It's week one of the semester. Twenty students, mostly freshmen, sit silently waiting for English 101 to begin. Most have one AirPod in; some scroll past AI-selected ads. Someone opens TikTok by mistake — the sound blares — they close it fast. No apology, not even a half-hearted laugh from classmates.
Welcome to the contemporary college classroom.
I am a college professor working at the intersection of humanities and artificial intelligence, and I believe AI not only threatens to devalue college, but also risks stripping humanity from our lives altogether. It doesn't have to be this way. AI automating away parts of work and life challenges the next generation to re-instill the importance of interpersonal social skills, and I see the college classroom as the ideal place for this rehumanization to take place.
Target: Bring humanity to work
Young adults sit in college classes fully aware that an AI-infused workplace is just on the other side of graduation. But they — and everyone else — have little idea how best to prepare for it.
Gen Z has been labeled the generation that lacks the social skills needed to succeed in an AI-augmented workforce: the infamous "Gen Z stare," faces glued to screens, fidgeting and doomscrolling thumbs. To me, this represents a clear tension between the young adults they are and the adults they need to be.
It's easy for my rhetoric to give off "kids these days" vibes. But I'm a young millennial — I too don't know what to do with my hands at dinner parties and have to make a conscious effort to maintain eye contact. Simply put: I teach what I wish I would have been taught.
Shifting the mentality of the classroom
In the college classroom, it's all too easy to talk at students for 90 minutes — to be a professor with a slide deck who tosses in a few canned jokes, watches the clock and sends everyone off to do homework at midnight. The result is two digital ships passing each other in the moonlight: the assignment creator and the assignment doer, building an "us versus them" mentality.
Instead, I offer a different mindset: the classroom is us together in the battle against the midterm or final exam.
Small social interactions
What "student-centered classroom" means for me is simple: I constantly interact with students and make social interactions integral to the experience.
As I shuffle into class, I ask students to tell each other: What was the most challenging question on the homework? What did you do this weekend? And more importantly, what did you wish you did?
At the end of class, I give five minutes for students to plan when they're going to complete the homework, then have them share that plan with the person next to them. These small exchanges often spark real friendships built over common struggles — a shared professor, a shared exam, a shared sigh of relief.
I used to hear professors brag about knowing each of their students' names, so I made it a priority too. But now I don't think that's enough. I'm asking future doctors and future businessmen to get to know each other as peers and future colleagues.
Centering the importance of public speaking
Sure, in my writing-intensive classes students turn in term papers, they get grades, and yes, some use AI. That's fine — but that's not the important part. What matters is whether students know the material well enough to articulate it to the group, to tell us why the subject matters to them and to the world.
So we spend a week where students give short 5-10 minute presentations on their work. "Tell us why fast fashion is destroying the planet. Tell me why we need to care more about factory farming."
For those brief moments of positive peer pressure as students stand at the front of the class, it doesn't matter whether ChatGPT helped with the commas or even wrote the conclusion. What matters is the students' ability to look a group of peers in the eye and bring the private work of thinking and writing into the public sphere.
The point isn't whether students used AI to compose the words; it's whether the ideas feel like they originate from the person behind them. Did they question it? Did they revise it? Did they decide it wasn't quite right and try again? That's the work I care about — the difference between turning something in and actually turning something over in your mind, in your hands, to the people around you. That's what makes it college.
Back in the classroom…
It's week 12. I just sent my students off into a small-group discussion on the value of AI in daily life. Five minutes go by. "All right, y'all, let's bring it back in." But no one stops talking.
And in that small moment, I know I've done my part as an educator: teaching students how to be human again.