The Campus
I walked across Fordham’s Bronx campus in the early fall, when the air still held a trace of summer but the light had already begun to thin. Leaves scraped along the walkways like small animals fleeing something unseen. Somewhere a bell rang without urgency, just to mark the hour.
Students crossed the quad with the unhurried purpose of a migration, some speaking, some not, and their voices grew thin as they neared the buildings. Their steps slowed. The laughter died. They went on in silence toward what waited there.
I followed the path toward the philosophy building, and the campus seemed to close upon itself as I walked, brick and stone rising with a somber intent, as though erected less to welcome than to endure. The buildings loomed broad and darkened by years of weather, their towers lifting into the gray air like sentinels posted by men who had perished. The windows lay deep in the walls, unlit and inscrutable, giving nothing back to the gaze that searched them.
There was no haste in the place, only the deep stillness of continuation. It felt shaped by time rather than urgency, possessed of a permanence that neither hurried nor softened. As I moved through it, I sensed that whatever knowledge lay within those walls would not be given freely or quickly, but would ask for patience, and perhaps leave behind a measure of doubt as the cost of learning.
Inside, the room was dim and cool. Wooden desks scarred with hieroglyphs. A chalkboard that had heard many claims about truth and would hear many more, none of them final. This was where we were meant to encounter Plato. This was where we were meant to reckon with justice.
The Book
I bought Plato’s Republic and carried it with me like a responsibility I hadn’t fully agreed to. The thing had real weight. It sat in my bag like a brick with opinions. The font was small. The paper was thin. And the sentences moved forward with the quiet assurance of something that did not care whether you were coming along.
I highlighted religiously. Whole pages. Paragraphs that glowed with meaning I assumed would reveal itself later, once I was smarter or calmer or older. My internal monologue was deeply sincere.
This matters.This is important.I’ll come back to this.
I did not come back to this.
In class, I nodded. I perfected the look of a young man in active contemplation. I learned to say things like “the ideal city” in a way that suggested I had spent meaningful time there. I participated just enough to avoid suspicion. Around me, others did the same. We were a room full of people quietly agreeing not to ask certain questions.
Here’s the part I didn’t understand then, but do now: I wasn’t lazy, and I actually wanted to learn this thing. I respected it. I just didn’t understand it. Not in a way that lodged anywhere durable or in a way that changed how I thought or acted or understood the people around me.
I was earnest. And I still didn’t learn.
Which is the question that stayed with me long after the book went back on the shelf:
What exactly did that struggle accomplish?
The Polite Fiction
Here’s the polite fiction we maintain, together, like a family lie about how the dog died peacefully in his sleep.
Most students are not really reading these books.
They are skimming. They are sampling AI. They are opening them with the same hope you open a Terms and Conditions page, which is to locate the exit as quickly as possible.
Professors have been doing this long enough to recognize the look of someone who has read the first twenty pages, the last five pages, and a summary written by a person who does not technically exist.
The students know the professors know.The professors know the students know they know.
And so we all participate in this quiet, elegant ballet of mutual non-confrontation.
A hand goes up in class. A comment is made. It is… adjacent. No one stops the music.
This is not a moral failure, and no one here is a villain. This is what happens when we treat learning like a triathlon people just need to survive.
The remarkable thing is not that students fake it. It’s how long we’ve all agreed to pretend that they aren’t.
And the professors, God bless them, tend to treat this like a charming inevitability, like a kind of weather.
They smile wryly and shrug. They make little jokes about “kids these days,” as if what’s happening is no more alarming than students wearing pajamas to class or calling them by their first name.
Which is strange, when you think about it, because this is the part where the transmission of ideas quietly fails. Where centuries of thought start getting treated like decorative antiques. And yet the prevailing attitude is one of malaise and resignation, as if the slow erosion of understanding is just one of those things that happens, like inflation or lower-quality towels.
They seem to think what they are witnessing is harmless, merely because it is familiar.
And humanities professors, I’ve noticed, love to take pictures of their bookshelves. Not to show you what they’re reading, exactly, but to prove that reading has happened.
The shelves are never casual, but heavily curated. Color-coordinated in a way that suggests both moral seriousness and light OCD. The spines face outward like a police lineup of guilt. Plato. Kant. Hegel.
Someone always slips in a copy of Being and Nothingness, which is there less to be read than to quietly threaten guests.
These images are posted with captions like “Office vibes” or “Current companions,” which is charming, because the books are not companions. They are chaperones. They exist to supervise you, silently, while you answer emails and judge undergraduates.
The bookshelf isn’t there to be used much. It stands to show that its owner knows which books belong in a room like this.
This is a collective misunderstanding we agreed not to correct. Owning the books feels adjacent enough to understanding them that we let the distinction blur, and over time the blur hardens into a credential.
Which is how a shelf becomes a proxy for a mind, and why so many very full shelves are guarding such oddly untouched ideas.
Reframing Learning
We talk about learning as though it were synonymous with exposure, as if sitting near a difficult text or struggling through its sentences and smelling the musty pages were itself the point.
But learning is not reading hard books.Learning is understanding things.
Difficulty has acquired an almost spiritual status in our culture. We treat it as evidence of seriousness, a kind of moral surcharge paid in confusion.
Yet difficulty, in itself, has no ethical value. It is simply a condition that may or may not serve understanding.
We know this intuitively in other domains. No one trains soldiers by issuing contradictory orders and calling the resulting chaos “character-building.” No one teaches a language by deliberately scrambling the grammar and insisting the student persevere out of respect for the language’s history.
Training is structured challenge. It is calibrated resistance. It is difficulty in the service of clarity, not difficulty as a test of worthiness or a rite of passage.
If we really care about ideas, we have to care about whether they arrive. Guarding how difficult they are might feel like respect, but it doesn’t keep them alive. It just keeps them contained. Understanding isn’t a favor we grant to people who struggle. It’s the whole reason we bothered having the ideas in the first place.
Football and Mill
So imagine a Division I football player. A real one. Someone who has spent years learning a playbook so detailed it might as well be written in another language, and who understands, down to muscle memory, what happens when one person freelances at the wrong time.
Now imagine trying to explain John Stuart Mill to him—the strange, humane part where Mill argues that societies only get better when individuals are allowed to try different ways of living. That progress doesn’t come from everyone doing the same safe thing, but from people running different routes and seeing which ones work.
If you hand him the book and say, “Mill is important, trust me,” he does what conscientious people do. He reads. He underlines. He worries he’s missing something essential that everyone else seems to have absorbed effortlessly.
But if instead you say this:
Think about the game.
Every play is drawn up carefully. Every route has a purpose. But within that structure, there’s room—and sometimes a necessity—for improvisation. A receiver sees something the diagram didn’t predict. A quarterback reads a defense wrong and has to make a decision anyway. Most of these deviations fail. A few work. And when one works, the entire playbook quietly changes the following week.
That’s what Mill was getting at with “experiments in living.” The idea was never to throw out the rules and hope for the best, but to keep the structure solid enough that people could try things without falling through the floor. Most of those attempts don’t change much, but a few do. Over time, those few are how anything improves.
Changing how an idea is delivered doesn’t drain it of depth. It gives the idea a chance to keep doing its work. And if you care about the work, then helping it travel is part of the responsibility that comes with knowing it at all.
And suddenly the football player is nodding. He’s smiling. He’s not pretending to absorb ideas about ethics and epistemology.
Nothing was dumbed down, professors. It was simply made legible.
Enter AI (Carefully)
At this point, AI enters the picture. It should do so quietly.
There is no need for awe or fear. AI is a tool, and tools take their moral character from how they are used.
The books and the texts remain. So do Plato, and Mill, and Heidegger. What changes is the path a student takes to reach them.
AI adapts explanation. It rephrases. It supplies context. It can notice where a reader falters and adjust the angle of approach. It meets students where they are, rather than where a syllabus claims they ought to be.
The role of the academic does not disappear. On the contrary, she is just as indispensable. Scholars oversee the material. They correct errors. They decide what counts as faithful transmission. Judgment remains human, as does responsibility.
What AI provides is structure. A temporary framework that holds the weight while understanding is built.
This is scaffolding for thought, much like the written word in the time of Socrates, the printing press in the fifteenth century, or the internet in the late twentieth century.
Once the structure has done its work, it can be removed, leaving only comprehension.
What Endures
But there is an obstacle we face.
We have built an educational culture around the idea that minds should look the same while they are learning. Same pace, same entry point, same tolerance for abstraction.
But people do not arrive that way. Minds vary. Attention varies. Background varies. Ignoring this only narrows who gets to reach ideas at all.
Personalization, in this sense, is a form of dignity. It says the idea matters enough to meet you where you are. It says an idea can survive being approached from more than one direction.
Access to ideas should not hinge on a single approved way of thinking.
At this point, a familiar objection usually appears.
People say that struggle matters. They say difficulty builds character. They say that if learning feels smoother, something essential has been lost.
No one is arguing for comfort as a goal.
But struggle has a purpose. It serves understanding.
If struggle were the purpose, we would teach physics by asking students to reinvent calculus from scratch. We would hand them chalk, a blank board, and a century of missing context, then congratulate ourselves on their perseverance.
We do not do this, because it would make no sense.
What made John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice beautiful was never the prose. Anyone who has tried to read it straight through knows that beauty is not the word that comes to mind. What made it beautiful was the gamble it asked us to take: to imagine a society built without knowing where we would stand in it, to plan as though luck had not yet chosen us. Fairness begins there, with a humility of mind and a willingness to picture a life other than one’s own.
What made Hannah Arendt essential was not the severity of her tone or the chill that sometimes settled over her sentences. It was her refusal to look away, the willingness to name how ordinary people participate in extraordinary harm. She mattered because she understood that evil sometimes arrives without spectacle, seeping in through the small permissions we grant ourselves each day, through obedience to procedure, through habits that dull the edge of conscience, until judgment itself grows tired and lays down, and what was once unthinkable comes to feel like the natural order of things.
And then there’s Kant.
No one encounters Kant and thinks, This is how I should communicate. You do not finish a page and feel inspired to emulate the style. The prose is so strained, dense, and joyless that it feels like it nearly breaks the medium itself.
What mattered about Kant lived beneath the language. The seriousness of the claim that we owe one another moral regard, that human beings are not tools, that dignity does not depend on usefulness. These ideas endured because the thinking altered how the world could be seen.
Which is the part worth preserving.
Ideas endure the way paths endure. They remain because people keep walking them. When the way becomes needlessly narrow or overgrown, fewer travelers arrive, and the path begins to disappear. The thinkers we return to are still with us because their ideas proved useful for living.
If we want those ideas to survive, we have to make them reachable again.
