Rob Townsend

New: "if you care about your students and the future of the #humanities... You need to engage with AI, understand both its appeal and its limitations, and integrate that awareness into your teaching." bit.ly/4y9LM2V

"the decline in History education... is emblematic of the broader challenges we face. We are increasingly illiterate, increasingly fixated on “costs” as opposed to “value,” and increasingly privileging our proverbial left-brain at the expense of our right." bit.ly/4yHIYu0

"in a world dominated by artificial intelligence and technological advancements, it is more important than ever to safeguard the uniquely human qualities which define the humanities." bit.ly/4ijFnfn

Slides for a talk given at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media about how I am experimenting with AI at work and for a history research project: The good and the bad, and why it makes me more optimistic about the future of the humanities.: bit.ly/4ih2cAx

"An obvious reason for valuing literature classes as a pre-med student is the opportunity to gain empathy for patients through reading their raw, emotional perspectives in novels or poetry...helps ground their science knowledge in a place of humanity." bit.ly/47ttY7V

"At precisely this moment, the question of what it means to be human and to possess human intelligence has become more urgent than ever. That is why the humanities have never been more essential and why they need to form a central part of the education of every student." bit.ly/3UcsmfE

"The University of Oregon is considering phasing out ... some or all of the master’s and doctoral programs offered in History, Romance Languages, Folklore, Comparative Literature, Classics, and German and Scandinavian" bit.ly/4eCYxvx

"The job market for humanities scholars may be bleaker than ever—except for the handful of academics who specialize in the philosophy of artificial intelligence." bit.ly/4zGHbq1

“We should value and uphold the humanities more than we do already...Not in a way that discounts STEM and science, but in a way that makes them equal.” bit.ly/4B6p3as

"Stanford students in particular, he said, are wary of the absence of a clear career “escalator” in the humanities — a predictable, linear pathway to employment." bit.ly/4j9uKhi

"The humanities are not a relic of the past, withering away while STEM overtakes education and the world. They have always been and will always be relevant to our development as a society." bit.ly/4yEl2Z0

"Its possible that in another 10 years time, the #humanities will have proven resurgent — remaining the domain of humans rather than computers." bit.ly/4yyl0lu

"Many of us in the professional schools simply could not do our work without this foundational scaffolding from the humanities." bit.ly/4y6abWK

"Things will go wrong, so we need problem-solving; people will live together, so we need collaboration; people will disagree, so we need empathy and conflict resolution; and we need resilience. The humanities prepare us for all of these." bit.ly/475xi8Z

“I think #humanities have a better story to tell than most other fields in response to what AI is doing... We [humanities majors and graduates] fill in a major gap, a weakness of AI.” bit.ly/4yqAeZR

Slides for my talk at St. John's University on the value of humanities skills in the workforce are now available at bit.ly/4hTHhnS (LinkedIn). Happy to share if you would like the original slide deck.

“The ability to formulate an argument, the ability to evaluate an argument, the ability to read a bit of text and extract an argument from that text; I think these are really skills that … are going to come in handy” bit.ly/47gO70E

“AI has not rescued the humanities. What it has done is reveal, with unusual clarity, what happens when societies allow the institutions that cultivate judgement to erode.” bit.ly/4d3OWxd

New: Focus groups and interviews with young people (bit.ly/3V50oTf) and the secondary teachers and counselors (bit.ly/4hjtkOE) who work with them provide important insights into how the #humanities fit into students' educational journeys and development as whole people.

“Many students just don’t feel comfortable with long-form reading that they’d do in an English or history class... If students don’t feel comfortable with text, they’re more likely to be attracted by something that doesn’t require them to do that reading.” bit.ly/4rw2bge

"College should prepare us for the world, but most of all prepare us to live. If universities keep pushing humanities to the sidelines because they may not be as profitable as other fields, we risk forgetting the purpose of education." bit.ly/3TMocLa

Thanks to Jennifer McNabb and Jess Cruz for two terrific days at UNI talking to faculty and students, and an opportunity to learn more about the terrific new Humanities Hub program here.

"The emerging conventional wisdom: In the age of AI, human skills such as creativity, communication and collaboration could provide a crucial professional edge, whatever the field." bit.ly/4ydZr9K

"Enrolment in humanities courses is holding up in the UK despite concern about their supposed declining popularity in an employability-focused environment": bit.ly/4dD0JCL

Slides for my talk at Coastal Carolina are now posted at bit.ly/4h74zoJ (on LinkedIn). If you can't download, or just want the PowerPoint version, please don't hesitate to ask.

"This future will be one of our own making as we professors erode the basics of humanities instruction and assessment to keep LLMs from turning writing assignments into opportunities to offload work." bit.ly/46ZGlYW

"Townsend said colleges and universities could address those concerns by making the skills students develop through humanities courses more explicit, including research, writing, and communication skills." bit.ly/4h7xZDg

"That presents universities with a paradox. While artificial intelligence is making it easier to generate text and information, skills traditionally associated with the #humanities —including critical reading, writing and analysis—could become more valuable." bit.ly/3T6LN8Y

"The humanities, the arts, they allow you to do the critical thinking. They allow you to think about what are the stories that are going to resonate with this population or this population. That’s human creativity. Currently, AI can’t replace that." bit.ly/4AaYvnW

"Instead of casting our adaptation as a defeat for religious studies... I instead focus on it as an opportunity to extend the reach of religious studies in ways that sharpen and expand the discipline’s skillset while supporting students and health professions." bit.ly/4xmuv5K

Hard to believe it has been 25 years. My memories of the day for the September 11 Digital Archive bit.ly/2Q5zWqr.

Grateful to the Baker Nord Institute for hosting a terrific discussion about the state of the humanities, and Maysan Haydar for a great conversation with her Public Humanities class!

As a higher ed finance person, I keep emphasizing that more students are enrolling in high cost of educating fields like health and engineering and fewer in lower-cost fields like the humanities. This squeezes institutional budgets as cross-subsidies disappear.

“Humanities students learn skills like fact-checking and writing good prose that fills in a lot of the gaps that come from working with AI... The hard part is figuring out how to get people to recognize that.” bit.ly/4r1OsO1

The decline in #humanities bachelor's degrees slowed substantially in 2025 (bit.ly/4yh0sgK), but a separate analysis of enrolled majors (pictured below) indicates further losses ahead, with the pace of decline accelerating since the pandemic (bit.ly/3UtRqyC).

"If we can improve the world of #humanities scholarship in order to defuse an impending problem, then even if the problem turns out not to be as harmful as we expected, our time will have been well spent." bit.ly/4xbsIAu

"The humanities have a distinctive role in higher education: they create the time and space to question inherited ideas about who is recognised as human, how we relate to other forms of life and what we mean by progress." bit.ly/4iaO1OU

"Liberal arts majors aren’t meant to lead you directly into a career. They’re meant to teach you how to think for yourself based on curiosity and passion, not how to achieve a certain job title." bit.ly/4yqrNgR

“I study the #humanities because it gives me the broadest base to be a great person and a great teacher. Now it seems they just want to beat down the humanities to look futuristic, like they are on the cutting edge. But of what?’’ bit.ly/4gX1hoe

“Maybe on your syllabus you have a little more information that by taking this course you’re going to acquire some of the most important requirements in the job market today” bit.ly/4qTizXB

"humanities scholars’ unwillingness to write to anyone who isn’t already a member of the club has contributed to our decline... the world outside our campus gates loves the humanities—book clubs and music performances and podcasts, oh my!" bit.ly/4gzOyZG

“There are good reasons for suspicion about the integration of AI into the humanities. But we should also admit that many of the objections to AI overstate the comparative advantages of human work.” bit.ly/4y9LM2V

New federal rule strips disparate-impact liability from NEH, NEA, and IMLS Title VI regulations, leaving intentional discrimination as the sole basis for enforcement: bit.ly/3UlrO71

"Business leaders are looking for people who can bring “their humanity” to the table ... here at Purdue Fort Wayne, the English and Humanities departments are seeing that reflected in their enrollment, which has remained stable and even grown slightly over the last three years." bit.ly/4yillII

Computer science majors now dropping faster the English majors. Does that count as good news? bit.ly/4xycWkl

"The humanities now face their own version of the koan: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Intellectual innovation is occurring...but increasingly without a broader educated public listening." bit.ly/4izp1ku

"At engineering schools, Horn said, an AI major is "signaling, 'Hey, this isn't just coding.'" On the #humanities side, he said, the idea is broader. "Liberal arts has never been more important in this era of AI — figuring out who are we and what are we meant to do."" bit.ly/4xpw1oy