This interview originally appeared on the Division of Arts & Humanities website.
Since Sara Guyer became dean of UC Berkeley’s Division of Arts & Humanities in 2021, she has served as a spokesperson for the discipline on a global scale. She directed the World Humanities Report(link is external), presided over the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes, and frequently is quoted in the media contradicting the myth that the arts and humanities’ relevance is in decline. In fact, the arts and humanities are experiencing a Renaissance at UC Berkeley, with steadily rising enrollments.
During Homecoming weekend, Guyer spoke with Will Kane, the executive director of news and media relations for UC Berkeley, about poetry, artificial intelligence, and the complex world we inhabit.
Will Kane: You talk about how the arts and humanities let us understand big, pivotal moments. What are you reading, looking at, and listening to that is helping you make sense of everything that's happening?
Sara Guyer: I'm a professor of English, and my research is on British romanticism and 19th-century poetry, which people often think has nothing to do with anything other than the past. What I find is that those poets have actually helped us to think about the self, imagination, and the natural world.
One of the poets I wrote a book about is John Clare. During his life, he suffered from a mental illness, and he was sent to an asylum. He decided to escape. He left the asylum and walked 90 miles over three days to make it back to his little village. He got there and said he traveled all this way, and now he felt “homeless at home.” That phrase has resonated with me over the past year. It doesn't feel like a place you’ve always been now, and if it doesn't, what do you do?
Outside of poetry, I find myself listening to bands like The National and Taylor Swift. They've all started to write in different ways about poetry. I also listen to a lot of podcasts because it helps to have a clear sense of what's going on. One is Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, who is an alum.
The arts and humanities classroom really helps us understand the world. We’re comfortable being in complexity. We're comfortable with the question and not the answer. And if there's a time when there's not an answer and we don't know exactly what to do, it’s this moment.
Kane: Why do you think the humanities’ artistic and intellectual frameworks are helpful for people to make sense of incredible change?
Guyer: One of the things that happens in our classrooms is that we bring together people who, in any other situation, would never be in conversation with each other. That's what's so powerful. We take a text, an idea, this moment, a concept, and we all come at it together. Wherever you go, but particularly at Berkeley, universities are committed to creating an experience that brings people together from a range of different lived experiences.
The humanities classroom compels you to articulate, examine, and defend your idea, but do it in a controlled environment. It might be controversial, it might not be, but that's what we seek to do with historical evidence and without assumptions. We push our students to have the confidence and capacity to know themselves and know what they think. Whether you go into business, medicine, public relations, or you become a professor, you need to have that sensibility and that confidence.
Kane: Nationally, there's this narrative that the humanities are dying. Is that trend true at UC Berkeley? What are you seeing at Berkeley?
Guyer: Absolutely not. While other universities report that the humanities are shrinking, at Berkeley, the opposite is true. The music major is the fastest-growing major on campus. We are finding bigger classrooms because film is exploding. English is back to the numbers we saw 15 years ago. We are hiring like crazy.
I like to speculate that it's about the world we're in. The humanities really are a resource — a confidence for living in our times.
We also changed some of our majors to open them up. Historically, many of our majors were focused almost exclusively on Europe. Europe's far from Northern California; it's hugely influential, but it's not the only story. Our classrooms now represent the vast diversity of literature, music, and art.
Kane: Do you feel like this interest in humanities at UC Berkeley is student-driven, or have you, as an academic division, cracked the code in a way that other schools have not?
Guyer: It's definitely both. For a long time, what was going on in the humanities wasn’t visible. It's hard for students to know what you're doing and why it’s important if we're not telling our stories.
They're not just stories that are about the distant past. It’s for a reason that the big AI companies have philosophers on their staff. Philosophy is part of the story of our world, and we just haven't been telling it, but now we are, and the students are coming.
We have not watered down our standards in this environment. We definitely look at popular culture, but if you want to major in English, you've got to do it all. We start with Beowulf and take you through to today. There's a reason why we're the number one program in English in the country. Berkeley is a rigorous place.
Kane: I want to talk about AI at the highest level. Do you see large language models as a tool or an existential threat to the arts and humanities?
Guyer: AI has the potential to be everything. Is AI an existential threat? I think not. Will it be a tool? My colleague, Steve Kahn, who is the dean of mathematical and physical sciences, sees AI as being the equivalent of a calculator. AI is a tool for efficiency, but it's not a tool for helping you understand how to operate in this world. On the whole, our goal is to make sure that AI isn't a substitute.
We have book chats at the Humanities Center, and I went to one with Martin Jay, who's a retired historian. He was talking about his new book on magical nominalism. I don't know that AI will ever be sophisticated enough to have that kind of quirky, extraordinary, synthetic insight.
We have faculty who are doing interesting assignments with AI in the classroom. Roni Masel started in comparative literature a couple of years ago; she teaches a class on monsters. She started having students prompt ChatGPT to write monster stories, and then have students analyze the stories that ChatGPT was creating — not for their quality, but to understand how ChatGPT was appropriating certain tropes or matters of tone and style from the archive of monster stories and using that as a tool to help students learn about the genre.
Kane: What are you hearing from alums and recruiters? Do they see the value of a humanities degree?
Guyer: There are two people on our College of Letters and Science Advisory Board who are heads of HR at major companies. Both of them talk about how important it is to have students who come out of fields that aren't just computer science. One works in Silicon Valley and said, “If I get two resumes and I see one majored in philosophy and one majored in data science — all else being equal — I'm going to hire the one who is a philosophy major.” Why? There's a boldness to studying philosophy in this environment that is apparent to people in HR. There's a risk to following your passion and to thinking beyond what the culture tells you to do. Then there's the communication capacity: you have thought deeply about something and articulated your point of view.
In fact, there was a story in The New York Times about the number of computer science and data science majors who are having trouble. History of art majors are doing better at finding careers on the job market.
I know many parents are anxious about students studying philosophy or history. That's the story we get in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and just in the air. I'm a parent of a teenager, so I think about these things, too.
I taught a course on career pathways in the arts and humanities. Over the course of the semester, we had conversations with alumni who have had a whole array of careers, and the students loved it. It was really an opportunity for students to ask questions and figure out, “What do I want to do? What matters to me?” The more we can offer that to our students, the better position they’ll be in to be successful in their careers.
Kane: You recently authored the World Humanities Report. Where do you see the humanities as a discipline in five or 10 years?
Guyer: We had about 120 research teams all over the world writing from their local context. The one that has stuck with me is a report from Russia. So many freedoms had allowed Russia to be a player on the international stage for a brief period of time. A set of constraints — closing up journals, repression, taxing private funding, taxing donors, taxing endowments — closed down the entire discipline of history in Russia.
I am a total optimist. At the same time, when I have this incredibly detailed account of what happened in Russia to the humanities, and when I think about what's happening today in this country, I am worried. The reason that happened in Russia — and the reason that there are all sorts of constraints at universities right now — is because universities are incredibly powerful. There is no greater resource for freedom than universities, precisely because of what I said before. You take people who have such different points of view, and you end up in conversation together, and what happens in those conversations is so much greater than any of us standing alone in our smaller communities. We're part of the lives of everyone.
Kane: Where do you see Berkeley's humanities in 10 years?
Guyer: My daughter's at a college where you can choose a major and modify it with another. Here, you have double majors, but you'll see more and more students having these combined majors where they are studying music and electrical engineering, or they're studying political science and learning deep regional knowledge in Italian studies, because they’re interested in fascism. It's more integral to what this university is.
What we need as a society right now is more Renaissance people. More people who are able to think through multiple discourses. It's not that the humanities just give you soft skills. It's that the knowledge and resources of the humanities are important for a range of careers in a world that's local and complex, where philosophical questions inform scientific questions, and scientific knowledge affects how we understand art and society.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.