SPRING 2026 Ransom Everglades LOG 21 world through books, Ransom Everglades provided so many opportunities to do that.” Critics of AI tools tend to focus, for very legitimate reasons, on the way they automate writing. From the perspective of Chief of Innovation and Strategic Programming John A. King Jr., the more insidious problem that has emerged three years into the AI revolution is their ability to automate reading – to short-circuit the long, exploratory process of knowledge-gathering that good writing ultimately depends on. “What I worry about with AI is the increasing lack of respect for knowledge,” King said. “Good writers are curious people who don’t think they know everything. And that’s why they do tons of research, even if it’s just to inform a tiny scene.” I share Dr. King’s concern, and what it underscores for me is the necessity of teaching intellectual humility as a habit of mind in the humanities classroom: a deference to the hard work of research, the slow work of reading and the irreducible beauty of a human voice on the page. “You’ve got to read a ton of stuff, as much as you can possibly cram in,” said Lindsay. “It’s like someone saying, ‘I’m going to be a football star, but I’ve never seen the game played.’ No, you’ve got to see as many games as you can.” But I also can’t help but feel excited about students discovering new forms of knowledge – and yes, even writing – that would’ve been inaccessible without AI. In the next academic year, the English Department will introduce a digital humanities course, Research Seminar: Literature and AI, that asks a basic question: What can we use this technology to do, in the humanities, that we couldn’t have done before? Some students will use it to find new patterns of thought and literary expression across vast bodies of text. Others might use it to make their research come to life in novel, interactive ways. No one will use it to write their paper – or, for that matter, to do the reading. The aim of the course is to give them a whole new universe of things to write about. “What does AI introduce, what does it bring to the party, that can elevate the design of what we’re doing and still preserve critical thinking skills? I think one of the exciting things is that what we’re writing about will be perhaps different because AI will give us some opportunities, some insights, some ways to analyze text in a way that you couldn’t do before,” explained Humanities Department Chair Jen Nero. I also take comfort in the idea that some things never change. If you crack open the 1970 edition of The Lamp and the Book, the Ransom School’s literary magazine, you will find numerous poems by Jeff Lindsay, then known as Jeff Freundlich. Among them are modern riffs on character portraits from The Canterbury Tales, written for Bowden’s class. We still do that exercise every year. And if it helped one great writer find his voice, I have no reason to doubt that, even in 2026, it could help many more. “Good writers are curious people who don’t think they know everything.” – John A. King Jr. “I learned to read first, and then I learned to write. And I often think of writing as a way to convey what I have read.” – Vanessa Mobley ’88
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