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This past fall I returned to Princeton after three years of retirement to teach eighteen-year-olds about the self. My colleagues were consumed by one question: how do you stop students from using AI to write their essays? The seminar turned out to be one of the best I have taught in thirty-five years.
The course was a First-Year Seminar on the formation and transformation of the self, drawing on original texts in anthropology and psychoanalysis. My aim was to develop what I call people skills—not the measurable skills specific to technical puzzles or professional roles, but the capacity to understand oneself and others with honesty and depth. I had taught versions of this course before, to both graduate and undergraduate students. Each time, I saw my task as facilitating the development of voice, interpersonal skill, and emotional intelligence: empathy in communication, cross-cultural respect, and above all how to access the subjective element of the self—what makes us who we are.
During the first two weeks I dedicated four ninety-minute sessions to the structure of the psyche: the split between ego, id, and superego; the true and false self; repression and the unconscious; the relationship between fantasy and the reality principle. All theoretical reading was accompanied by empirical examples. I focused on the students themselves and guided them to understand their own plasticity and indeterminacy. College, I told them, was a liminal phase between childhood and adulthood—a threshold that would shape who they would become in ways none of them could anticipate. To provide a concrete example from an adolescent perspective, I had them watch the four-part British series Adolescence, which depicted a four-day period during which a thirteen-year-old boy was arrested for murdering a female classmate. I was less interested in his guilt than in our collective cluelessness—about him, and about the adolescent self more generally. What does it mean not to know what is happening inside someone we live with, love, or are?
Students wrote a three-page essay weekly in response to prompts asking them to recall the sensory impressions of a scene and think through those impressions, organizing them into experience with the help of the readings. Only one initial response appeared to use AI. I wrote on his paper that I was most interested in his voice and its progression, and that this first essay did not reflect his voice at all—it was too perfect, the metaphors too literary, having nothing to do with his age or experience. I wanted something rawer and impressionistic. From then on, every student looked forward to the prompts.
What I stressed above all was the indeterminate, the accidental, the surprise—not the self as a stable essence to be expressed, but the self as something discovered sideways, often against one’s intentions, through encounters with the world.
The students understood this because they had already lived it. Lilly had taken a gap year to dance with a company in Jerusalem, drawn by a performance that had made her cry at sixteen. She had not gone looking for a vocation; she stumbled into one. “It was as though I accidentally stumbled upon a dream,” she wrote. “I didn’t know what it was until I found it.” A year later, adjusting to Princeton, she discovered through the course readings that the self she had worked so hard to consolidate was not a fixed thing but a multiplex and discontinuous process. The class gave her the vocabulary not to stabilize that discovery but to live with it more honestly.
Mary arrived intending to major in engineering, then switched to a finance-adjacent field for its career options. One day, for no reason she could later explain, she began reading a mathematical proof on cyclic groups—a subject entirely outside her coursework. She spent six hours on it. “I would get an epiphany rush every time I would entangle a new layer of the proof,” she wrote. That accident—an afternoon of following curiosity without permission—forced her to confront what her ego had been suppressing: that she was a theoretical thinker who had been protecting herself, she eventually realized, from her father’s expectations. The proof did not tell her who she was. It ambushed her with it.
Oliver spent a summer at a prestigious bank in London and found himself saying internally, “I don’t feel like myself”—not once but repeatedly over three months. The novelty of the suit and tie wore off within two weeks. He stayed anyway, performed competently, told people it was impressive, and watched his actual self go quiet. Writing about it in the seminar, he recognized what he had been unwilling to name at the time: that his ego had been deceiving his self, mistaking others’ praise for inner confirmation. “Those three months saved me from my biggest fear,” he concluded: “wasting my potential.” The insight arrived not in Geneva but in the act of writing, months later, under conditions that required honesty.
Ben’s moment was more abrupt. On a service trip, sleep-deprived and hungry, he said to a local volunteer while building a ramp for a disabled senior: “Well, I do a lot of winning, so it’ll be fine.” The volunteer paused and said he had just been telling someone else how impressed he was with the humility of students from Ben’s school. “This sentence,” Benjamin wrote, “hit me like a truck.” It was not a lesson he had sought. It was the accidental return of his own self in someone else’s words.
This is what the humanistic social sciences can teach—and what AI cannot. AI has no experience of its own. It borrows the voices of humans, synthesizes them, and produces fluent text that sounds like someone but is no one in particular. A student who submits an AI-generated essay has not merely cheated; they have missed the entire point. The point is not the essay. The point is to learn from experience: the encounter between the student’s own life—its accidents, its resistances, its unexamined moments—and ideas powerful enough to illuminate that life from the inside.
Voice is not a stylistic attribute. It is what remains when a person has genuinely grappled with experience and found their own way to express it. Lilly’s voice is inseparable from the year she spent in Jerusalem and the courage it took to return. Mary’s is inseparable from six hours alone with a proof that had no practical use. Oliver’s is inseparable from three months of quiet self-betrayal in a Swiss bank. Ben’s is inseparable from surprise at his own lack of humility in a summer work camp. These voices could not have been produced any other way. They required living, and then the difficult work of making experience out of what has merely been lived.
At the end of the seminar I assigned my own memoir in manuscript—it had not yet been published. In it, I tried to do exactly what I had been asking of the students—to follow the accidental and the indeterminate honestly, without knowing where it would lead. They were moved by it in ways that surprised me. What moved them, I think, was not the content but the model: that an older person, looking back across decades, was still engaged in the same uncertain process of self-formation that lay ahead of them. The self, the book suggested, does not resolve. It develops—if you let it, if you are willing to be surprised by it, if you resist the temptation to hand that process over to something more efficient.
The attack on the humanities rests on a simple premise: that what cannot be measured cannot be valuable. But the self cannot be measured. Experience cannot be measured. The capacity to recognize oneself in a moment of unexpected honesty—on a service trip, in a math proof, in a bank in Geneva—cannot be measured. What the humanities can teach is the practice of taking one’s own inner life seriously enough to examine it, and taking the inner lives of others seriously enough to try to understand them beneath their self-presentation, or simply to understand them as they cannot always understand themselves. In a world increasingly organized around surfaces, metrics, and the efficient production of plausible text, that practice is not a luxury. It is, in the end, the only thing that makes us legible to each other—and to ourselves.