The surprise on the faces of the doctoral students was as palpable as was the disbelief upon hearing the methodological equivalent of heresy spoken in a classroom. When giving a talk to grad students a year ago at the University of California, Riverside about careers beyond the university, I challenged an orthodoxy that is daily ingrained within too many political science departments. In this case, the orthodoxy had nothing to do with identity politics, “Woke” ideas, or the enrollment crisis. Instead, I challenged the prevailing orthodoxy among many up-and-coming academics that quantitative methods lead to solid research and job security. When I explained that artificial intelligence (AI) could do most of the quantitative work that bestows mystique and value upon many professors, the students were visibly nervous. This was for a good reason. Among many professors in the social sciences, AI will shift the power away from big data wizards and back to old-school classics and methods.
AI is currently the rage. There is no shortage of self-proclaimed AI experts with varying degrees of expertise who appear seemingly out of nowhere. In this cacophony of concern are those worried about AI bias and racism. (Andrew Gillen recently explored how AI got so biased in favor of the left). In the national security realm, other experts fear AI running amok and facilitating human extinction. Among the rank and file of society, job loss and economic displacement are the worries of the age, with as much as 65 percent of the population fearing layoffs in favor of robots. Among the professorate, the ability of chatbots such as ChatGPT to produce the work of quantitative scholars in a few minutes or less threatens many in the academy with outright irrelevance. Due to how moribund and dysfunctional higher education has become, worse things could happen.
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I vividly remember the disdain that quantitative scholars held for those of us who adhered to qualitative methodology as a specialty. Professors who were quantitative scholars researched aggregate effects of one thing against another, such as income and voting habits, and then published the studies that made sweeping claims about human behavior with the numbers to back them up. The studies were always morally perplexing, not because they lacked sophistication or because we could not understand them. Rather, these studies made the human being so small of a variable, and one so divorced from any acknowledged moral universe that the studies often bordered on sociopathy. Those of us who valued learning foreign languages, travel, and deep historical work had to continuously fight to validate our research. What separated these two camps is the legacy of humanism.
Universities emerged in the medieval world, but it was Renaissance Italy that made them great with the revival of Studia Humanitatis: the study of moral philosophy, rhetoric, history, and languages. In 15th-century Italy, the first modern humanists resurrected Classical Greek and Roman ideas and repackaged them into an intellectual agenda devoted to effective human communication, moral consideration, and empathy for the human condition. Unlike later humanism’s affiliation with atheism, many Italian humanists, such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, were religious and transcendental in their drive for learning. While known for his designs in engineering, Leonardo da Vinci still managed to paint the Mona Lisa and compose poetry. For the Renaissance humanists, scholarly subjects were intertwined and interconnected in their orbit around the human soul.
These ideas seem arcane and distant from the modern university because higher education has attempted to eradicate them for decades. In his 1998 book, Who Killed Homer, the historian Victor Davis Hanson documented the demise of Classics departments from the 1960s onwards due to a combination of professor careerism and the growing notion that Western civilization was worthy of intellectual destruction. By the turn of the millennium, not only were the classics on their way out, but Woke was on its way in. The humanities that originated in the Renaissance had devolved into siloed fiefdoms of academic disciplines driven by identity politics and confirmation bias. Unlike in the universities of the humanities’ Italian forebears, contemporary disciplines like history, literature, and philosophy were walled off from the sciences. No university today would produce a Da Vinci, and a scholar like Pico della Mirandola would be run off most campuses for daring to discuss God.
This degeneration of higher education is better known than the near-hegemony that quantitative analysis has obtained in the social sciences. Good dataset work and time-series panel data are quicker to research and publish than tracking down eye-witnesses of terrorism abroad or digging through Turkish archives to understand the thinking of Ottoman military officers involved in the Armenian Genocide. Despite the reduction of the human being to a data point rather than an empathetic subject of study, quantitative methods offer an illusion of finality to the questions they address. When combined with the forward-looking Marxist theories of a better tomorrow, quantitative research takes on a quasi-divine quality that offers a glimmer of hope for ending humanity’s problems. The advent of AI is going to change all of this.
The ability of a good chatbot to run numbers and datasets threatens quantitative researchers with irrelevance. Bots like ChatGPT, GrokAI, and others lower the threshold for researchers to run their own data without the same tedium and formal modeling mastery that was once the exclusive domain of quantitative researchers. Suddenly, the bots can talk anyone who has an internet connection through game theory modeling. A consulting firm no longer needs a quantitative research PhD to produce research to push policy. Of course, some programming will always be required, but the quantitative hegemony enjoyed by quantitative researchers is over. What will be in greater demand is something that universities have now long denigrated: the qualities of the human being.
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The advent of AI offers a chance to renew the university by reviving what originally made it great and integrating it with a humanistic approach to new technology. The lower threshold to quantitative data mastery makes mixed methods more accessible to scholars looking to blend old and new. The ability to speak in person and present information verbally and eloquently are just as necessary today as they were in the Renaissance. Foreign languages are more accessible and learnable with the assistance of AI.
The opportunity for a new Studia Humanitatis is there, all that is missing is the conversation to start the transformation.
Image: “Digital Humanities AI generated art” by Microsoft Bing on Wikimedia Commons
