My Classroom Will Be AI-Free This Fall

Once upon a time, about 5,000 years ago in southern Iraq, lived a king by the name of Gilgamesh. He was sexist, classist and exploitative, and he mercilessly tyrannized his subjects to satisfy a restless bloodlust in search of his own immortal glory. Yet every year, my first-year humanities students fall in love with him and the epic masterpiece written in his name. They adore his bravado and his bromance with the wild man Enkidu; they are moved to tears over the loss of his love and the dawning of his own existential angst. These 18-year-olds are completely drawn into the ancient king’s strange and often cryptic otherworldly journey from thousands of years ago—across chasms of space, time, language and culture. This is why I love teaching the humanities.

I’m an associate professor in the College of the Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, and I’ve been teaching students about ancient texts for 30 years. Most students come into my classroom fairly certain that this survey of the ancient world will be a boring waste of time—most leave with the profound wisdom that comes from having explored the rich tapestry of human experience. 

But this summer, before I can get into my usual preparation of new notes, slides, writing assignments and seminar questions for my incoming class, I’m wrestling with the fact that, come fall, it will be second nature for many of my students to upload a PDF of The Epic of Gilgamesh into generative AI for a plot summary so they can pass the quiz, then feed it my prompts so the AI can spit out a perfect essay, and then go enjoy their weekends.

Why wrestle with Plato’s allegory of the cave when ChatGPT can summarize the main point in seconds? Why spend weeks working on a debate about gender in the Garden of Eden when Perplexity can produce a polished and sophisticated argument faster than a Nespresso can produce a latte? Grammarly has eliminated the annoyance of figuring out proper syntax, any gen AI can clean up a messy turn of phrase, and Claude can render writer’s block obsolete by offering ideas to get students started. I’m starting to wonder if I should just program Gemini to grade the papers that Claude has written, and we can all knock off early.

I won’t, of course, at least partly due to stubbornness. If there has ever been a time to double down on the value of a humanities education, it’s now. It’s no coincidence that a steady devaluation of learning for learning’s sake, of thinking about what it means to be human from multiple angles and across time and cultural spaces, has brought about tremendous polarization and a dearth of basic civility. In a world increasingly marked by division, broadening perspectives and the fostering of empathy is vital. 

But I’ve been watching my students slide down the slippery slope of AI slowly, tentatively, for the past year and a half as they experimented with each new iteration of ChatGPT. During the final month of the spring term, many of them went into an enthusiastic freefall. When I called them into my office to review essay outlines one-on-one in the fall term, I could be fairly certain they had done enough work on their own to talk me through their rough ideas. In the spring, students brought me polished essay outlines that could have passed as dissertation proposals. The students blinked nervously and responded to my questions about these (clearly!) AI-generated outlines by stumbling through apologies, explaining they were so tired and their thoughts so jumbled that they weren’t sure how to explain them. Some of them eventually admitted they were a bit confused about what “they” had written, explaining that the assigned texts were complicated and perhaps they didn’t understand them well enough and should review them again and resubmit. 

For decades, elementary educators and governments  have pushed for STEM training and opportunities, and university administrations have followed suit, pouring resources into improving STEM education. As a result, many students see their university years as a combination of job-training and degree-attaining. It seems like the point is to get a piece of paper that says you’re educated, to get it quickly, and to use it for job applications as soon as it’s received. If students can get this degree entirely by uploading and clicking around a large language model and never missing a social event in the process, then why on earth would they want to read a book or study a piece of art, let alone discuss it with classmates, think about it from multiple angles and write their own papers on it?

This line of thinking, however, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what education is. Knowledge is a capacity developed through practice, not a downloaded list of fast facts. You cannot shortcut your way to wisdom any more than you can gain muscle mass by watching someone else exercise. 

The number one question I get from parents is, “What is my child going to do with that humanities degree?” There is no question that getting a job is a real problem in 2025, and young adults face high housing costs, a cost-of-living crisis and scary unemployment rates. But despite conventional wisdom, many stats and studies demonstrate that a four-year immersion in the wisdom of the ages isn’t less likely to yield a job than any other undergraduate pursuit. What’s more: a rigorous humanities education produces informed and engaged citizens, well-equipped to adapt, thrive and lead in the disruptive and unpredictable brave new world that is emerging.

Report after report demonstrates that leaders of industry are looking for employees capable of critical and strategic thinking, with strong interpersonal skills and empathy, who are creative problem-solvers. My humanities students will graduate with communication abilities that stand out among a cohort of Gen Zs known for burying their heads in social media streams, and with the flexibility and adaptability to solve new problems on their own instead of asking Siri or Claude to simulate secondhand advice. And they will have the much-needed capacity to listen to different perspectives and even change their minds based on solid evidence-based arguments rather than the say-so of influencer personalities online.

And so, despite all the marvels and promises and potentials of gen AI, only humans will be permitted entry to my classroom in the fall, and only humans will be able to complete my course. Students will leave their phones and laptops in their backpacks and pull out hard copies of dog-eared books riddled with hand-written sticky notes, and we’ll be Luddites together for four and a half hours each week in old-school Socratic dialogue. With laptops closed and phones stowed, we will read together, lingering over passages of description and dialogue to discuss and debate. My students will be drawn into The Epic of Gilgamesh inexorably, with awe and wonder. Yes, they may scan an AI-generated summary before they come to class because they’re afraid of looking stupid, but they’ll soon realize that this quick and dirty output of information is simply not helpful when the goal is deep, thoughtful, slow accumulation of wisdom and true understanding and appreciation of human complexity.

I’m not going to ignore the existence of AI. It’s obviously here to stay, and can certainly be a useful tool in the hands of people educated enough to be discerning and judicious. But this fall, in my technology-free classroom, students will look me and each other in the eye. We’ll talk about what we’re reading, what they think, why it’s important, how it’s relevant in today’s world. In the past, I’ve had students go home with prompts and work toward long-form essays analyzing aspects of what we’re reading, but AI has put an end to that, at least for my first-years. They’ll hand-write their own genuine thoughts in real time, and submit them to me before they pull their phones out of their bags on the way out the door. 

This approach is going to mean a lot more work for me, but I would much rather read my students’ own genuine insights and reflections than wonder if I’m expending my energy, time and care on grading the work of a chatbot. My job satisfaction has always come from direct interactions with the minds and souls of 18-to-22-year-olds; if I can no longer do that, I will need to pack up and find a new way of earning a living. 

The Epic’s narrator introduces Gilgamesh as “one who has seen the deep,” and by the end of his journey we glimpse the meaning of this phrase: the former bully has been profoundly transformed by the wisdom he has gained, recognizing his role—as a flawed and complicated human being—in creating and maintaining a uniquely human legacy. Whatever changes I make this year in light of AI, I’m as excited as ever to bring my students on a journey to see the deep.

Shawna Dolansky is an associate professor in the College of the Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, where she teaches students in the first year of Canada’s only bachelor of humanities (great books) program, as well as upper level seminars in the history of religions.