 Greetings and welcome to this edition of Campus Conversations. I'm Dan Moguloff from the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Today, we're going to be talking about the arts and humanities with two leading champions for what is an amazingly wide array of interrelated and deeply engaging academic disciplines. We'll be talking about, among other things, the strength of and interest in the arts and humanities at Berkeley, the evolving curriculum, and what might lie ahead for A&H in an AI-dominated world. With us today is Sarah Geyer. She's a professor of English and since September 2021, our Dean of Arts and Humanities. Her entire career has been devoted to advancing the humanities with special attention to private public coalitions, innovative faculty research programs, the public humanities, and inclusive collaborations across the globe. Stephen Best is a professor of English. In July 2022, he was appointed as the new director of UC Berkeley's Doreen B Townsend Center for the Humanities. Stephen is a scholar of American and African American literature and culture, with a record of scholarship that places him at a crucial nexus for thinking about institutional legacies and creating a more deeply inclusive humanity center at UC Berkeley. As always, we're going to welcome your questions throughout this conversation. Just post them to the Facebook Live site, and we'll do our best to get to them as we proceed. Sarah and Stephen, welcome. Thank you. Nice to be here. Yeah. So let's just start off with a little bit of biographical information, Sarah. Just a little bit about your past for people who don't know you, haven't met you, and what your first contact with or interest in the arts and humanities was. How did it all get started? Well, thanks, Dan. So I am returning to Berkeley. I returned to Berkeley in September of 2021. I did my PhD here in the Department of Rhetoric. And the Department of Rhetoric is really the only department of its kind in the country. And so I came to Berkeley initially to be part of a department that was thoroughly interdisciplinary, that was asking big questions, but also using methods like close reading to address those questions. From my time at Berkeley, I then spent 17 years at the University of Wisconsin. And when I was at Wisconsin, I, in addition to being a professor of English, directed the Center for the Humanities at Wisconsin for over a decade. And it was an extraordinary run. And among the many things that I discovered and was committed to while I was at Wisconsin was developing career internship programs for PhD students and really thinking about how the work that happens in a public university can reach a broader public beyond beyond that university. From my time directing the Center, I then became the president of an International Consortium of Humanities Centers and in that role, worked with humanity centers across the globe in order to foster collaborative research, which isn't always the norm in the humanities. When most people think about the humanities, they think about a scholar sitting in her office, writing a book for many, many years or sitting in the library doing really detailed research. This was an opportunity to think about how does collaborative research happen? How do scholars work across generations with early career scholars, with very senior scholars, with graduate students? So I came to Berkeley as Dean having done a lot of work in the global, the interdisciplinary, and the public humanities. But my own interest in the humanities started very early. Probably my first day of college, I had a sense that I would be a professor. I was always a reader. I read a lot of philosophy in high school. I studied languages early. And so my whole formation has been oriented towards the humanities. So before I turn to Steven and seek similar background and context, how do you define it? How do you define the arts? It seems so sprawling and so big. How do you put your arms around it? Well, there are many ways to define it. At Berkeley, we can define the arts and humanities by saying, I look after 19 departments and 15 centers. And those are the departments focused on literature and literary study, the departments focused on the arts, theater, dance, performance studies, music, as well as as art practice and film and media studies. And then departments focused on philosophy. And so that's one way we could look at them in terms of the historic disciplines. At the same time, there are scholars of literature who are working in the social sciences and there are anthropologists who are working in the arts and humanities here. And so what are we committed to? Or what are the methods that really define the humanities? Criticism, interpretation, questions of representation and questions of aesthetics are some of the fundamental some of the fundamental methodological tools that we use. But, you know, one of the things that I like to think about when we talk about what happens in the humanities is that the humanities are also and the arts and humanities are incredibly open-ended. And that's not to say that that's not to say that there are no definitions. There are very clear definitions, but we do have scholars across the division who are working on questions that many of us would think are questions of science or questions of social science. So it's at that moment, it then comes to what are the kinds of questions we're asking? And are there questions that are we asking questions in the same way about, let's say, the pandemic or about human rights? Are we asking them in the same way and using the same archives that our colleagues in other parts of campus are using? So are we using literature to ask questions about human rights, rather than than case studies? And that's really one of one of the key aspects. It's not always the themes, but it's the methods in the archives. Got it. What a great way to set the table. And having said that, Stephen, tell us a little bit about your background, about how you got to Berkeley and what your own take is and how you got interested in the arts and humanities and where you think the whole field is headed. Sure. I'll start with the last question first. That's my origin. Unlike Sarah, I let's say I came from a family where you became either a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. So I went to college fully expecting that I was going to become a doctor. And it was a class that I took. I might have been myself more year on sort of women's literature, gender and literature that sort of opened my mind. And I sort of then decided I was going to become oh, and I was going to major in the humanities. I ended up majoring in art history. And my feeling during those years of being in college and having to make that decision was that in my humanities courses, I was being exposed to these really broad and powerful knowledge systems. Theory was all the rage, you know, feminist theory, African American literary cultural studies was sort of on the rise. And I felt like I was being exposed to these models for addressing large scale social problems. And I think that was really, really attractive to me as an undergraduate. That sense of the scale of the question. I think getting a PhD in some ways shifts your focus toward, like as Sarah put it, very sort of fine grained, monastic work in a field. But but that sort of was my beginning. And I I've always been sort of interdisciplinary in my thinking and orientation, you know, majoring in art history, but being very interested in literature, very interested in philosophy. So that's always been part of my makeup. And I sort of came to Berkeley when I finished graduate school. It was my first job. It's the only job I've had. And so I've been able to sort of like many of my colleagues sort of see Berkeley from a series of perspectives, a series of advantages of a junior faculty member to a full professor. So that's yeah, I mean, I, you know, we're going to probably get here at some point, talking about intellectual life on the West Coast, but I I always thought I was going to be at Berkeley only for a handful of years and it's approaching three decades now. So I guess that that happens when you come to Berkeley. Steve, I want to say something about that. So I left almost to the day 20 years before I returned. So I finished as a graduate student in 2001 and I came back in 2021. And I would say just about everyone from whom I took a graduate seminar, either was still on campus or had retired on this campus, which I don't think we can say about about most other places. I do think that that is what shapes the arts and humanities at Berkeley, is that incredible longevity, that sense of commitment to a project that is is really, I think, unique to this, to this place. Before we go on for those who may not know about it, talk a little bit about what the Townsend Center is, what it means to have a humanities center within a university, why we need one and what its role is. Yeah, I mean, I'll pick up on something Sarah said earlier, right? In our fields, the humanities and the sciences, but it looks a little bit different in the humanities. We value and honor specialization, mastery of a field of knowledge, and that requires kind of solitary work, working on our books. And humanities centers often serve as kind of connectors. You know, when I became the director of the Townsend Center, I I sort of read the mission statements of other humanity centers just to sort of see both how Berkeley was in the tradition of the Humanities Center or also at an angle to that tradition. And the word you often come across in those mission statements is interdisciplinary, that like humanity centers are kind of the places where faculty get to sort of think and talk across the disciplines. I think humanity centers are also an important place for intellectuals to gather, to discuss challenging questions that shouldn't be left to any particular discipline. And we can sort of talk more about that later as we talk about AI, etc. But I do think humanity centers sort of. The humanities, another way of thinking of the humanities is there are the fields. Well, there feel the field fields in which people scholars pursue, study particular objects, right? We all have an object on the novel. You know, 19th century French painting. We all have a kind of tradition of objects. And humanity centers are sort of places for us to to open our questions to other other disciplines, other fields. So I think that's one of the. Forms of kind of exchange that the term interdisciplinary is meant to kind of signal. Got it, Sarah, before we just want to for people who joined us late, but I want to come to you next and talk a little bit about sort of the health and well-being of the arts and humanities on the Berkeley campus. And for those of us who are joining a little late, we're talking about the arts and humanities today with Dean Sarah Geier and Professor Stephen Best, who's the director of the Townsend Center. As always, we welcome your questions. If you do have questions, post them to our Facebook live site. Thanks. So, Sarah, you know, I've read some pieces about declining interest and there's always these pieces about how more and more students' orientation to higher education is highly vocational. What are we seeing at Berkeley in terms of interest in the arts and humanities? How are things going? Well, it's a great question because things aren't going the way most people think they're going. So there's a story about the humanities. There's a story about the humanities that I was told when I first showed up on campus that our student credit hours are low, that students are enrolling in our courses, that high school guidance counselors aren't encouraging students to major in the humanities. And that's exactly what I expected when I showed up on campus. And it's not surprising that I would expect that because just last week, a university decided that they would close all of their humanities departments. Or when we look internationally, we see that places like Australia are thinking about charging surcharges to students who want to study the humanities. Yes. Yes. So that there's a search, a humanity surcharge because it's it's not a vocational or it's it's not a degree that leads to to a vocation, which this is a little bit of a sidebar, but Steve and I was thinking about something you said earlier, which is my father was a doctor who was an English major. So these aren't either, either ors. So what I was completely surprised to discover when I came to Berkeley is that there's enormous interest in the humanities. Now, that's particularly case, the particular of the case in a set of departments like film and media studies, music, history of art, art practice, which is a major partly because of the studio or lab like requirements does have limits on how many students it can really serve in the way that it would want to. But but students are interested. And then that led me to ask why, you know, first of all, what's changed? Because for the past 10, 15, 20 years, we've been reading. We've been hearing about an ongoing crisis in the humanities. Majors are shrunk. Students aren't interested anymore. They're just kind of the kinds of problems or questions students are interested in, maybe questions having to do with public health, questions having to do with human rights haven't led them to come back to the or certainly questions about data science and AI, which we'll get to, have led them outside of the humanities rather than towards the humanities. But at Berkeley, it seemed not to be the case. So I started to ask why what's changed at this moment so that students have come back to us and some things have changed in the lives of our students and some things have changed in the lives of our campus and the lives of our department and the two have converged. So if we look at students who have started college or who are finishing college right now, what what have they experienced over the past four or six years? They've experienced a global pandemic that really changed everything for them. What is social life? What is an education? What can I do? What can I not do? What's my relationship to the world? What are what's happening in cities? So they experienced the global pandemic. They experienced the racial reckoning, largely with George Floyd, which raised all sorts of questions about privilege, about institutional racism. And really, many students were looking to make sense of what they themselves have gone through and make sense of it, not only empirically, but also in terms of their imagination, how much is race in this country and globally an effect of the imagination and how to litter turn philosophy and the visual arts help students to make sense of their own own experience. They've grown up with climate change and climate change is something that is both completely palpable and totally mysterious. They don't know how it will we don't know how it will affect our future. We can predict it with tremendous care, but at the same time, the emotional effects, the political effects of climate change are serious. And finally, they've lived through what many call a crisis of democracy, the country and the political system that students thought they knew and understood and could rely on doesn't look the same way that it did three, four, six years ago. So if you're 18 or 20 and you're coming to college, one of the things that you're coming to college trying to understand and figure out is what is this world that's yours and how are you going to live in it? What decisions should you make? Why are those the right decisions to make? And there's nowhere else in in the university that is as focused on questions of ethics, questions of the imagination, questions of who and what it is to to be human in this world than than the arts and humanities. And we can talk a little bit about the arts as well, but that's kind of the overarching sense is students are here. And I mean, the other thing to say, Dan, is students are happy. And that's not a story that we usually hear about the humanities. We've read so many stories in Washington Post cover. All these kind of mainstream media covers a story that says Student X majored in English or majored in history of art and really regrets it. They can't find a job. They're not making enough money. It hasn't changed them. They wish they'd done something else. But that's not true for Berkeley students. And I think that is is incredible. And I'm glad to think a little bit about why I think it has to do here with how we teach what our our curriculum looked like and what our classrooms look like. So we'll circle back on that. But Steve and I want to ask you the same thing, but you have your finger on the pulse as well. But it was sort of I'm struck by something that Sarah said. If I could if I followed the bouncing ball correctly, which is things are really bad and difficult in the world. So bad times for the world, good times for arts and humanities. But and in the midst of all this sort of darkness and challenge, students are kind of happy. So there are these really interesting streams there. What do you see from your vantage point? I mean, it's interesting because I'm not at all surprised by that kind of convergence, as you describe it, dark times, intellectual and ethical pursuits. It seems that that make that makes sense to me. I mean, what listening to Sarah, one thing I thought it may be a side note, but I but I think it's worth mentioning we may kind of come back to it a little bit later is, you know, I'm also very kind of mindful of all of the recent efforts essentially to legislate against the humanities in, you know, bills in Florida and Utah to remove majors in gender studies. Theory, I couldn't even believe that like now, you know, that like that they're legislative attempts to sort of outlaw the teaching of theory that that that that is also sort of part of our moment in terms of target, like it's not so much the demise of the humanities. It's like the targeting of the humanities is this issue I feel is very much kind of certainly on the on the on the table for the next electoral season. Right. Well, let me just interrupt you for a second. Do you think that's the result of the somehow the human the humanities having become politicized in a way that other academic disciplines have not? And no, my I don't know what Sarah's answer to that question would be. I suppose my answer is no, like the politicization of I want to know what what's behind the quite like what what what you're perceiving in the question. Right. Like no, no, I'm just asking is that we don't hear political debates. And like the teaching of physics that humanities is it simply because the humanities are so engaged in the real world around us that as as a matter of course, it vacuums up sort of political issues and positions. But the kind of headlines, the ones you're talking about, is that something new? The fact that, you know, what students are learning curriculum courses are something that politicians running for office are talking about. Well, they're also talking about climate science and they're talking about evolution. So there is probably a history. I'm not probably there certainly is a history of science being politicized. And there's a long history of book banning in and and the management of of high school and and even undergraduate or even university education. So I don't think it's entirely new. Although, I mean, I'd be interested to hear what you think, Steven. But, you know, what has changed is that in many ways, education has become more more progressive and more inclusive. And so, you know, Catcher on the Rye was once a band button just to give in, but now we're thinking about students reading much more expansively and thinking in different forms of institutional and national self criticism. And I think that the focus on self self awareness and self criticism in a humanities education, whether it's of one as one self as a person or as an agent or of the institutions to which one belongs, really has has gotten attention and maybe that's what's new is is the kind of question of institutions that has become baked into an education. Yeah, I think what's different, I think, Sarah, you're right. There's a kind of long, longer history here earlier, the earlier an earlier face of it we would have called book banning. But but I think what feels different right now is that what's being targeted are what we would call the humanistic fields or humanistic disciplines, that seems new. But I think you're right. But I think you're right that it is part of a much longer tradition. Yeah, Sarah, I want to go to a question that came in actually from a parent, a parent of a freshman who was interested in the humanities and wondering if Berkeley has enough depth in the humanities to engage his daughter. He this parent is hoping she's hoping her daughter will find, as she says, her people. So what how do you respond to those concerns and are you guys growing? What are you doing to accommodate this continued interest? Well, the big picture answer is yes and yes, which is to say I don't think there's any wire that has the depth that that Berkeley has, the number of languages that we teach, the range of disciplinary methods, the the libraries, the conversations and and the diversity of students. So I having not met the student and not knowing anything about her. Absolutely. I feel very confident saying she will find her people. So so that's that's one thing. But we have 15 faculty searches going on right now. And just to give you a sense of the range of those searches, they range from medieval English to critical race theory in film and media studies department to Arabic and Islamic literature in a comparative context, in comparative literature, and there are a dozen others. So just to give you a sense that that that there is range. And what I think is unusual about Berkeley and this kind of points is something I said earlier, which is that everyone who I took a seminar from just about everyone who I took, everyone but one who I took a seminar from as a graduate student, spent the rest of their career at this institution and retired here or is still on the faculty if they haven't yet retired. So Berkeley has this incredible way of of managing both what sometimes would get called the traditional or the older humanities, which we would associate with the study of the Italian Renaissance or which we would associate with medieval studies, Europe, high art and the newest of the new humanities. And what I think is most unusual about Berkeley and really part of its signature is that its commitment to both to both the traditional, the core, the fundamental historic areas of the humanities and also to completely breaking that open and doing new things so that you would have a scholar of Victorian literature also being at the cutting edge of trans studies, or you would have the graduate program in the English department here, which is always the best program in the country. What makes it the best in part is that it's so committed to the English literary tradition and at the same time uses that commitment to break open what that tradition is. So what's what's new and what's growing at Berkeley is also not opposed to its history, but is always building on on an incredible history. And there's there's much more to say to say about that. But I think that's why students are so excited as they both have the grounding in a historic tradition and they have the opportunity to ask really new questions that matter for their lives and for the world they want to live in. Yeah, amazing. I mean, Steven, Sarah paints a really interesting picture of an academic discipline that's evolving and expanding and developing. And I've heard phrases like global humanities, environmental humanities that aren't phrases that I heard when I was an undergraduate. What's your perspective of what's happening to the field and what's happening to its appetite and its interests? And how is that impacting the kind of people who are majoring in, who are teaching, who are dedicating their lives to the arts and humanities? What's new? Why? Well, I think to echo Sarah's point, like just from the perspective of the English department, it's a field that's constantly kind of it is self involved in a kind of self interrogation. So when I arrived in the English department, literature in English was largely American and British. And since that time, we've made lots of hires in a broader array of national literatures in English. But also we've started to kind of interrogate, you know, the question of like whether all American literature is written in English. There are American literatures that are not written in English. And so it's a field that's constantly asking itself these questions about what's in this field, what's excluded from this field, how can we rethink what we do such that we can sort of continue to sort of expand and grow the sort of the playground of the discipline? So I think that that sort of self interrogation is part of what's vital and and and makes the field feel alive. I don't know if that answers your question, but I but from my own perspective as a faculty member, starting as a junior faculty member, I feel like I've witnessed that over the years in my department alone. So, Sarah, I'm curious, given that given the evolution and the development of the expansion, however you want to call it, how has that impacted or helped you define your goals as the dean? That's a great it's a great question. So my overarching goal as as dean when it comes to undergraduates is to make sure that every student who wants to major in the arts and humanities or take classes in the arts and humanities study the arts and humanities feels like they can. Now, what does that mean? It means we have historically, at least over recent decades, lived in a society where if you were to go home and say, guess what, I'm majoring in philosophy or guess what, I'm majoring in history of art. There are many, many families, particularly but not exclusively families with where the students of first generation undergraduate, where the cost of Berkeley, even with programs in financial aid, is still really significant because it's expensive to live in the Bay Area, that every student who wants to major in the arts and humanities understands that they can, has access to the courses that they want to study and feels proud and entitled to that destiny. And and for me, that's what what what will allow that to happen is that students have access to a narrative about the value of the humanities for themselves as individuals and as students, but also for our society. And related to that, that that we can tell a story about the arts and humanities that isn't only subversive, that isn't only critical, that isn't opposed to a career narrative, but that's actually the grounds for a successful career, whatever that career might might be. So that's that's one one of my goals. One of my other goals is as I look around this extraordinary campus and this extraordinary division, there are historic gaps and there are areas where we haven't invested and one of those areas is in the study of Africa and the African humanities, so we have a very long standing commitment. Probably unique or amongst the very top in the country to understanding the humanities in Asia, we have two departments that are committed, focused on Asian humanities, we don't have a department focused on Africa. And in fact, those departments where we would expect students to be able to study, whether it's African languages, African literature, African philosophy, we don't have faculty right now or enough faculty working in those areas. So one of my other major commitments as dean is to look at historic gaps and and address them and address them through hiring, address them through through bringing new visibility to them. And this has been a project that has at this stage actually garnered widespread support amongst my departments and department chairs. So one of the things I hope to be able to accomplish in the coming years is to hire many new faculty working in and on the humanities in Africa. And history of art has really been at the cutting edge of this with two new extraordinary members of their faculty working on African and African diaspora guards. Well, it's really there's so much going on. It's so exciting and I can't help but ask even sort of the same question. Your goals as director of the Townsend Center for the humanities. What what you've got your eyes on for the future? What's your prioritizing right now? Well, coming out of the pandemic, one of my goals is to help my colleagues to sort of reconstitute our sense of intellectual community on campus. I would I also want the Townsend Center to be a partner with other campus units. So so one of the things we're very much looking forward to is starting next year, we're going to be collaborating with the Berkley Center for New Media on a series dedicated to AI and the humanities. So in the with Tom McEnany at Berkley Center for New Media will be working to sort of essentially bring sort of typical Berkley high level in thinking and engagement to the very pragmatic questions that are confronting us as humanists and as professors generally around AI. So we're hoping that these will be events where, for example, we want to do an event on translation where we have both scholars who translate and who work in other languages on the same panel as the engineers behind Google Translate to sort of talk about some of the challenges that say Google Translate. Some of the challenges to sort of language instruction and evaluation that come with having these sort of AI tools at our fingertips. But that's just one thing that we're hoping to do starting next year with the Berkley Center for New Media. All right, I keep pushing it off. We're about to get to we're about to get to AI talking a little bit more about that. I'm still kind of blown away that how the humanities came to embrace artificial intelligence, but or at least engage with it. Before we go there, just another interesting question that came in from somebody who's watching and listening today. And here's an interesting question. They ask, does the preoccupation with STEM in early education send the message that the humanities are irrelevant? Are in other words, are you guys trying to push something up hill here? Face challenges that really find their genesis early on in our education system? What do you think about that, Sarah? Yeah, you know, this is a question I thought a lot about. How much how much does what we're dealing with in terms of student interest and student enrollment emerge in fourth grade or in fifth grade when students have a really clear, clear track? You know, I also think that young students are encouraged to be poets. I'm a parent. I have a 12 year old and a 16 year old and I'm tracking their education. And there there's clearly a strong, strong focus on STEM and how many AP chemistry and physics classes you can take. But at the same time, poetry, literature and the arts is also what we raise students in and on. So, I mean, but what I would like to see is for us to build closer relationships between early and high school education and the university. We don't operate in a vacuum. And Berkeley is so unique because we have the most extraordinary faculty Pulitzers and Guggenheims and people at the very, very upper echelons of their fields, working with undergraduates, first and second year students who are coming who are coming out of public education for the most part in the state of California, that we can do that is just extraordinary. And I think it does turn students on to realize that they can be in a room with an author of the book that they've read or a poet whose work they came across in high school. You don't get that everywhere. So it's not an uphill battle at Berkeley because the arts and humanities are so exciting at Berkeley. OK, artificial and AI. Let's go to AI because it's like half the world is going, oh, cool. And the other half is going, oh, crap. There is this complete bifurcation of reactions that this is sort of the sign of the end of days and for others, a brand new universe is opening up before us. You know, and it's all really started with a rollout or really accelerated with the recent rollout of chat GBT and there's concern in higher education about teaching, about cheating, about how are you guys help us think about this? Stephen, let me start with you because you've got the series kicking off at the Townsend Center. Talk to us about the whole AI and humanities thing. I mean, it's interesting just again, I keep there are little seeds that are planted, you know, when Sarah says things, you know, the classroom where students are getting to talk to a poet about the poem, right? There is, of course, I feel like there's a labor issue with AI and there's a cheating issue with AI. And those are different concerns, right? The AI generated art or the AI generated novel, right? Part of what we derive as value in works of art is that felt need to talk to painters about painting, to talk to poets about poetry and no AI is going to ever sort of disrupt that felt need to talk to creators about the things that they're the objects that they're creating that we study in the humanity. So so I think that's partly why the humanities needs to be at the table within the discussion, but I do think there are the ways for the humanities to kind of disrupt the current conversation around AI, which is what we're hoping, which is well. I mean, the distinction between machine intelligence versus human knowledge, right? Like we think when we read a get a readout from chat, GBT, that we're encountering a kind of encountering a kind of intelligence. But but but that. So so that like it obviates the need for humanistic labor, for learning how to write an essay, for having critical thinking, but it doesn't. Like, you know, it isn't an intelligence, right? It isn't it's it's scraping large data sets for like the right way to sound when writing an essay. But I kept thinking over the weekend as we prepare for this for this discussion, I knew it was AI was going to come up and I just kept thinking of the phrase a kind of a machine that runs on its own exhaust, right? That that that that is sort of what a large language model is and that fundamentally humanists are there to discern what's needed to become human in writing, which often involves talking to writers about intention, talking to writers about their craft. And no AI is going to disrupt the the need we have to talk to artists about their art. Sarah, what do you see? Thread or opportunity or a little bit of both? So first of all, there's a question of scale, right? So there's always been fiction, there have always been fakes. There's always been anxiety about fakes. Our colleague in rhetoric, Winnie Wong writes about fake fake paintings and the production of fake paintings in fake kind of paintings of your European masters in China. So this is a question of scale. It's a question of student responsibility. I'm not sure before you go on, I'm not sure what you mean by scale. Well, it's not the problem isn't entirely new. It's just and it's at a problem of of a fiction or of a fake or of dissimulation. It's just at such an extraordinary scale, both in terms of the scale of its quality and the scale of and its size, like just how accessible this is, how how massive this is as a change. So it's not about a totally new category to me. I think it's a question of scale. That's one thing to think about. Students have cheated all the time. They've hired people to write their papers, right? Now you can do something that involved a very individual transaction with a kind of smoothness that is unprecedented. So that's what what I mean by scale as as a shift. One question I have is what will what effect will it have on our talking to each other? How important will the classroom be? The seminar, the humanity style classroom, the making an argument on your feet, the kind of the give and take of of a conversation that happens, a really good discussion that happens in a seminar. How important will that now become when writing can can be manipulated, manipulated? And what's so strange about this is this is a conversation that's been going on since the 18th century about writing and speech and that artificial intelligence would send us back to conversations and back to thinking that Rousseau was having about how writing can be kind of faked, really, in a way, how how how writing does or doesn't signify presence, how speech, how how important is speech to know that someone is really thinking behind you and in person speech? I think that's going to be one of the big conversations that we have going forward is what happens in the classroom itself, not just when a student is on her own or their own writing. So those those are some of the things that I've been thinking about. But doesn't this also touch it almost feels like a can opener? Doesn't the the questions around AI you roll them out if you expand a little bit, touch on the the basic conversation of what we're talking about when we talk about higher education, about its purposes, about where it's supposed to leave the student when all said and done, right? Aren't there some larger themes here that could not be more current and modern? Absolutely, absolutely. And so there's questions of of ethics and honor that are clearly part of this question. There's questions of the human and the nonhuman and what we value. We all depend on AI in all sorts of ways. So it's not as if we're going to live in a world where there's there's no AI or where we don't want to. We all want and need AI more and more to play our music, ultimately to drive our cars, let alone I mean, some of our papers are kind of the least of it in terms of where AI is going. So but if at universities, we can prepare students to know how to live in this world, to ask the hard questions, to figure out who they want to be and what they want to do in a world that has gotten increasingly complex because the very question of intelligence is is now a question in a way that wasn't 50 years ago. Then that's we need universities all the more because it's how to live with this. It's not just a matter of it taking care. AI is not going to take care of our problems. We need to take care of our problems in a world where AI will become dominant. Yeah, amazing. And so, Stephen, are there other things out there on the leading edge of arts and humanities besides AI, that that the practitioners and those who really live and breathe it, that that's brand new, that's exciting in the field? Or have are people really focusing on this right now? People are focusing on this right now. You know, I think with AI. One last thought is that. It's not about is this good for us or is this bad for us? It's about formulating a series of critical questions so that we know how to kind of negotiate our relationship with these new tools, learning how to kind of contextualize AI social impacts, learning how to consider the kind of racial implications of automated algorithmic responses. So it's just trying to think critically about that stuff that I think is where we are sort of right now as humanists. In terms of like, like. Your larger question, the humanities, I don't, you know, I don't know. I know that there are like, there are people I'm very interested to bring to the Berkeley campus and that's another thing that the Townsend Center does a great deal of, which is to sort of have these sort of marquee events where major filmmakers, artists can come to campus to interface with our students. So that's a. That's a big goal for the coming years. We're having. Scholar, see on I visited us this week, the filmmaker, a pitch upon Verus, a taco will be visiting us later this semester. These are the some of the things that sort of draw or make the Townsend Center kind of a magnet of activity on campus. You know, so the magnet, the magnet idea, the question is something else I wanted to ask you about, because aside from Berkeley, Berkeley's ability to maintain its strength in the arts and humanities and and beyond the fact that Berkeley students continue to be very interested in the arts and humanities. I'm aware, Sarah, there have been some developments. The consortium of humanity centers and institutes that it has a new role here at Berkeley that you're playing a role in this. Talk to us a little bit about the institutional positioning that that's happening right now and where Berkeley sits in this whole world of arts and humanities. Yeah, absolutely. So we spent a lot of time talking about departments and just how extraordinary our individual departments are. We spent a lot of time talking about the Townsend Center and there's also the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry and the Arts Research Center. So Berkeley has a tremendous commitment to the interdisciplinary humanities. But when the consortium of humanity centers and institutes, which is a consortium of about 200 humanity centers and institutes, the majority of which are located at universities, some of which are university adjacent or independent, but most of which are operate like the Townsend Center are based at universities. When the the consortium is in the process and almost completely moved from the University of Wisconsin, where it was located since about 2017 to to Berkeley, with that move, a number of things happen. So Berkeley then becomes connected in an integral way. It becomes the hub for the global humanities, which it already is intellectually, but in terms of international partnerships, Berkeley is and will be the home and the site of a network of two hundred two hundred universities in mainland China across Europe in South America. And and what happens when that happens? The consortium started at as a partnership between UC Irvine and UVA. It then was housed at Harvard and Duke and then has been moving westward of stopping in Madison and and really stopping at a public university for several years. And now by coming to Berkeley, it really will be on the Pacific Rim for the first time substantially. And as we think about the future of the humanities, one of the things that I've been thinking about as I we talked briefly about directing the World Humanities Report has been the growing role of China in supporting the humanities. This is not a topic we have enough time to talk about now, but we'll hopefully find another time that as funding for the humanities in Europe and North America, especially the United States has really shrunk, funding for the humanities in China has grown and that comes with a whole set of complexities. And by being located in California, CHCI I think has the opportunity to deepen Berkeley's connections to the humanities in Asia and also Asian connections to the humanities here in the United States. And there's no moment where this will have been more important. I think because as we think about academic freedom, as we think about human rights, Berkeley has long standing signature commitments to those areas. And so as CHCI lands here, we also have an opportunity to reaffirm the commitments that we have institutionally to academic freedom and and to to human rights. So we only have a couple of minutes, but just I just like to ask you guys for some final thoughts, because it sure seems like one of my my original hypothesis. Bad times in the world have been really good times for arts and humanities. And that in turn has really put Berkeley front and center. So all told kind of a net positive Steven, some closing thoughts on on the humanities in Berkeley, as we say goodbye today. Well, of that original equation that you sort of laid out, I think, you know, it actually makes the humanities sound much more vocational and like pragmatic. Do you know what I mean? In the sense of it being a kind of response to the desire to kind of find sort of solutions to problems that we're confronting sort of in the everyday on the national scale, internationally that that students are turning to the humanities for solution. So it's just very interesting to sort of think about that again, that crossing of like dark times for the world, good times for the humanities at Berkeley as suggesting something about the the the way in which the humanities has a purpose is to some extent I'll use the word vocational in quotes. I was thinking more about relevant. OK, OK, relevant. Yeah, fascinating, Sarah, closing thought from you. So two things. First of all, you know, the aftermath, and this is one area that I've focused on my own research, but the aftermath of of the Holocaust and of genocide was to ask the question, do we need poetry? And it turns out that the question was the answer to the question was yes. And that poetry not just to kind of not as an avoidance mechanism, but actually as a means of expression and ultimately, as I would say, as a means of living and complexity. And so that's my second point is that what the humanities allow us is to be in complexity and questions that we might never answer in our own times. Yeah, we are going to ask the hardest questions with a sense that we won't necessarily ever get to the answer. But we might get a little bit closer. And so is it about good times or is it about bad times or is it about the sheer complexity of our world, which is always there in the background? Beautiful. That is a great note to add on. What a fascinating conversation. It's just another reason it's so great to be at Berkeley. So thank you so much, Stephen and Sarah. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Dennis is great. Yeah, and thanks to all of you who have joined us for this campus conversation. And we hope to see you next time around. Have a great afternoon and stay dry and warm.