One afternoon last fall, a class full of Amherst seniors forgot I was there. In the 19th-century octagonal room where I taught my course on fiction, they were deep in an argument about the tempestuous ending of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw—about whether the ghosts haunting two children in a gothic country house are real, about whether they exist only in the deteriorating mind of their governess, about why one of the children dies at the novel’s conclusion, about whether he even dies at all. The famously ambiguous novel is strewn with evidence to support incompatible interpretations, and my students found it all. The discussion became loud, animated. People smiled, then laughed. Nobody was waiting for me to tell them the answer; the room was theirs, all eight sides of it.
A large language model on one of their phones would have exhausted the debate with just a few keystrokes. Try it: Ask ChatGPT or Gemini if the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are real, and they will with alarming speed give you a few bullet points for rival interpretations—and then stand ready for the next question. Ask one to pick a side, and it will do so with triumphant certainty. (“Definitively? No—the ghosts do not exist,” ChatGPT told me.) Or it might offer you a cheeky riff to tie things off, as Claude recently did for me: “The ‘real’ answer may simply be that James wanted the question to haunt you.” The ghosts are haunting, get it?
My point is not that the LLMs are more right or wrong than their human counterparts, but that the speed at which they churn through the argument is the exact opposite of the slow, messy conversation that unfolded in front of me last fall. What makes The Turn of the Screw so generative isn’t that it has a hidden answer waiting to be unlocked. James built the ambiguity in on purpose, and lingering over that uncertainty, turning it over, is the entire point. (“The story,” as one of the characters famously says, “won’t tell.”)
That kind of intellectual experience—irreducibly human, stubbornly inconclusive—is precisely what artificial intelligence cannot offer. AI is a certainty machine: Ask a question, get an answer. But the most important questions don’t work that way, and learning to live inside them, and to enjoy living inside them, may be the most valuable thing that a liberal education can teach. In all the hand-wringing about higher education and its future, we risk turning our colleges into joyless job preparation, political death matches, or both. We’ve forgotten the most important thing of all—that thinking can be deeply pleasurable.
Anxiety about the outsourcing of human thought to computational models is perhaps the dominant strain in our educational discourse at the moment, and plenty has been written about how to protect our campuses from intellectual erosion at a moment when nearly nine in 10 students are using AI in their studies.
Cal Newport, the computer-science professor and productivity writer, has offered one kind of solution: Treat “cognitive fitness” like physical fitness. Universities, he’s said, should become “citadels of concentration,” functioning like a “Navy SEAL boot camp” to prepare students for intellectual hardship. As any athlete will tell you, if you are going to succeed, you have to put in the hard work of the weight room. Lift, rest, repeat.
I’m a fan of Newport’s. But when we treat education solely as a grim, rigorous workout meant to stave off cognitive decline, we forget that the reason athletes engage in intense physical preparation is so they can participate in games and contests that are deeply pleasurable. (As Crash Davis famously demands of his teammates in Bull Durham, “Fun, goddamnit!”) Athletics is not the same as preparation for war, nor is the work of deep thinking. Both are social activities that require hard work, yes, but both are accompanied by the possibility of something else: joy.
We cannot lose sight of that pleasure, and not only because of AI. Over the past few years, educators have watched students succumb to the rush to righteousness—an urgent reflex to seize the “correct” moral or political position and then vociferously defend it by disputing the legitimacy of all others. It is a rejection of the slow work of wrestling with ambiguity. What Newport’s “boot camp” metaphor misses—and what the ideological piety that plays out on social media completely neglects—is that the play of ideas is the essential counterweight to both intellectual laziness and rigid dogma.
Intellectual play is less like a modern sporting event and more like those endless playground games of tag and Wiffle ball you played as a kid. It is a social mode of inquiry propelled by boundless curiosity and a healthy skepticism. Play prevents thinkers and the institutions they inhabit from becoming rooted, fixed, and dull. As Richard Hofstadter put it long ago in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, “Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.”
An undergraduate education must facilitate this kind of slow thinking and its playfulness. It is through play, not painful reps at the intellectual gym, that we do the crucial pedagogical work of teaching our students how to think with both creativity and rigor. It is through play that we are invited to embrace the messy, circuitous, and experimental nature of human curiosity. When professors play as intellectuals, we introduce our students to one of the most valuable gifts we have to offer: the pleasure of the life of the mind.
One persistent criticism of the work that we do on college campuses is that it seems hopelessly frivolous and out of touch. How can a roomful of students debating The Turn of the Screw have any relevance to the profound civic and technological challenges of our own time? It’s impossible to ignore that humanities enrollment has been in decline for well over a decade because of the fear that this kind of activity offers nothing in the way of a marketable skill or quantifiable return on investment.
Yet what we need now, and will need even more as machine thinking works its way deeper and deeper into the workplace, is the capacity for human judgment—judgment that is human not only because a person made it but also because they have learned to think together with other humans about challenges that have no clear answer or solution.
When students debate whether the ghosts in James’s novel are real or imagined, they are not merely settling a literary dispute. They are practicing the capacity to hold two competing interpretations in mind simultaneously, to test each against the available evidence, and to remain genuinely uncertain without becoming paralyzed. They are learning that a question worth asking is, in many cases, one that resists a clean answer.
These are precisely the cognitive habits that have atrophied in our public life. Our most urgent challenges, whether the governance of artificial intelligence, the erosion of democratic norms, or the challenge of building shared meaning across fractured communities, are not engineering problems with determinable solutions. They are interpretive ones that involve weighing trade-offs and competing values. They require citizens who can listen carefully, argue charitably, tolerate complexity, and resist the pull of the obvious. The seminar room, at its best, is where that tolerance is built.
About 90 years ago, one of my predecessors as president of Amherst College, Alexander Meiklejohn, wrote that the art of democracy is “the art of thinking independently together.” That’s what we learn when we engage in intellectual play, and that is what a democratic society requires—the capacity to engage not only in a contest of ideas but also in the joyfulness of our collective striving. To be sure, it’s a long road to travel from the ghosts of Henry James to a revival of our democratic life, so we should have some fun along the way.
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