University administrators have been debating how best to integrate AI into classrooms in recent months.
Technology has been banned from humanities and social sciences (sosc) Core classrooms, a move that administrators have publicly touted. Social Sciences Collegiate Division Master Jenny Trinitapoli wrote in a memo this summer that sosc Core classes are “best understood as a pedagogical setting without AI.”
At the same time, the University of Chicago has given all students, faculty, and staff access to Anthropic’s enterprise suite of large language models starting in July for staff and autumn quarter for students.
Amid the changes, the Maroon spoke to students and professors in humanities sequences about how the new policies are impacting them and to find out how they are adapting.
Haitham Ibrahim, an associate instructional professor who teaches the Media Aesthetics: Image, Text, Sound humanities Core sequence, told the Maroon in an interview that Trinitapoli’s memo for sosc classes made him rethink the merits of allowing technology in his classroom. “They were the first to say that [Claude is] advanced enough to the point where it’s going to be a challenge to… differentiate what’s legitimate writing from what’s not,” he said. “That made me feel that a new policy was necessary.… There [is] no room for any kind of electronic device in class.”
Ibrahim has incorporated in-person midterm and final exams into the course in addition to a final project. He’s also changed the format of out-of-class discussion posts, making them strictly based on notes taken on paper during class.
Ibrahim is not the only professor to adopt classroom practices beyond going analog. Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy and director of undergraduate studies in the Philosophy department, told the Maroon she had replaced out-of-class papers with in-class exams in her Philosophical Perspectives course after ChatGPT was released in 2022, but this year she is moving back toward written papers.
“There are skills that students don’t get to practice, don’t get to learn if they don’t have to do the kind of writing where you get to think about it for a little bit,” Callard said.
Beginning this year, Callard is offering students in her Core class two tracks to choose from. Students have the option to take three exams throughout the quarter or meet outside class with other students to discuss the material and write three short papers based on those conversations.
“My thinking was that if some of the work of the paper had already been started in a conversation, that it would seem more doable to try and continue that on one’s own rather than facing a blank page and an empty prompt,” she said.
Similarly, Samantha Fenno, a senior instructional professor and the chair of the Human Being and Citizen humanities sequence, adopted a more formal process of incorporating group discussions into written assignments, having students discuss texts, present their ideas, and then reflect on their own thoughts and those of their peers in writing.
“When students use AI, they don’t remember what they wrote,” Fenno said. “The hum Core and sosc Core are training the muscle of your mind. If you do the reading and pay attention in class and talk to your classmates about the reading, there’s a lot of you staked into that—the human part.”
Bill Hutchison, who teaches the new Inquiry, Conversation, Argument (ICA) writing Core course, has also shifted to more in-class writing. He said he’s seen professors in the Center for Writing and the humanities Core adapt in different ways, but “the colleagues [he’s] most inspired by are the ones that are pushing themselves out of years of comfortable pedagogical routine.”
“I think students deserve us seeing teaching afresh and anew,” he said.
Multiple professors described the shift away from technology in humanities classrooms as a net positive, decreasing distractions and increasing the quality of in-class discussions.
“There is less distraction.… In the past when I regulated laptop use, most students followed the code, but some of them would just peek and look and get distracted,” Ibrahim said. “I think it’s been a net positive to train their perception.”
Callard said adding formal out-of-class discussions to her course has helped students cultivate conversational skills. “One of the things that we should be thinking about are students becoming good conversationalists. That’s just as important a skill, in my view, as being good at writing.”
Hutchison said that he might have missed the positive value of alternatives to out-of-class essays. “Many of us leaned too hard on the [take-home long-form essay] as the only kind of student writing we were getting,” Hutchison said. “One of the questions that AI raises is what kind of evidence of student thinking do we want to see.… It turns out you can see student thinking in all kinds of forms of writing.”
First-year students in the humanities Core said the policy better facilitated in-class engagement and unfiltered conversation compared to technology-permitting high school classes.
“I think the benefit is that people are genuinely doing their work,” Dylan Johnson, who is taking the Greece and Rome: Texts, Traditions, Transformations sequence, said of the changes. “You’ll never have to wonder, ‘Hey, is this person just AI-ing the whole thing?’”
“I think [technology-free classrooms have] just shown that there are people that are genuinely intelligent and creative, and they know how to try,” he added.
Grace Zhuang said she thought most students agreed with the no-AI policy in her Readings in World Literature course, which also has an analog classroom but still assigns out-of-class essays. “UChicago is a very self-selecting school, so if you [came] here, you knew you were going to have to put up with the serious academic rigor.… I think most people here actually enjoy that,” said Zhuang. “I feel like you can see that in my class discussions because everyone always has something really cool to share.”
But students also saw costs to a stricter anti-AI approach.
Zhuang questioned some professors’ decisions to require all essays to be written in-class, as is the case in some of her friends’ courses. “I understand the paranoia, but I feel like that’s going a bit too far,” she said.
Zhuang continued: “A lot of older generations hate on younger generations for being too dependent on tech or AI, but I think Gen Z is more anti-AI than people think we are.”
“One of the most difficult things as an instructor in dealing with AI is that it brought a sort of adversari[ness] to the classroom at times where there ha[s] been, historically, a sense of collaboration and collegiality,” Hutchison said. “A lot of my efforts to change assignments and my classroom approach.… have been to diminish or remove that adversari[ness].”
Zhuang also said the University has been unclear about its expectations for student use of AI. She said her STEM and economics classes have very different norms for AI use than her humanities course.
“‘The Habits of the Mind’ felt very performative.… They didn’t actually touch on the nuances of the [AI] policy,” Zhuang said in reference to the workshop for first-year students during O-Week.
UChicago does not have a universal classroom AI policy, leaving the details of acceptable AI use up to instructors.
Hutchison sees the new first-year writing Core requirement as one way the University is responding to writing and AI on campus. “Yes, we’ve given Claude Enterprise to every student, but we also have radically revamped the Writing Program,” he said. “This institution has doubled down on its support for writing as a fundamental part for any kind of education that you are going to get at [UChicago].”
ICA, the new writing Core course first piloted last year, uses essay writing and an extensive peer review process to “help students learn to read critically and creatively, analyze evidence, structure complex ideas, and develop independent arguments,” according to the Center for Writing website.
About 70 percent of first-years will enroll in ICA this year, according to Hutchison, and the class will be required for all first-years starting in the 2027–28 academic year. ICA has its own AI policy that is enforced across all course sections and prohibits using generative AI “to produce, revise, interpret, research, discover, or evaluate coursework or course materials.”
Individual humanities Core instructors are also incorporating discussions around AI into their courses. “I try to make AI a topic of inquiry in the class, not to take it for granted as this black box that produces stuff but actually to help students think about AI in writing, for example,” Ibrahim said.
Regardless of whether professors see the changes as beneficial or just necessary, they acknowledged that a change was necessary. “Sometimes new eras in thinking, including pedagogy, require some kind of fierce catalyst to force change, and I think AI has been that fierce catalyst,” Hutchison said.
“The humanities are always renewing themselves,” Fenno said. “We’re in a moment… [when] the humanities has to think about, ‘What is the value of what we’re doing?’ And for the most part, the value of the humanities is the human.”
