To Measure, or Be Measured Unto: What Is Humanism in the Face of Artificial Intelligence? Or: The Instructor Function

Abstract

This essay examines the potentially dire implications of artificial intelligence for the future of humanism, higher education, and the Humanities by introducing the philosophical conflict between Protagoras’ claim that humanity is the measure of all things and Plato’s competing assertion that the truest standards of value reside outside human experience. It argues that this tension continues to shape contemporary posthumanist, deterministic, and institutional modes of thought, all of which subordinate human judgment to external authorities, structures, or technologies. Drawing on examples from literary theory, the history of online education, and recent AI initiatives within the California State University system, the essay contends that artificial intelligence threatens to accelerate the standardization of teaching, diminish faculty autonomy, and redefine education in managerial and technocratic terms, which redefine faculty as an unnecessary expense. In response, it advances an inclusive humanist framework that affirms the intrinsic value of human experience, creativity, and judgment while calling for renewed faculty governance, intellectual independence, and a reaffirmation of the Humanities as indispensable to democratic and educational life.

1. The Old Argument

What is the value of human life? How can that value be measured? And who measures it? These questions have been the subject of philosophical and polemical discourse for millennia. The argument over these questions, which this essay pursues in both philosophical and polemical terms, is one of the oldest we have, perhaps most famously encapsulated in the disagreement between the ancient Greek thinkers Protagoras and Plato. Their conflict established the terms of a long-running dispute between those who believe the meaning of human existence is intrinsically derived, found within the experience of human life itself, and those who insist that meaning is extrinsically derived and must be sought somewhere outside the individual, outside the world available through sensation, lived experience, struggle, embodiment, and fleeting moments of happiness.

Protagoras, whose famous statement πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος [pánton chremáton métron estìn ἄnthropos—of all useful things, the measure is humankind] (Sextus Empiricus 1935, p. 32, 7.60),1 might well be understood as our earliest humanist. His position locates value inside human experience, life, and judgment, making human beings themselves the proper judges of where value, worth, and meaning are to be found.2 Plato, in contrast, is perhaps our first anti-humanist, finding value outside the realm of human experience, life, and judgment.

For Plato, and for many later thinkers who follow in his tradition, “all that is given in experience counts as a hindrance and a barrier to be broken through” (Gomperz 1905, p. 88). For a modern (and non-Platonic) thinker, however, the outlook is reversed. In such a view the problem is not the lived experience of an individual, but the a priori structures of thought that take the Forms, or the dictates of a theology, or what Jean-François Lyotard calls a grand narrative (of whatever stripe) to be the measure of all things (Lyotard 1979, p. 98).3 It is these structures that are the hindrances and the barriers to be broken through. This task becomes especially urgent whenever the meaning of human life is said to depend entirely upon, or be given by or through some external principle, force, or authority. Plato’s Laws expresses this latter position through the claim that God is the measure of all things (an idea that the later Roman Church would enthusiastically adopt): “ὁ δὴ θεὸς ἡμῖν πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἂν εἴη μάλιστα, καὶ πολὺ μᾶλλον ἤ πού τις, ὥς φασιν, ἄνθρωπος” (Plato 1926, p. 294, 716c,). [Now for us, God is the measure of all useful things, in the highest degree, much more than is any man they speak of].

This same logic is with us today in numerous secular forms. Nationalism treats the nation-state as the proper measure rather than the people who compose it (“Ask not what your country can do for you—Ask what you can do for your country”). Corporate ideology elevates the institution, enterprise, or organization above the workers whose labor sustains it. Academic institutions often operate according to similar assumptions, asking individuals to subordinate themselves to “the department,” “the university,” or “the mission.” Even ecological or other liberal–technocratic forms of thought often reproduce the same structure by insisting that human beings derive their legitimacy only through service to something external to themselves (and are otherwise a threat if not contained and constrained by such service).

The key ingredient in these latter varieties of thinking is the fundamental idea that you, I, and we are not the measures (or measurers) of anything. The standards of usefulness, goodness, legitimacy, or necessity are presumed to exist elsewhere, in some authority, entity, or ideology to which humanity must submit. Whether that is God, the State, the Party, the Corporation, or even “Nature,” the structure remains essentially the same—you, I, we, do not measure. We are measured unto. This condition of being measured unto forms the shared foundation of many posthumanist and/or anti-humanist theories and practices that displace living human beings in favor of abstractions, structures, or nonhuman agencies. In retrospect, this was made crystal clear during the latter half of the twentieth century, especially among thinkers shaped by the Nazi occupation of France in the mid-1940s and its aftermath,4 when it became fashionable to proclaim the death (or the end) of Man, and the decentering of human experience. But sift through the shifting rhetoric for a while, and it soon becomes evident that behind all the various statements of this position there lies the old misanthropic idea that among all things in existence, the only one that does not truly matter is the human being.

Against this tendency, the full statement attributed to Protagoras sounds like a manifesto for a radically human-centered philosophy: “πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν μὲν ὄντων ὡς ἔστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν” (Sextus Empiricus 1935, p. 32, 7.60). [Of all useful things the measure is humankind: of those that are, that they are; and of those that are not, that they are not]. However, is Protagoras referring to humanity collectively or to individual humans? Plato’s interpretation, especially in the Theaetetus, attempts to reduce the statement to an argument for extreme relativism or solipsism grounded in individual perception. This has long been a common interpretation of the Protagorean position.5 But F.C.S. Schiller persuasively argues that such an interpretation is neither inevitable nor particularly coherent. As Schiller argues: “we do not know its exact context and scope, and so can interpret it in various ways. But, however we understand it, it is most important and suggestive, and, in every way but one, it is a fundamental truth. That one way, of course, is Plato’s” (Schiller 1907, p. 33). For Schiller, the “great mistake” is to regard either interpretation as “exclud[ing] the other” (ibid.). The individual can be the measure of all things, but so also can humanity: “Man […] is the measure also in the generic sense of man” (ibid., p. 34)

Contemporary postmodern and posthumanist theory, however, frequently bypasses this complexity while simultaneously promoting attitudes historically opposed by humanist traditions, and operating as a kind of present-day extension and re-instantiation of the Platonist (antihumanist) position. In recent decades, much of our intellectual culture has turned against several important currents of modern humanism (which have roots of different sorts in the Protagorean position). One of the often vehemently rejected forms is the “instrumental” tradition associated with thinkers such as Bacon and Descartes, which places human beings at the center of efforts to understand and shape the natural world.6 Another is the “idealist” tradition exemplified by Kant, in which the world acquires meaningful coherence through human consciousness and reflection.7 A third, often neglected, current is the dialectical tradition influenced by Hegelian thought, which understands human beings and the world as mutually constitutive through interaction.8 Many postmodern and posthumanist critiques collapse the first two traditions together into a negatively caricatured form of humanism, reject the resulting straw man, and then largely ignore the third. The consequence is a series of increasingly extreme positions united by a recurring idea: you, I, we, do not measure. We are measured unto.

None of this would be a particular problem, at least outside of the kinds of intellectual and academic debate that occur ideally within our universities, were it not for the fact that our universities are not, in the popular sense, merely academic. They are load-bearing beams in the structure of our society, and the ideas that happen on campus do not stay on campus. Similarly, ideas that have their origins off campus do not stay off campus. In a way, our educational institutions operate both as a kind of laboratory or point of origin for ideas, and as a kind of accelerator and intensifier of ideas—testing and sometimes lending legitimacy to ideas that help shape the larger culture, and then unavoidably (re)shape the educational institutions themselves. Artificial Intelligence is a particularly dangerous product of this dynamic, as its use is both shaped by, and (partially) legitimized by, co-opted forms of scholarly ideas that have not stayed on campus.

The primary danger is this: Artificial Intelligence, especially in the hands of Government, Corporate, and University interests, threatens to become the latest and greatest tool via which we will be measured unto. The rest of this essay will be an attempt to explain why I think this is so.

My first step will be to give a brief account of trends in literary scholarship (especially in the area of postmodern and posthumanist thought) that have, in my view, tilled and fertilized the soil (however unwittingly) in which the seeds of our current dilemma have been planted and are now threatening to grow beyond our ability to control. However, what follows will not be an attempt, for example, to mount an extensive counterargument against posthumanism, or even to engage systematically with the critiques made by posthumanists of what they might call anthropocentric humanism. What I am attempting here is to paint a picture of how we got into the position in which we currently find ourselves, with long-standing arguments between scholars having been weaponized into a larger complex of ideas, technologies, and actions that are now arrayed against us as scholars, teachers, and students of the Humanities.

2. Who Needs Humanism Anyway? Or: The Scholarship That (Unwittingly) Prepared the Ground

In an already twenty-year-old summary of ongoing trends in Shakespeare scholarship, Thomas McAlindon writes of “an all-pervasive determinism in the interpretation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The dramatists’ characters are now largely the controlled subjects of ‘effects’ of impersonal forces, psychological, linguistic, or political” (McAlindon 2004, p. 10). More recently, Neema Parvini characterizes such work as reflecting “a form of social determinism [in which individuals] are said to be conditioned by a set of social, cultural and ideological forces,” rendering them “entirely products of their particular place at a particular historical moment” (Parvini 2012, p. 52).

Such arguments are a contemporary reframing of much older claims that human will is an illusion. Nietzsche famously dismisses “das grosse Verhängniss von Irrthum, dass der Wille Etwas ist, das wirkt,—dass Wille ein Vermögen ist” [that great fatality of error, that the will is something that works—that will is a capacity], insisting instead that “Heute wissen wir, dass er bloss ein Wort ist” [today we know that it is only a word] (Nietzsche 1899, p. 80). For nearly two thousand years, such arguments have been much the same, whether they take theological forms (Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, and the notions of original sin and predestination9), philosophical/historical forms (Foucault, and the idea that impersonal systems of power create the “subject” in their image10), or biological forms, as in Baron d’Holbach’s work Système de la Nature, where he argues that all things in the universe can be explained in terms of material causes and effects, including human thought and action (Holbach 1780, pp. 53–54).11 Modern critical theory frequently reproduces these assumptions in social or ideological terms that treat the self as an illusion, a construct of the Ideological State Apparatuses Althusser describes as controlling and producing thought and the material conditions that make thought possible: “idées sont ses actes matériels insérés dans des pratiques matérielles, réglées par des rituels matériels eux-mêmes définis par l’appareil idéologique matériel” [ideas are material actions inserted into material practices, regulated by their own material rituals which are defined by the material ideological apparatus] (Althusser 1976, p. 108). For Althusser, the “ideas” of the “subject” or “individual” derive from the ideological apparatuses of society (State, Church, School, etc.). As a result, “le sujet agit en tant qu’il est agi par le système” [the subject acts as it is acted by the system] (ibid., p. 109).

More recent scholars working in posthumanist discourses build on these ideas, taking them in new directions. Posthumanism emphasizes “decentering the human in favor of a turn toward the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technology” (Grusin 2014, p. 7), and positions itself as “speculating […] about the nature of reality independently of thought and of humanity more generally” (Bryant et al. 2011, p. 3). The posthumanists argue against “Humanism’s valorization of the human as the moral, conscious subject of free will that is the bearer of a universal essence” while also opposing humanism’s “referential theory of language, according to which language […] correspond[s] to the empirical reality outside it” (Cotter et al. 2016, p. 2). Additionally, “the abandonment of the ‘human-centeredness’ that sets boundaries between the human and the nonhuman is said to open the potential for creating a truly democratic planetary multiplicity without a center” (ibid., p. 1). For example, Frantz Fanon argues that the whole point of “les sciences de l’homme” [the sciences of Man] is to “faire admettre à l’homme qu’il n’est rien, absolument rien,—et qu’il lui faut en finir avec ce narcissisme selon lequel il s’imagine différent des autres « animaux »” [make Man admit that he is nothing, absolutely nothing—and that he must put an end to this narcissism according to which he imagines himself different from other ’animals’] (Fanon 1952, pp. 17–18). Eileen Crist condemns “a supremacist worldview [that] blinds the human collective,” while advocating for “contracting humanity’s scale and scope [and] opening our imagination toward a new vision of humanity no longer obstructed by the worldview of human supremacy” (Crist 2018, pp. 1242–44). Donna Haraway, of A Cyborg Manifesto fame, chides Foucault for what she calls the “species chauvinism” (Haraway 2008, p. 60) in his work, and imagines her work as a critique of the human-centered bias of the theorist who declared the death of Man.

But there is more.

Rosi Braidotti writes of the “the glee with which [she has] always greeted the notion of the historical decline of Humanism,” (Braidotti 2013, p. 16) arguing that the Humanist concept of the self reflects a “Eurocentric paradigm” in which “Subjectivity is equated with consciousness, universal rationality, and self-regulating ethical behavior, whereas Otherness is defined as its negative and specular counterpart.” (ibid., p. 15). Sylvia Wynter maintains that concepts such as the human, and humanity, are built on exclusion, and originate with the “humanist strategy of returning to the pagan thought of Greece and Rome for arguments to legitimate the state’s rise to hegemony, outside the limits of the temporal sovereignty claimed by the papacy,” which provided “a model for the invention of a by-nature difference between ‘natural masters’ and ‘natural slaves’, one able to replace the Christian/Enemies-of-Christ legitimating difference” (Wynter 2003, p. 297). Wynter aligns this idea with Aristotle’s distinction in the Politics between those he categorized as naturally free and naturally slavish.12 Stefanie Fishel goes even further, telling us that “we have never been wholly human, biologically or otherwise,” while arguing that the idea of the “human” is a product of “the Enlightenment project” serving the interests of those of “white, male, and […] European descent,” and excluding all others, who “were historically, and continue to be, defined as sub- or nonhuman.” (Fishel 2017, pp. 101–2). Tony Davies makes a similar point, insisting that “the master narrative of transcendental Man has outlived its usefulness,” and that “[a]ll humanisms, until now, have been imperial,” and “speak of the human in the accents and the interests of a class” (Davies 2008, p. 141). Braidotti agrees, echoing Jacob Burckhardt, for whom pre-Renaissance “individuals” did not exist “nur als Race, Volk, Partei, Corporation. Familie oder sonst in irgend einer Form des Allgemeinen” [except as a race, a people, a party, a corporation, a family, or otherwise in any general or common form] (Burckhardt 1860, p. 131). For Braidotti, the “self” is a “moveable assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari’s agencement) within a common life space which the subject never masters but merely inhabits, always in a community, a pack or an assemblage” (Braidotti 2016, p. 26). She maintains that we must grapple with a “debate about posthumanism and the displacement of anthropocentrism,” since “we have entered a posthuman condition” (Braidotti 2018, p. 242). Along much the same lines, Debashish Banerji and Makarand Paranjape contend that what we are now experiencing is a “blurring of the human boundaries” in which the subject “becomes assimilated into a posthumanism with or without consent” (Banerji and Paranjape 2016, p. 1).

The posthumanists also, like so many of their forerunners, seem to have little or no place in their thinking for the individual. Even as the mid-twentieth century intellectual Lucien Goldman claims “le structuralisme génétique refuse […] le sujet individual [et] remplace le sujet individuel par le sujet transindividuel” [the genetic structuralism rejects […] the individual subject [and] replaces the individual subject with the trans-individual subject] (Foucault 1994a, p. 814), so also do contemporary posthumanists advocate for “replacing the […] (‘free’) human with a cooperative transspecies” (Cotter et al. 2016, p. 2). Reworked versions of Baron d’Holbach’s arguments against free will continue to appear, insisting that “the experience of choice may be an interpretive, post hoc construction” (Bear and Bloom 2016, p. 920), while informing us that “all behavior can be ascribed to mechanisms that transcend human agency” (Wegner and Wheatley 1999, p. 480).

The impression left by the more radical forms of this work goes beyond determinism and enters the territory of misanthropy, as if the so-called Wisdom of Silenus (that it would be better for “people to die as soon as possible”13) were now the dominant idea in the (post)Humanities. Alan Weisman illustrates this by imagining a world in which human beings have gone extinct, where “a Homo sapiens-specific virus—natural or diabolically nano-engineered—picks us off but leaves everything else intact” (Weisman 2007, p. 4). Even more extreme versions of these ideas can be found in proponents of “neoreaction” (or NRx). Nick Land’s lengthy essay “The Dark Enlightenment” describes human beings as “technological contingencies, or technoplastic beings, susceptible to precise, scientifically informed transformations.” Seen through this perspective, “‘Humanity’ becomes intelligible as it is subsumed into the technosphere,” reaching a “bionic horizon: the threshold of conclusive nature-culture fusion at which a population becomes indistinguishable from its technology.” (Land 2012).

The specific vocabulary changes across these traditions (religious, biological, philosophical, technological), but the structure remains remarkably constant. “New Presbyter,” as John Milton writes, very much appears to be “but Old Priest writ Large.” (Milton 1957, p. 144). Over all of this hovers the specter of the old argument, and we are even now in territory more Platonic than Protagorean. We do not measure. We are measured unto.

Even if just among ourselves, and even despite the valid arguments that can be made about the devastating impacts of anthropocentricism on the world we share with innumerable other species, this has long been a slightly dangerous line of argument for humanities scholars and thinkers to make. And it is now worryingly apparent that the more, shall we say, adventurous parts of our own thinking are being weaponized against us. Artificial intelligence has raised the stakes of the more radical forms of posthumanist argument in a manner that represents a real and present danger to the Humanities, the teachers and students who study it, and even to the very structures of Education itself. Among the ironies here is the fact that many posthumanists might well raise objections to the use of AI on unimpeachably well-intentioned grounds: the impact on the environment being only one of the myriad possible objections: “[l]arge data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people” (Yañez-Barnuevo 2025).

But despite those objections, the position we find ourselves in now is a result of a co-opted version of our own work being turned against us, while being incorporated into a long-standing project to decenter the human presence and perspective in education. This project has always aimed at the standardization, corporatization, and de-humanization of education, and has been led for decades by a variety of actors working within structures that are now arrayed against us as scholars, teachers, and students in the Humanities.

I am going to use two examples to make my case: the first, an experience working in corporate online education from over twenty-five years ago; the second, recent developments in my university system (the California State University) vis-à-vis the wholesale adoption of AI by the Administration, from the Chancellor of the entire CSU, to the Administrative structures of each of the 23 campuses that make up the system.

3. The Corporate Education Agenda, or the Instructor Function: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Replaced

From late 1999 to late 2000, as I was writing my dissertation at Northwestern University, which would eventually become my first book: The Tyranny of Heaven (Bryson 2004), I was offered a job as a Subject Matter Expert (or SME, as was the jargon internally) for a course in Human-Centered web design being put together by a business called UNext in the Chicago area. UNext was working on creating a complete (and completely online) MBA curriculum, at first in partnership with such institutions as the University of Chicago, the Columbia University Business School, Stanford University and the London School of Economics and Political Science (University One of Four Elite Institutions to Join UNext.com 1999), then later shifting to an arrangement whereby it would deliver its curriculum through a partnership with an online subsidiary institution (given academic accreditation in Illinois) called Cardean University (Virtual Education Wiki: Cardean University n.d.). That experience taught me a great deal about web design, especially through a user-experience lens (with a heavy emphasis on the work of Jakob Nielsen (Nielsen n.d.) on user-interface web design and Donald Norman (Norman n.d.) on human-centered product design). The two project leads were both academics of long-standing who brought their academic expertise into the corporate world as consultants (Nielsen recently retired from the Nielsen-Norman Group, their eponymous enterprise, but is still engaged in thinking about design principles in the case of AI (Jakob Nielsen on the Future of Design: Embracing AI and Agency 2025), while Norman is still active with the company).

In this job, I was paid $100 per hour for a full-time position that took 40 or more hours per week, as part of a course design team. There were several of these teams working on courses simultaneously, so the UNext campus was a vibrant hub of activity and burned through capital at an enormous rate. At first, things seemed to be looking up, as the company signed a deal with GM to provide MBA classes to a potential audience of 88,000 employees in the spring of 2001 (Almer 2001a). But by the summer of the same year, the money was already drying up (UNext Wants to Alter Deals with Universities 2001), and by the end of that year, UNext was laying off employees (Almer 2001b). The goal was an ambitious one (and that ambition—combined with the overall dot com enthusiasm of the time—probably explained the rapid burning through of capital investment): to create, not just an online MBA program for a single use case (or even multiple use cases), but to create a template for online education that would be scalable and eventually enable a dramatic reduction in costs associated with instructional roles for the institutions that bought the UNext curriculum and vision. Meetings that I sat in on with the design team talked about that latter goal as the real—if still distant—breakthrough that our work would enable.

To that end, I served as the initial test instructor for the course I worked on. All of my online interactions with the students in that test run were recorded, then later analyzed not only for effectiveness but for replicability. Among the questions we would ask were the following: “how representative is this interaction?”; “how often would such a question be asked?”; “how often would such an issue arise in student discussions, and how best would it be addressed?” From that data and analysis, an initial template was created that we then asked a group of test instructors to use with test students in a more widely released iteration of a second test run. When that run was completed, we went through the same process—scraping the data that had been gathered, and using it both to fine-tune elements of the course for a third test iteration, but to further standardize and templatize the “responses” and “interactions” that would be required from what I will now call (adapting the work of Foucault in “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?”) the Instructor Function.14

The proximate goal was to have only a small number of what we called “course runners” overseeing a large number of individual sections of the course, doing so while using as much of the templated and standardized text (introductions, interactions, and responses) as possible. The course materials themselves were all pre-written and pre-designed, but we wanted those still inhabiting the Instructor Function to use the standardized responses as much as possible, only innovating when a new or unanticipated situation arose. Those innovations, of course, would then be put through the same process of analysis and standardization that the existing material had gone through, thus increasing the breadth of the dataset from which the standardized responses would be drawn. But always, the ultimate goal was to wean these courses away from any need for human intervention (except in the direst of circumstances) and to render them self-sufficient, with no need for a human instructor. The Instructor Function would be built into the dataset underlying the course itself, and we would be selling to educational and corporate institutions a product that required no budgetary expense devoted to human beings who teach and interact with students.

This was many years before I became aware of the work being done on what we would all come to call Artificial Intelligence. But it is my argument here that the goals we worked toward at UNext—if in an early and still somewhat inchoate manner—are among the goals of AI enterprises like Open AI (and others) and the educational institutions like the California State University (my own institutional home) that are now partnering with them.

4. Foxes in the Henhouse, or What Is Humanism’s Role in the AI-Powered University?

When Chat-GPT (version 3.5) was first released to the general public on 30 November 2022, it was the first unveiling of an effort that had begun with a partnership between Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and a number of others in late 2015, purportedly in order to advance “artificial intelligence in a way that benefits humanity” (Marr 2023). Its impact on the academic community was swift, changing the working environment for both students and faculty members alike. A recent article in Scientific Reports maintains that “[u]niversity students have begun to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in many different ways in their undergraduate education, some beneficial to their learning, and some simply expedient to completing assignments with as little work as possible,” while it begins with a declaration by the authors that “[t]ext throughout this article was written in collaboration with the ChatGPT [4o] and Claude AI [3.5] systems” (Black and Tomlinson 2025).

According to a recent study in Science, AI use is now widespread among students: “[t]wo-thirds reported using GenAI during the 2023–2024 academic year, and 37% reported using it regularly (i.e., monthly or more)” (Chirikov et al. 2026, p. 818). The authors note that “[u]sage patterns differ considerably across disciplines (see the figure), with higher adoption in STEM fields” (ibid.), though “[s]ome social science disciplines also show high levels of GenAI adoption: Business students report a 51% use rate, and economics stands at 49%.” (ibid.). Where academic integrity is concerned, the authors first note the widespread fear of (and frequent preemptive responses to) student cheating: “[i]n response to widespread GenAI use among students and emerging concerns about academic misconduct, many higher-education leaders have implemented restrictive policies, such as banning GenAI in assessments and enforcing disciplinary measures for unauthorized use” (ibid.). But they also note that cheating rates, so far, appear to be lower than worst-case scenarios often present, while raising a note of alarm about the rates in non-STEM disciplines:

Although our estimates indicate that GenAI-assisted cheating may not be as widespread as anecdotal reports suggest (1), they underscore the considerable challenge it poses for maintaining academic standards. GenAI-assisted cheating varies across disciplines. Overall, estimated rates are higher in non-STEM than in STEM fields. At the discipline level, for example, economics (17%) and journalism (16%) show relatively high rates, whereas biology is among the lowest, at 5%. Given that GenAI adoption in non-STEM disciplines is presently low, there is a concern that the absolute number of cheating cases could substantially increase as usage grows.

(ibid., p. 819)

In a chart included in the article, the authors plot out an estimated rate of AI use for cheating purposes in Humanities disciplines of just under 10%. But they note that “[b]ecause some students may not recognize that their GenAI use constitutes a violation, this estimate is likely conservative” (ibid., p. 818).

Similar problems—and perhaps even more dire in their implications—are manifesting among scholars and faculty members. According to a recent article in Nature, hallucinated citations (citations to works that do not exist) are becoming a major problem in scholarly papers:

[A] team of researchers has sifted through 2.5 million papers and preprints to provide the best assessment yet of the prevalence of hallucinated citations. The team’s audit encompassed 111 million references in papers and preprints listed in major repositories, including arXiv, bioRxiv, Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and PubMed Central, and found that there were 146,932 hallucinated citations in material published in 2025 alone.

(Stokel-Walker 2026)

Cui Bono? Who benefits when the scholars begin submitting to the temptation to take the kinds of shortcut represented by using AI in such a manner? And if this is happening amongst our scholars, researchers, and professors, with what eyes can we look at our students while telling them that they should not be doing the same thing?

Amidst these developments came the announcement on 4 February 2025 that the California State University (the largest university system in the United States) would become from that day forward “the Nation’s First and Largest AI-Empowered University System” (CSU Announces Landmark Initiative to Become Nation’s First and Largest AI-Empowered University System 2025). It was announced with a self-congratulatory flourish:

Today, the California State University (CSU), the largest and most diverse public four-year university in the country, announced a first-of-its-kind public–private initiative with some of the world’s leading tech companies, including Adobe, Alphabet (Google), AWS, IBM, Instructure, Intel, LinkedIn, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and the Office of California Governor Gavin Newsom that will leverage the power of artificial intelligence to create an AI-empowered higher education system that could surpass any existing model in both scale and impact.

The CSU’s unprecedented adoption of AI technologies will make training, learning, and teaching tools—including ChatGPT—available across all 23 CSU universities, ensuring that the system’s more than 460,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff have equitable access to cutting-edge tools that will prepare them to meet the rapidly changing education and workforce needs of California. The CSU expects to make these tools available within the next few weeks.

(ibid.)

It is probably needless to say that the faculty were not consulted,15 and that we found out about this just the same way that everyone else did—via a press release on the University system’s central website. We did not measure. We were measured unto.

Even as I was in the process of writing this, the CSU administration measured unto us yet again, this time by announcing in an email sent to all employees on 19 May 2026, that the system will now “expand toward a multi-vendor AI environment, giving our campuses greater access to a broader ecosystem of AI tools and capabilities.”16 Which other vendors/AIs this might include (Claude, Grok, Gemini, etc.) was not made clear. But what does it matter? We did not measure. We were measured unto. NPR recently published a story covering the behavior of CSU management in this regard, stating that CSU leaders “want it to become the nation’s first artificial intelligence-powered institution of its kind” (Gaines 2026). It was here that CSU students and faculty found out that the administration had renewed its contract with OpenAI (the corporate entity behind Chat-GPT) for another three years. On this, as on so many other things, we did not measure. We were measured unto.

But why is any of this a problem? These tools, after all, are not going to disappear, and a good argument can be made that it is a matter of equity to make them available to CSU students, many of whom do not come from economically privileged backgrounds, and so cannot afford to access these tools privately at the same rate that others might. While I might spend significant time discussing the potentially negative effects of these tools on student cognition and learning (especially in this Wild West period in which such tools have been quite suddenly imposed on a landscape that was not prepared for their use), I am instead going to return to my point about the standardizing of education and course-delivery I worked on more than two decades ago in the early dot com world. These tools—unless university faculty have significant input into their use by students and colleagues alike—have the power to rend the heretofore familiar fabric of education in destructive ways (not merely disruptive—a concept loved by the tech community) that will change the landscape for both faculty and students entirely. As I see it, the end goal is the same as it was at UNext over twenty years ago. To replace the Instructor with an Instructor Function. To put you and me, in other words, out of work.17

Why? Simply put, faculty cost too much. According to a document entitled CSU 2025/26 Budget Planning Guidance, “Salaries and benefits make up 75–80% of operating costs; reducing ongoing salary expense is crucial to financial sustainability” (CSU 2025/26 Budget Planning Guidance 2024). Faculty salaries and benefits alone represent about half of that figure, so up to 40% of the system’s entire budget (Article 31. Salary 2026). Our academic administrators will no doubt protest that they have no such motives, and I cannot in truth say that I have been able to sit in on meetings during which they have professed such motives. The argument I am making here is an “of a kind” claim. The executive managers of a large system, regardless of the particular industry or type of enterprise, are going to be more similar than different. They will be driven by considerations of quality, to be sure. But they will also—and perhaps more than we would like to think—be driven by considerations of quantity, of bottom-line concerns for maximizing productivity while minimizing the cost thereof. In a proposed 2026–27 budget of 9.1 billion dollars (Executive Summary 2026), assuming the 40% figure quoted earlier for overall faculty labor costs gives us a figure of 3.64 billion dollars, spent on faculty salaries and benefits. Next to that, the reported 39 million dollars the CSU will be paying OpenAI over the next three years (Gaines 2026) is like loose change between the sofa cushions. The incentives at work here are obvious.

The next question is how? How will the increasing presence of AI everywhere in university life lead to the reduction, and even the eventual elimination of the faculty (beyond a small rump Parliament of workers retained to give a “human” face to a mechanistic enterprise)? As John Warner has asked, “How long will it take before someone decides the professor is unnecessary?” (Warner 2024).18 It will not happen tomorrow. It will not happen next week, or next academic year. It will be done slowly, as the tenured faculty, who are no longer being replaced in numbers great enough to prevent their decline as a category (Colby 2023),19 eventually disappear, the next group to be reduced will be the non-tenured. Slowly, at first, but surely and with purpose. Their AI replacements (especially in asynchronous online courses—which are the cheapest kind for the institution to deliver) will be informed by the very teaching materials the now-liberated-from-employment human academics have for years now been uploading onto learning management systems like Canvas (whose recent hacking, as Jacques Berlinerblau notes, “provided a teachable moment of the most disempowering sort. We were reminded of the degree to which everything we do in our capacity as teachers is being digitally captured” (Berlinerblau 2026). Just as we were scraping the material generated by test instructors at UNext over two decades ago, you may be quite certain that, no matter what you are being told about the privacy and security and intellectual ownership of your work,20 it is being scraped as well—no matter your rank or perceived status in your scholarly field,21 and for a similar purpose in the end. To replace you.22 You do not measure. You are measured unto.

Now, I am not claiming to have inside knowledge of the private discussions held in the CSU Chancellor’s office, much less those going on in the halls of real power in any educational institution. But I am saying that the pattern of incentives is clear, and that it maps very neatly onto my previous experiences in the world of internet-technology-driven education. The long-standing trend toward hiring fewer and fewer faculty on the tenure track and more and more faculty into adjunct and temporary status is a cost-saving measure. The incentives and precedents for saving money on faculty labor are already well-established. AI represents the new frontier in those long-standing efforts. Adjuncts cost less. AI partnerships cost less still.

5. Conclusions: What Is to Be Done, or Who–Whom?

To ask the question that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin used to ask, though in very different contexts, what is to be done? What can we do both to integrate AI into responsible teaching and scholarship, and successfully resist being shoehorned into the Whom class, unto whom things are measured by the Who class that measures unto us? As I conclude this essay, I can only make a few suggestions below.

(1)

Make common cause with our students over the value of learning information and skills on one’s own. Who wants to merely pretend to be a guitarist or pianist or painter, if one could learn—to greater or lesser degrees—how to do such things oneself? Who wants to spend a life “knowing” only what is measured unto us by an “intelligence” that is not our own? Each short-term decision to let the AI provide us the answer becomes another long-term deficit in knowledge and ability that we may never be able to fix or even address. And a lifetime of that is a recipe for regret in later years.

(2)

Make common cause with each other, faculty standing up for the value of faculty work conceived of in terms of teaching and the scholarship and publication that enriches and is enriched by that teaching. For too long, for decades now, I have observed in my own particular corner of the academic world that the path away from those values is that which is valorized by our institutions, as if the real work of academia was the endless series of administrative tasks that threaten—like an invasive species of flora or fauna—to overwhelm and subjugate the landscape and exterminate all other sparks of life therein. Academia has been colonized by a perspective that considers the students and the faculty who teach them to be the least important people on campus, and the intellectual work they do to be the least important work on campus. This is, in large part, what has led to the kinds of decisions about technology and the place of human beings that I have been discussing in this essay. We must stop excusing—or simply refusing to confront and call out due to false notions of collegiality—the people who make these decisions (who measure unto us). As Berlinerblau has acerbically (and accurately) observed recently: “the decision to massify courses, to casualize academic labor, to peg education to profit—those were initiated by the board, the suits, the suites, the overlords, and all the other rapacious slimeballs who rule us. But whenever these policies were floated, there were always scholars willing to defend, justify, and execute them” (Berlinerblau 2026). We have to stop making common cause with the very forces that aim to replace us.

(3)

Insist on the principle of faculty shared governance in colleges and universities. Yes, I can see some of you rolling your eyes. We have let that fall by the wayside in recent decades, and the management/administrative class has been only too happy to take up the slack and treat us as if we are little (or nothing) more than fungible resources and an expensive line on the balance sheet—witness, again, the long-standing trend toward the adjunctification of the faculty.

(4)

Return—where possible—to the kind of reading, researching, writing, and teaching that has a strong emphasis on human experience and value. There is already no shortage of people both inside and outside of the academy that are more than willing to deride the Humanities, laugh scornfully at Humanism, and/or profess to regard it as not just flawed but inherently oppressive and worthy of dismantling and destroying. With such “friends,” what need we of enemies? Yet, we are also well-stocked with the latter. Literature (the Humanities discipline in which I live, move, and have my being) has inherent value as an art form that reflects a human experience that itself has inherent value. It is, as James Baldwin noted, a way of connecting with others one may never meet, and a means for realizing nonetheless that one’s loneliness is not absolute. There are, and have been, others like you: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive” (Howard 1963, p. 89).

(5)

Resist—not only the evident injustices of the world, and those who perpetrate them, but also those who would tell us that Humanism is now an outmoded (or worse) perspective best left in the dustbin of history. While acknowledging its imperfections and its abuses at the hands of the Measuring Unto class, it is now more important than ever to realize the truth of what Edward Said wrote years ago: “Humanism is the only—I would go so far as saying the final—resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history” (Said 2014, p. xxix). Perhaps this resistance can be best understood in the words of Terence (an African slave who gained his freedom and went on to become one of the most influential dramatists of the ancient Roman world): homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto [I am human, nothing human is alien to me] (Terence 2001, p. 186).23 It is true that the old Humanism made too many things that are human alien to it, but an expanded, reformulated, and more inclusive Humanism can serve us as an attempt to more closely live up to Terence’s vision, by reconnecting the flawed, incomplete, but necessary Humanist project to the original sense of a shared need to resist tyranny, and escape from the measurements of those who would impose it.

I could go on, but other perspectives should be heard now, from other people whose experiences and perspectives are themselves of inherent value. Finally, however, I will suggest that we have, as scholars, teachers, and students, played the posthumanist, and anti-humanist game amongst ourselves long enough to know now that the greater threats are not our poets but our bureaucrats, not our authors but (all too often) our critics, not our teachers, scholars, and students, but those among us who are determined that is their place to treat the rest of us as means, rather than ends, who have decided that they have come to a final knowledge of the value of all things and the final solutions to all problems (including us), and thus it is theirs to measure, while ours is to be measured unto.