At MIT, conversations about artificial intelligence have become a way into older questions: What counts as intelligence, and what makes human thought distinctive? In Concourse, those questions sit alongside the study of science, mathematics, and engineering, giving students a place to examine technology through humanities and debate.
A humanities community within MIT
Concourse was founded in 1970 to bring humanities, engineering, and science faculty together around a shared curriculum. It gives first-year students a foundation in the humanities alongside math and science General Institute Requirement courses taught by Concourse faculty.
Senior lecturer Linda Rabieh says AI has made the question of what it means to be human especially vivid to students. They are asking whether intelligence is mathematical ability or the accumulation of information, and whether human intelligence is something different.
For Rabieh, that renewed attention makes AI relevant to the humanities. The program turns to works by Plato, Homer, Aristotle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge as starting points for conversations about enduring questions, rather than treating technical subjects as separate from human concerns.
Assistant Director Sasha Rickard ’19 describes Concourse as a “mini-liberal arts college within MIT.” The program accepts 50 first-year students each year. They arrive with varied interests and experience in the humanities, including some with little prior exposure to the subject.
Shared classes create space for debate
Concourse has a dedicated space in Building 16, with a classroom, seminar room, lounge, and kitchen. Students receive advising and take classes together, and their time in and outside the classroom helps them get to know one another and their instructors.
That continuing contact matters to the program’s discussions. Rabieh describes the exchange of ideas as “cross-pollination”: students encounter different perspectives across their humanities, math, and science courses, as well as in community life.
In a weekly Friday advising seminar, students meet over lunch to discuss assigned texts or debate a question. Fall discussions address the human condition broadly. In spring, the focus turns to practical political or moral issues, including gene therapy, immigration, and gun control.
Several debates take place with the MIT Civil Discourse Project, which has worked with Concourse since 2023. The format gives students practice examining contested issues together, in a setting where disagreement can be part of learning.
Learning to reason beyond numbers
Political and moral questions do not always yield a single answer that can be demonstrated with a calculation. Rabieh says Concourse helps students approach these topics rigorously through judgment and reasoning that are not quantitative.
Rickard has seen students arrive with very different starting points. Some believe they already know the answer to political or philosophical questions; others hold back because they assume there can be no definitive answer. Over time, she says, students may learn either to listen to others or to trust that they have something meaningful to contribute.
For Johnnie Jones VI, a senior in mathematics who serves as a teaching assistant and debate fellow, the program’s value lies in learning how to work through ideas. Reading and discussing a book becomes a way to engage with questions that remain relevant across generations.
Many students continue contributing after their first year as teaching assistants, debate fellows, or associate advisors. Upper-level students also take electives, spend time in the lounge, and join events. Rickard says they often want to support new students and set an example.
A new director carries the program forward
Ford Professor of Political Science Lily Tsai was recently named Concourse director, succeeding Anne McCants, the Ann F. Friedlaender Professor of History. McCants stepped down after 14 years of leadership, during which colleagues credit her with strengthening advising, championing a whole-student approach, and bringing passion to teaching.
McCants says she valued sustained relationships with students, sometimes across all four years, and collaboration with educators from other disciplines. That kind of ongoing exchange is a defining feature of a program designed to connect fields that can otherwise remain separated.
Tsai takes the role as MIT expands efforts to connect the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences with other fields. These efforts include the Compass Initiative, the MIT Human Insight Collaborative, and shared faculty positions within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.
For Tsai, reflection and debate help students become not only excellent engineers and scientists, but responsible citizens and leaders. As powerful technologies prompt questions about how they should be used, Concourse offers students a place to develop the judgment needed to consider those questions carefully.