There is a new fantasy being sold to students as advice.
Yes, there is a growing anger around AI on campuses, the student protests, the booing of commencement speakers, the very understandable grief underneath it all. I still believe some of that grief is real. Students are not wrong to sense that something has shifted beneath their feet. They were promised one world and are graduating into another.
They were told that the old bargain between education and opportunity would remain intact if only they worked hard enough and played their part.
Then AI arrived, or more accurately, became impossible to ignore.
Suddenly, the performance of knowledge looked cheaper. The production of words looked easier. The value of memorization looked shakier. The old classroom rituals began to feel exposed. And many students, watching the adults around them improvise certainty, responded with suspicion.
I understand the suspicion.
What I do not understand is the response.
Now, as often happens, the pendulum is swinging.
After years of breathless worship at the altar of STEM, after years of “learn to code” advice thrown at every young person as if a programming language were a life raft, there is suddenly a new romance with the humanities. Philosophy is back in fashion. Literature is being rehabilitated. History is being summoned from the basement. Ethics has become a word even technologists now use in public. People are rediscovering the importance of meaning, judgment, language, culture, interpretation, and moral reasoning.
Good.
It is about time.
But beneath some of this newfound affection for the humanities, I hear another lazy argument forming.
If AI can code, humans should study philosophy.
If machines can generate answers, humans should ask better questions.
If automation takes over technical work, the future belongs to the poets, historians, ethicists, writers, artists, and deep thinkers.
There is truth in this. There is also danger.
The old bad advice was never that STEM mattered. STEM does matter. The bad advice was that STEM, by itself, was a guaranteed ticket into relevance. The bad advice was that technical fluency could substitute for judgment, that employability could be reduced to a major, that a young person could choose the “right” field and be protected from the uncertainty of the world.
Now we seem eager to commit the same error in reverse.
Just study philosophy.
Just read literature.
Just become a better thinker.
Just be more human.
It sounds wiser. It feels gentler. It flatters those of us who believe education should do more than prepare workers for payroll systems.
But it is still incomplete.
Thinking is not a career plan.
A philosophy degree does not automatically make someone wise. An English degree does not automatically make someone articulate. A history degree does not automatically produce judgment. A political science degree does not automatically produce civic courage. A student can spend four years around great books and still leave unable to write a clear argument, listen across difference, analyze a real problem, use modern tools, build trust, make decisions under ambiguity, or produce work that has consequence beyond the classroom.
The humanities are powerful, but they are not magic.
They can form deeper human beings. They can cultivate discernment. They can teach students to live inside ambiguity without panicking. They can help young people understand that every system has a history, every technology carries assumptions, every institution has a moral architecture, every story includes what is said and what is hidden. At their best, the humanities train us to ask what kind of world we are building and who pays the price for our innocence.
That is no small thing.
In a world flooded with synthetic intelligence, these capacities are not ornamental. They are urgent. We will need people who can read more than text. People who can read context. People who understand incentives, memory, power, narrative, silence, grief, beauty, manipulation, belonging, and consequence. People who can tell the difference between efficiency and wisdom. People who know that what can be automated should not always be automated, and what can be measured is not always what matters most.
The future does not need fewer humanists.
It needs better-formed ones.
It needs humanists who can do more than admire complexity. It needs them to enter complexity with courage and produce clarity without becoming simplistic. It needs them to work with scientists, engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, educators, policymakers, and communities. It needs them to understand technology well enough to shape its use, question its assumptions, and resist its worst temptations. It needs them to write, speak, facilitate, research, build, organize, interpret, design, challenge, and lead.
The humanities should not become a hiding place from the future but rather, become a training ground for judgment inside it.
This is where the current humanities comeback narrative becomes dangerous for students. It takes a necessary correction and turns it into a comforting slogan. It tells students that because the world needs meaning, they will be rewarded for studying meaning. But the labor market does not reward abstraction by default. Communities do not change because someone has opinions about justice. Institutions do not improve because someone has read about ethics. Employers do not hire potential in the abstract forever. At some point, students have to show what their education has made them capable of doing.
This is not a crude argument for turning every humanities class into job training.
That would be a betrayal of the humanities too.
The answer is not to drag Shakespeare into a LinkedIn workshop or turn philosophy into a corporate ethics certificate. The answer is to stop pretending there is no bridge between contemplation and contribution. Students deserve more than romantic speeches about the life of the mind. They deserve an education that helps them convert insight into agency.
Can they write something that changes how people see a problem?
Can they research a community need and frame it with accuracy and humility?
Can they use AI tools without surrendering their own judgment?
Can they facilitate a conversation where disagreement does not collapse into performance?
Can they build a public argument, a policy brief, a documentary, a curriculum, a venture, a campaign, a prototype, a body of work?
Can they identify what is humanly at stake in a technical decision?
Can they prove that their education has made them more capable of serving the world, not merely describing it?
That is the bridge.
That is also where many institutions are still failing.
We have spent years dividing students into false camps. The practical students go here. The thoughtful students go there. The ambitious students choose business. The brilliant students choose engineering. The reflective students choose philosophy. The creative students choose art. The caring students choose education or social work. Then we act surprised when the world asks for people who can cross boundaries and our systems have trained them to stay in lanes.
The future does not care about our departmental nostalgia.
The future will ask students to move across disciplines because real problems do not arrive in departmental format. Climate does not care whether a student majored in economics or ecology. Migration does not care whether someone studied politics or sociology. AI ethics does not care whether the expert in the room came from computer science or philosophy. Student readiness does not care whether the insight came from psychology, design, data, literature, or lived experience.
The world is integrated but education is still too often fragmented.
So when people say the humanities are making a comeback, I want to ask: what kind of comeback?
A comeback as a vibe?
A comeback as a defensive posture?
A comeback as a way for universities to repackage declining programs with prettier language?
A comeback as another promise to students that this degree, unlike the last fashionable degree, will save them?
Or a real comeback?
A real comeback would be more demanding. It would ask humanities programs to keep their soul without hiding from outcomes. It would ask STEM programs to stop producing technically capable people with underdeveloped moral imagination. It would ask business schools to teach more than optimization. It would ask universities to stop treating AI as either a threat to be policed or a gadget to be sprinkled across syllabi. It would ask students to build proof of judgment, not just accumulate evidence of attendance.
A real comeback would place writing, ethics, history, culture, creativity, and philosophy at the center of future readiness. Not as decoration. Not as nostalgia. Not as a sermon about the old days when people supposedly read more and thought better. At the center because no society can survive on intelligence without wisdom, speed without direction, innovation without restraint, or ambition without conscience.
But the humanities also have to accept a hard truth.
Relevance is not the enemy of depth.
Application is not the enemy of reflection.
Usefulness is not the same as utility.
There is a way to prepare students for work without reducing them to workers. There is a way to honor the life of the mind while still asking what that mind is capable of doing in the world. There is a way to defend the humanities without pretending that beauty alone pays rent, that curiosity alone builds agency, or that critique alone changes systems.
Students need honesty.
They do not need another adult fantasy.
They do not need to be told that coding will save them. They do not need to be told that philosophy will save them. They do not need to be told that AI literacy is optional because human beings are special. They do not need to be told that being human is enough when the world will ask them to demonstrate how their humanity becomes judgment, skill, contribution, and courage.
Being human is not the differentiator.
Becoming deeply, usefully, ethically human is.
That requires practice.
It requires proof.
A student who studies philosophy should be able to reason in public, not just privately admire difficult ideas. A student who studies literature should be able to understand narrative power in politics, media, branding, identity, and conflict. A student who studies history should be able to recognize patterns without becoming trapped by them. A student who studies art should be able to see what others miss and make that seeing visible. A student who studies religion should be able to understand meaning-making across cultures without caricature. A student who studies language should know that words are not accessories to power. They are one of its primary instruments.
This is not soft.
This is not impractical.
This is the hard work of preparing people for a world where the easy answers will increasingly be produced by machines and the hard questions will remain stubbornly human.
What should we do?
We should stop asking students to choose between being technical and being thoughtful. We should stop pretending that the humanities are pure only when they are economically fragile. We should stop treating AI as an invading force rather than a civilizational test. We should stop designing education around the assumption that majors are destinies.
They are not.
A major is a starting point. A discipline is a lens. A transcript is a record of exposure. None of them, by themselves, proves readiness.
The world is not short on credentials.
It is short on evidence.
Evidence that a student can think.
Evidence that they can make.
Evidence that they can listen.
Evidence that they can adapt.
Evidence that they can use tools without becoming tools.
Evidence that they can remain morally awake in rooms where convenience is rewarded more than conscience.
That is why the humanities matter now. Not because they offer students a safer hiding place from technological change. Not because they guarantee employment in some imagined post-STEM renaissance. Not because every student should become a philosopher in order to survive the machine.
The humanities matter because the future will be shaped by questions that cannot be answered by computation alone.
What should we build?
Who is harmed?
What do we owe one another?
What kind of progress deserves the name?
What must not be optimized?
What does a good life require?
What does dignity demand?
These are humanities questions. But asking them is not enough. Students must learn to carry those questions into the places where decisions are made, products are built, policies are written, institutions are led, communities are served, and futures are designed.
That is the work.
Not attendance.
Not nostalgia.
Not slogans.
Not another round of adults telling students that the next fashionable field will protect them from uncertainty.
The future needs philosophers who can build.
It needs engineers who can reflect.
It needs artists who can organize.
It needs business leaders who can remember that markets are not morality.
It needs educators who can prepare students for reality without surrendering wonder.
It needs students who can think deeply, learn quickly, build credibly, and remain human under pressure.
So yes, let the humanities come back. But let them come back with backbone.
Let them come back with proof.
Let them come back not as a retreat from the future, but as one of the few serious ways to face it.
Because thinking matters.
Thinking may matter more than ever.
But thinking, by itself, is not a career plan.
It is the beginning of responsibility.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
