According to Philosophy Nous, the Dean at Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences suggested that a group of teaching assistants going on strike be replaced conveniently by artificial intelligence. It would be a much cheaper option while the TAs demand higher pay and benefits, and would, apparently, accomplish the same desired ends. The dean, Stan Sclaroff, is a computer scientist. Another article from the same publication makes a list of reasons why philosophers are declining across the country, and why philosophy and humanities departments are getting cut. Justin Weinberg writes,

• Skills taught at universities may increasingly thought of as unnecessary to learn because we can automate them. Search engines are ways of automating research, and now we have large language models (LLMs) for automating our writing. (What these means may lack, perhaps glaringly clear to some experts, is much less visible to their typical user than what said means deliver.)
• Education has trouble competing for attention with all of the world’s entertainment and all of the friends of each student, which each student now, via their phone, has access to at all times. The entertainment explosion has led to reduced attention spans, resulting in professors lowering standards, in turn resulting in lower quality output from students, and so decreasing the educational value of college courses.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be a cheaper alternative teacher, probably starting with courses in which there is no physical equipment or activity. (AIs replacing course instructors may be the most conservative prediction regarding how AI will alter education.)

The Demand for Philosophers – Daily Nous

Weinberg goes on to call for a renewed advocacy of philosophy and the study of the liberal arts more broadly. “Selling” philosophy as a worthy undertaking in and of itself must be a priority of the university. He continues,

And so it would serve philosophy well if more philosophers took up administrative positions at the colleges and universities. We don’t need philosopher kings, but philosopher deans and associate deans, philosopher provosts, and philosopher university presidents would be helpful.

Someone jokingly commented on the first cited article that university administrators are the ones who need to be replaced by AI. While many universities now include bloated administrations, with administrative employees far outnumbering faculty and in some cases even the students, perhaps it’s better to consider what kind of collegiate leaders universities hire in the first place. Why not get a philosopher as a college president? Or at least, advocate for those who will highlight the enduring need of the humanities, which goes beyond practicalities afforded by automation and asks the deeper question: What does it mean to be a human being?