Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock frequently uses the phrase, “At Dartmouth, we teach students how to think—not what to think.” But in this age of artificial intelligence, it is “why” we think that can save our sense of purpose. The more super intelligent machines can solve, the more we need to learn how to prioritize shared wellbeing over individual advancement. A liberal arts education can be a vehicle for private gain. But the thriving of current and future generations is what a liberal arts education is for.
In 2010, Kenji Hosokawa ’98 started a debate on Facebook when he questioned then-President Jim Kim’s commitment to a liberal arts education based on published excerpts of an interview. Mayank Keshaviah ’97, Won Joon Choe ’97, John Honovich ’97, David Evans-Pinzón ’97 and a number of other alums and I chimed in. After a lively, weeklong exchange, we received a note from Kim, copying his then outreach director Nariah Broadus.
Kim wrote:
This was not clear as they edited the piece but please know that I was reflecting on the idea in the context of all the conversations I’m having with students in the class of 2010 who are trying to decide what to do next...
I hedged my bets more than anyone by doing both a medical degree and a PhD in anthropology. I still love reading social theory and philosophy and do so on a regular basis. Indeed, I think that the solution to today’s most difficult problems must start with training the leaders of tomorrow first through a liberal arts undergraduate education.
A few weeks ago, Yiran Jiang ’26 wrote in a column in The Dartmouth, “Ancient Athenian citizens dedicated their free time to thinking and philosophizing. Part of what liberal arts education does is to echo that spirit — to liberate the mind and to encourage reflection.”
Jiang undersells it. Today’s stakes are higher than when Kim made history by breaking Dartmouth’s presidential color barrier. Embracing a liberal arts education is even more critical.
A liberal arts education pursued for personal enrichment is a luxury we can no longer afford. Climate change is already contributing to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year, and scientific estimates project that mortality will scale significantly toward the middle of the 21st century. Comprehensive scientific reports, such as that of the Lancet Commission, confirm that global pollution levels have already breached global safety thresholds and account for millions of premature deaths annually. Tech executives like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Verizon’s Dan Schulman have warned that artificial intelligence could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, pushing national unemployment rates into the double digits. Analyses from groups like the Boston Consulting Group suggest 15% of all jobs face elimination by 2031. Sixty million households — 150 million Americans — are already unable to afford basic daily necessities.
Things are bad. I have seen no evidence that Open AI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, are devoting the preponderance of the compute or code they control to solving these problems.
I have, however, already seen evidence of Jiang’s piece sparking necessary conversations in alumni social media groups and message threads.
I shared Jiang’s piece with Zan Song ’17. We met at this year’s Latinx Heritage Month Big Green Affair alumni event in Los Angeles. When I shared that I was reading Richard Rorty and Byung-Chul Han for fun, we began an interrogative dialogue that we’ve been in ever since. Apparently we’ve run afoul of Elan Kluger ’26’s assertion that we chose Dartmouth because we are “anti-intellectual,” but I digress.
Zan and I both empathized with Jiang’s viewpoint. I suspect many more will soon.
On the Oct. 13 episode of The Daily, Cornell University mathematics professor Steven Strogatz described how he felt watching artificial intelligence solve problems that human mathematicians have wrestled with for decades. Strogatz confessed that ChatGPT hallucinations made large language models laughable to top mathematicians in 2022. But by May of this year, OpenAI wasn’t just solving sophisticated puzzles like Navier-Stokes equations, it was producing “elegant proofs.”
The existential weight of what could be lost if machines deliver answers without human struggle — the insights and understandings that make solving problems meaningful — brought Strogatz to tears.
His grief was compounded by the fact that social media users were reveling in the schadenfreude of having even the most elite minds — like Terrence Tao, also known as “the Mozart of math” — liquidated by superintelligence. Strogatz lamented that he saw the “put the fries in the bag, Terrence” meme everywhere on X.
Whether we want to or not, all of us will be forced to grapple with what happens to human purpose when our talents, ambitions and doggedness are bypassed and surpassed by code. Where do we go from here?
A liberal arts education gives us our best shot at answering that question.
In his seminal book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl posited that humanity’s paramount motivation for persisting is the “will to meaning” — the deep drive to find a purpose — rather than the pursuit of pleasure or power. Frankl made this argument in writing and subsequent interviews “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” He got it from Nietzsche, who first made this point over a half a century before in “Twilight of the Idols.”
On the other side of World War II, after fascism in Europe had finally been defeated, Ernest Hemingway, offered a complementary reflection:
We have come out of the time when obedience, the acceptance of discipline, intelligent courage and resolution were most important into that more difficult time when it is a man’s duty to understand his world rather than simply fight for it.
It will be our duty, when we have sufficient valid knowledge, to disagree, to protest, even to revolt and to rebel and still work always toward finding a way for all men to live together on this earth.
Hemingway was a toxic and abusive lifelong self-medicator. But he wasn’t wrong about this.
Toward the conclusion of his piece, Jiang writes, “I believe we are more than capable of succeeding, not just for ourselves but for a broader community.”
That’s the hope of a liberal arts education. It’s time for us all to put ours to good use.
Unai Montes-Irueste is a member of the Dartmouth College Class of 1998, Dartmouth College Alumni Council, and president of the Dartmouth Association of Latino/a/x/e and Caribbean Alumni. He lives in Southern California with his wife and three children. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
