Quick Take
UC Santa Cruz historian Kiva Silver is worried about the future of the university’s college system and the core courses at UCSC. He believes the courses, usually taken in students’ first year on campus, are essential to preserving a human-centered liberal arts education as a bulwark against AI. The courses, he writes, should not be sacrificed as the campus works to overcome a structural deficit of about $87 million. The courses and living-learning communities are part of UCSC’s original 10-college system and, he argues, foster critical thinking, belonging and the type of intellectual community that has always nurtured humanity. If students never ask “who am I?”, he writes, how will they be able to differentiate themselves from machines?
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Artificial intelligence has started writing – and thinking – for our students, and we must resist.
I have been teaching humanities seminars for UC Santa Cruz’s Stevenson College for 20 years, and I can say unequivocally that the college core courses are foundational. They not only distinguish us from other campuses, give our students a sense of belonging and provide necessary writing, reading and critical thinking skills, but they also enable our students to flourish as human beings.
They are essential and we must, even amid budget cuts, preserve them.
UC Santa Cruz will soon have a new campus provost, and with a continuing budget deficit of at least $87 million, it is no surprise that UCSC’s residential colleges and the core courses they offer are “open to a conversation.” We don’t know yet what that means, but there is great concern that the college core courses could be targeted.
This would be a mistake.
The courses and the faculty who teach them are a bulwark against the existential threat AI poses to a liberal-arts education. I hope our future campus conversations underscore this importance and the role first-year seminars play in students’ development as thinkers, writers and learners.
We had our first campus forum about the colleges on Feb. 11, and I was pleased that the discussion highlighted the importance of the core courses and first-year “living learning communities” (LLCs) nationwide. Professor Kim Lau, a longtime champion of the colleges who currently serves as provost of College Nine and John R. Lewis College, emphasized that UCSC’s residential college system provides a small liberal-arts, first-year experience within a large public research university.
It’s ironic that we are having this conversation now – a time when universities nationwide are suddenly discovering the importance of LLCs, especially in boosting student retention. UCSC has always had them. In fact, the college system, based on models at Cambridge and Oxford universities, was part of the original plan at UCSC, and has always distinguished us.
Each of the 10 colleges at UCSC has distinctive themes, but more important than the college theme is the community built in these first-quarter seminars.
The core course (College 1) is the only course in the curriculum where the entire class consists of first-year students who live in the same building. The core classes happen near the dorm, so all their classmates are neighbors.
The dorm is where you socialize; the core class is where you learn together and form a broader residential and intellectual community. The core courses teach our students the value of human connection and the excitement of community inquiry, which is desperately important as AI threatens both.
It’s not that AI can’t be useful. Students just need to learn how to use it responsibly. College 1 offers a prime opportunity for students, many of whom are already using AI, to discuss its uses and abuses.
I’m a historian who thinks a lot about our future. I worry about what will happen if students stop developing their own thoughts through writing and reading, which is why I am writing a book on the importance of first-year university core courses in our new age of AI.
I worry about how AI will not just destroy critical thinking, but also what will happen to students’ writing “voices.” The most powerful writing lesson I teach my students comes from Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French Renaissance inventor of the “essay” (from the French verb, essayer – “to attempt”). Montaigne wrote in an “attempt” to know himself.
In the process, he made “friends” with the reader, as readers often find in Montaigne a unique human voice. As a reader, I want to know my students; as writers, I want my students to know themselves.
Like Montaigne, I hope that students see reading, writing and conversation as useful in knowing themselves and fashioning their own lives. AI threatens this central writing (and life) lesson because if students aren’t creating their own thoughts through writing, then they’re not thinking for themselves, which may impede knowing themselves, too.
Writing an essay is the most human of all activities, for it is ultimately an attempt to “know thy own self.”
When we look at AI-generated work together in class, it is impressive. We read aloud its uniform paragraphs. We’re seduced by the seamless sentences, the organization, the “flow.”
But then I ask students if they would be friends with this writer. After examining the machine-generated writing in class, students then ask, How is my writing – my ideas, my voice – different? What makes me unique? Following Montaigne, we ask, “Que sais-je?” or “What do I know?”
But even more importantly, AI challenges us to ask an even more fundamental question, “Qui suis-je?” or “Who am I?” What makes me human?
AI, fortunately, isn’t human, but our college core and writing courses are intensely human: We talk and listen to each other; we build ideas together through conversation. We look at our flaws, laugh and try to do better.
What’s more human than that?
The first-year seminar is still the place where students have actual books (not screens) in front of them, where they still show their hand-written annotations, and where they talk to each other as a class and in small groups. Core is still the place where students get to know – and hopefully love – their neighbors.
If we really care about retention and giving students a true liberal-arts education, then we need to support our colleges and these courses. That means supporting Unit 18 faculty (lecturers) who teach these courses with higher pay, job security and smaller class sizes. Especially with the challenges posed by AI, we need stable faculty cohorts united in our commitment to a human-centered education and student success.
And for us to recognize AI-generated writing, we need to know each of our students. To know our students – and recognize their distinctive voices – we need smaller classes.
And we need financial and administrative support. That is the only way we will maintain and fulfill the potential and promise of UCSC’s residential college system.
Without community and without original thinking developed through careful reading, writing, and classroom conversation, students may never discover what it means to flourish, to realize their own potential, to live deliberately. AI is not just a threat to human writing; it is a threat to human flourishing, what the Greeks called eudaimonia.
As Living Learning Communities, the core courses are where students discover what it means to be human. UCSC’s College Core courses – and the lecturers who teach them – may be the last bastions of a truly humanistic education.
As we look to the future, let’s fortify them.
Kiva Silver is a continuing lecturer at UCSC’s Stevenson College, the writing program, and the history department. He is writing a book on the importance of the first-year humanities seminar in the age of AI.