Some questions are older than the majors you now choose. What does it mean to be human? What is a flourishing life? What makes a society good, and who should hold power in it? Long before universities siloed knowledge into departments, these questions formed a single conversation. Humane studies is the field that keeps that conversation whole.

Kenyon has housed that conversation since 1975. the Integrated Program in Humane Studies is the College's oldest interdisciplinary program, and its year-long Odyssey sequence still works the way few courses anywhere do: students read from Homer and Plato through Dante, Shakespeare, Darwin and Marx, with lectures from faculty across the College, a seminar of fifteen, and tutorials where each student defends a short paper in person. The program teaches students to find the questions that need to be asked, not just to answer the ones others are already asking.

Those questions carry new weight now that we live among machines that write, argue, and decide. In 2016, IPHS faculty Kate Elkins and Jon Chun created the world’s first human-centered AI curriculum and founded the AI CoLab, built on a conviction the program had held for forty years: the questions come before the code.

Today the program pursues the same questions with whatever methods they require. Students asking about power trace political discourse across 316,000 tweets and surveillance capitalism through social media terms of service. Students asking what we can know study 17,000 real human-chatbot exchanges to understand what kinds of relationships we are forming with our AI systems. Students asking what creativity is fine-tune language models on Donne and judge whether the results are poetry. This is humane studies in its current form, and students graduate with portfolios of original research downloaded more than 100,000 times by readers at more than 4,000 institutions in 198 countries.

The work is recognized well beyond Gambier. Schmidt Sciences funds faculty trying to rescue disappearing archives using AI. Faculty lead the Modern Language Association team at the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium. OpenAI, UNESCO and the IBM/Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab have each sought the program out, and Forbes profiled it as a model for human-centered AI education. When Fields Medalist Terence Tao and Tanya Klowden wrote about AI and the future of mathematical thought, they cited Elkins and Chun’s 2023 article on what AI demands of us: an understanding of the nature of knowledge, beauty, meaning and morality.

IPHS at 50: Homecoming 2026

The program will celebrate more than half a century during Kenyon's Homecoming Weekend, Sept. 25–26, 2026, with open seminars, an alumni poster walk, a featured conversation and a reception. More information can be found at humanestudies.org.