The most human education in an age of machines
September 28, 2026
Dear Clark Honors College alumni, parents, and friends,
Last Thursday, I had the wonderful opportunity to meet new students and their families (over 400 of them!). From the students from Toronto, Canada and Jamestown, Rhode Island drawn to pursue their love of marine biology at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology to the political science student who wants to be a lawyer so he can make sure that people get the health insurance they deserve to the students wanting to use data science for the public good, this event never ceases to remind me why our work matters.
This year, students arrive at a pivotal moment, when the headlines insist that artificial intelligence is breaking and changing higher education. We see it differently. These new technologies are tools. As such they will not replace the critically human ability to assess information, generate new ideas (and not just reproduce patterns), and make decisions based on ethical and principled reasoning. AI can’t replace the electricity of ideas workshopped around a seminar table that benefit from human perspectives, experiences, and insights. At the CHC, our faculty teach human reasoning and thinking. Through a writing-intensive curriculum, shared inquiry, oral defenses, portfolios, fieldwork, senior thesis and community-engaged projects our students learn how to build relationships by showing up for each other and listening. The learning at the Clark Honors College deeply shapes our students and helps our graduates to advance their communities and the world around them. AI promises that writing, synthesizing information, solving complex problems, and learning will be easy. In the CHC, our students learn to do hard things because it is in the struggle with new concepts, ideas, and skills that real learning takes place.
Tools will never replace the experience the CHC provides to our students, through small classes, the dazzling array of courses we provide them, and the theses that allow them to develop the expertise, skills, and confidence to lead. This remains our promise to the students who arrived on campus last week, the students who return this week, and the students who will join us in the years to come.
With gratitude,
Carol Stabile
Dean, Robert D. Clark Honors College