Humanification

It is not my job to indoctrinate you into a political party, a philosophical sect, or a religious creed. I am not here to recruit. But it is my job to indoctrinate you about something—namely, how to think, why thinking matters, and what happens when you decide it doesn’t. I have an obligation to give you a language for understanding critical thinking and the dangers of surrendering it, a framework for recognizing the difference between a meaningful life and a comfortable one, and the warning signs that appear when convenience, short-term gratification, and ego begin quietly eating away at the soul. Some of you believe life is a high-stakes struggle over who you become. Others suspect the stakes are lower. A few—regrettably—flirt with nihilism and conclude there are no stakes at all. But whether you dramatize it or dismiss it, the “battle of the soul” is unavoidable. I teach it because I am not a vocational trainer turning you into a product. I am a teacher in the full, unfashionable sense of the word—even if many would prefer I weren’t.

This battle became impossible to ignore when I returned to the classroom after the pandemic and met ChatGPT. On one side stood Ozempification: the seductive shortcut. It promises results without struggle, achievement without formation, output without growth. Why wrestle with ideas when a machine can spit out something passable in seconds? It’s academic fast food—calorie-dense, spiritually empty, and aggressively marketed. Excellence becomes optional. Effort becomes suspicious. Netflix beckons. On the other side stood Humanification: the old, brutal path that Frederick Douglass knew by heart. Literacy as liberation. Difficulty as transformation. Meaning earned the hard way. Cal Newport calls it deep work. Jordan Peele gives it a name—the escape from the Sunken Place. Humanification doesn’t chase comfort; it chases depth. The reward isn’t ease. It’s becoming someone.

Tyler Austin Harper’s essay “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College” captures this split perfectly. Wandering Haverford’s manicured campus, he encounters English majors who treat ChatGPT not as a convenience but as a moral hazard. They recoil from it. “I prefer not to,” Bartleby-style. Their refusal is not naïveté; it’s identity. Writing, for them, is not a means to a credential but an act of fidelity—to language, to craft, to selfhood. But Harper doesn’t let this romanticism off the hook. He reminds us, sharply, that honor and curiosity are not evenly distributed virtues. They are nurtured—or crushed—by circumstance.

That line stopped me cold. Was I guilty of preaching Humanification without acknowledging its price tag? Douglass pursued literacy under threat of death, but he is a hero precisely because he is rare. We cannot build an educational system that assumes heroic resistance as the norm. Especially not when the very architects of our digital dystopia send their own children to screen-free Waldorf schools, where cursive handwriting and root vegetables are treated like endangered species. The tech elite protect their children from the technologies they profit from. Everyone else gets dopamine.

I often tell students this uncomfortable truth: it is easier to be an intellectual if you are rich. Wealth buys time, safety, and the freedom to fail beautifully. You can disappear to a cabin, read Dostoevsky, learn Schubert, and return enlightened. Most students don’t have that option. Harper is right—institutions like Haverford make Humanification easier. Small classes. Ample support. Unhurried faculty. But most students live elsewhere. My wife teaches in public schools where buildings leak, teachers sleep in cars, and safety is not guaranteed. Asking students in survival mode to honor an abstract code of intellectual purity borders on insult.

Maslow understood this long ago. Self-actualization comes after food, shelter, and security. It’s hard to care about literary integrity when you’re exhausted, underpaid, and anxious. Which is why the Ozempic analogy matters. Just as expensive GLP-1 drugs make discipline easier for some bodies, elite educational environments make intellectual virtue easier for some minds. Character still matters—but it is never the whole story.

Harper complicates things further by comparing Haverford to Stanford. At Stanford, honor codes collapse under scale; proctoring becomes necessary. Intimacy, not virtue alone, sustains integrity. Haverford begins to look less like a model and more like a museum—beautiful, instructive, and increasingly inaccessible. The humanities survive there behind velvet ropes.

I teach at a community college. My students are training for nursing, engineering, business. They work multiple jobs. They sleep six hours if they’re lucky. They don’t have the luxury to marinate in ideas. Humanification gets respectful nods in class discussions, but Ozempification pays the rent. And pretending otherwise helps no one.

This is the reckoning. We cannot shame students for using AI when AI is triage, not indulgence. But we also cannot pretend that a life optimized for convenience leads anywhere worth going. The challenge ahead is not to canonize the Humanified or condemn the Ozempified. It is to build an educational culture where aspiration is not a luxury good—where depth is possible without privilege, and where using AI does not require selling your soul for efficiency.

That is the real battle. And it’s one we can’t afford to fight dishonestly.