a process begun earlier this year and accelerating now with alarming speed.”

Both here and in other countries, attacks on universities are coordinated with attacks on broadcast media, foundations, law firms, civil servants, judges, and, often, the legislative branch.

In its battles with US higher education, the Administration has some grassroots support. In July, Gallup found that 41% of people had little or no confidence in higher education, and of those, 32% said it was “’too liberal,’ trying to ‘indoctrinate’ or ‘brainwash’ students, or not allowing students to think for themselves as reasons for their opinions.” That group represents 13% of the whole sample: enough to generate a flood of social media, but a minority of the population. The Administration’s agenda is mostly self-interested rather than populist.

Thus I disagree with people like Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE (now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), who believe that American universities courted trouble by being intolerant of conservatives. He says, “If they’d listened to us 15 years ago, none of this would be happening.”

I welcome FIRE’s current work against the Trump Administration, but I believe that Trump would have gone after higher education in exactly the same way if universities had attracted more prominent conservative faculty and speakers or had avoided issuing statements about current events. Right-wing media would still have found plenty of anecdotes about liberal bias, and 13% of Americans would still have denounced higher education from the right. The administration needed a pretext–not a fair assessment–to squash higher education as an autonomous sector.

Second, I believe that one of our most important tasks–as humans, and specifically as people who study or work in universities–is to inquire into what is right. This process (call it “normative analysis”) is comparative or dialectical; it’s about juxtaposing alternative values and competing arguments and reasoning about which is better. Furthermore, John Stuart Mill was correct; you can’t just read and discuss alternative arguments to feel their force. You must talk to peers who sincerely hold them.

I think that swaths of US higher education are too ideologically homogeneous to support this kind of reasoning well. In the liberal arts and some of the professions, the dominant ideology is left (although not Marxist, because real Marxism is marginal). In business schools, economics departments, and business-oriented engineering programs, I think the bias is center-right and biased toward technology.

I do not object to the characterization that the whole of higher education is too homogeneously center-left. For instance, at my university, less than one percent of faculty political donations went to Republican candidates or organizations in 2018. At the same time, the name “Marx” is mentioned in just four Tufts course descriptions this semester, half of which are in Art History; none in the social sciences. In short, the ideological range is constrained on both sides, not to mention that academic culture tends to be secular, meritocratic, cosmopolitan, civilian, Anglophone. and technocratic.

Excessive homogeneity can lead to clichés, “motivated reasoning” (selecting evidence to favor a preferred conclusion) and weak argumentation. It can fail to prepare people to engage the broader society.

Meanwhile, few faculty are trained and empowered to address questions of value in academically rigorous ways.

Normative analysis is the focus of a subfield in political science, political theory, which had about 75 job openings in the USA in 2022-3 (5.75% of all political science jobs). That year, there were also about 450 job openings in the USA for philosophers involved with value-theory (broadly defined). Put together, those searches constituted about one open job dedicated to teaching normative inquiry for every ten institutions of higher education in the United States.

Normative analysis is (and should be) conducted in other disciplines as well. Yet it is generally countercultural across higher education and in contemporary society.

Some right-wingers denounce discussions of “divisive concepts.” I have personally observed left-wingers who are genuinely intolerant of conservative (or classical liberal, or religious) arguments. And many administrators, professors and students are positivists. They believe that facts and values are strictly distinct; that values are matters of opinion; and that scholarship should be about facts. It is particularly difficult to have a serious discussion about values in a community where people share key political values and yet deny that values are relevant, claiming that research and teaching are only about facts.

In sum: we should expand philosophical or ideological heterogeneity on college campuses, which means extending our ideological range to the right but also in other directions. We should do so because it is good for us, not because the Trump Administration claims to want this outcome. Trump’s people simply want to squelch autonomous civil society. A powerful civil society is confidently pluralistic and willing to debate normative questions from many angles. Getting there requires internal work, even as we battle our national government for freedom.

Montaigne’s equanimity

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Michel de Montaigne famously imagined that he could learn not to mind dying. After all, there is no rational reason to fear not existing, nor to regret that you won’t still be alive in 100 years, for you weren’t alive a century ago. But if we are not going to fear death when we meet it, then there is no reason to fear it now. By imagining that we will face death without fear and working back from our last day to the present, we can remove distress.

As Montaigne says, no soul is “at rest so long as it fears death,” but if the soul can remove that fear, “then it can boast something almost surpassing the human condition: anxiety, torment, fear, and displeasure can no longer lodge in it” [1.20, my translation].

In this early essay, “To Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne canvasses many arguments against the fear of death. Nevertheless, the general air is of a person who is indeed anxious about dying, and whose everyday experience is colored by that fear. He seems to be clinging to logical arguments that are not really changing his state of mind.

Montaigne’s last essay, “Of Experience,” revisits the same topic in a spirit of greater equanimity, even though the author is old and close to his real death. Here he suggests that he has absorbed the arguments against fearing death and has made them part of his character:

Yet I am prepared to lose life without regret, as something that is losable by its very nature, not as something that is annoying and troublesome. Besides, only for those who delight in living is it appropriate to dislike dying.

There is a certain housekeeping involved involved in enjoying life; I enjoy it twice as much as others do, for the degree of enjoyment depends on the amount that we apply ourselves to it. Especially at this hour, when I perceive my life to be so brief, I want to extend its weight; I want to arrest the promptness of its flight by the promptness of my senses, and to compensate for the hastiness of its passing by the vigor of its use: since my possession of life is shorter, I must make it deeper and fuller.

Others feel the sweetness of contentment and prosperity; I feel the sweetness as they do, but not as something passing and slipping away. Also, we must study, savor, and ruminate on life to give appropriate thanks to the One who grants it to us.

Other people enjoy all pleasures as they do the pleasures of sleep, without knowing them. So that even sleep might not escape me so stupidly, I have sometimes found it good to have my sleep disturbed so that I can catch a glimpse of it.

I consult with myself about my own contentment, I do not skim over it. When I have become sorrowful and disgusted, I probe that state and bend my reason to meditate on it. Or do I find myself in some tranquil setting? Is there some pleasure that tickles me? I do not let myself be swindled by my senses, I associate my soul with it, not to engage in it, but to agree with it, not to lose myself in it, but to find myself there; and I let my soul see itself reflected in this state of thriving, to weigh and estimate its good fortune, and to amplify it. [Montaigne 3.12 (“Of experience”)]

If, as a young man, Montaigne had known that he would later achieve equanimity, then he would have known that he didn’t have to fear death in the present. Unfortunately for him, he could only advocate equanimity, not predict that he would achieve it until he actually did (or at least, so he claims).

If the sky were seen for the first time

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Now give us your true mind, turn to reason.
A new thing is trying to reach your ears 
To reveal itself to you in novel forms.
But nothing is so simple that it is not
At first hard to believe, nor any marvel 
So great that we don’t soon forget our wonder.

The sky’s clear and pure color, so restrained,
The stars shining everywhere, the moon,
And the splendid brightness of the sun’s light— 
If all this were suddenly, for the first time,
Unexpectedly revealed to mortals,
What could be called more miraculous than this,
Not less than what nations had dared to believe?

Nothing, I think; this scene would compel wonder.
We’re so tired of seeing, we don’t care to look up
To the resplendent temples of heaven.
Stop being terrified by this novelty
Stop spitting reason out of your mind.
Rather weigh it with sharp judgment, and if it seems true
Give it assent, or, if not, fight against it. 

For the mind seeks reason, and the highest place 
Is infinitely beyond the walls of this world. 
What is there beyond, where the mind wishes to look,
Where the free-thrown spirit itself can fly?

This is an excerpt from Lucretius (2.1023-46), which I found because Montaigne quotes the second part of it in his essay “It is Madness to Base True and False on our Self-Confidence” (1.27). My translation of this Latin text. Stephen Batchelor also discusses this passage (in his translation) in The Art of Solitude (Yale University Press, 2020), p. 42.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal

Monthly Archives: August 2025

teaching in the era of AI (thoughts for fall 2025)

The Art of Solitude

holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important

Montaigne’s equanimity

If the sky were seen for the first time