Teachers Cannot be Replaced by AI, or What I Learned from Roger Haight, SJ

In the Fall of 2008, I began an MA at Union Theological Seminary, where I enrolled in my first course with Roger Haight, SJ. Over the next four years I took as many courses as I could with him. He remained a steadfast mentor, even friend, until he died last summer.

As a teacher, there was no one better than Roger. I set him as the North Star of my own teaching when I began over a decade ago. While AI usage has raged onto college campuses, I have fixed my courses to his light with renewed energy. I want to share lessons I carry from him, and what I think they offer to Catholic colleges about why teachers cannot be replaced by AI.

When I arrived at Union, I was a horrible writer. I was excited about and cared about big ideas, but my thinking was chaotic. A few weeks into school, I met with Roger about my writing. He looked at me and said simply, “You just have to get As on every paper.” He didn’t say this like I’d been lazy, or like my GPA was important. He was saying he knew I was intelligent enough to write well; he was expressing confidence in me. No teacher had ever treated me like I could be that kind of student. In that moment, I became a writer and thinker who people (a person, Roger) took seriously. I had never been able to imagine that because it had never happened. Because he took me seriously, for the first time, I did too.

I then applied myself to the iterative practice of responding to his (infamous) prompts with theses. For every class, Roger’s students responded to a prompt about the assigned reading with a 20-word thesis, followed by 300 words of explication, with citations. The product is students’ thoughts, focused and informed by the reading.

As I edited my theses every week to get just the right 20 words, I learned to write. I learned that writing is a practice, a craft through which one comes to clear thought. I learned that to write is to take a stand. I learned that expertise is revealed in the ability to say things plainly, while jargon and complexity are usually guises for stupidity or grift. In learning to write, I gained the ability to think clearly and creatively. I got some As.

Roger’s confidence in me did not teach me that I was secretly special. I had not gotten the anointing with which (bad) professors often mark a group of pet students. Roger expressed this confidence in every one of his students. Over the years, every one of his students with whom I have spoken expressed that he saw and brought out something special in them.

I learned then not only to write, but what it means to teach. Being a teacher is not about praising students who appear special and claiming them as a legacy. It is not about transferring information from one hardware to another. It is about freeing every student to become their best thinking selves by holding out a context they can step into, a context in which they can take a stand about who they are and what they think. We, each of his students, edited, crafted, and wrote. Every thesis he assigned us was a platform on which we could practice who we wanted to be and what we thought. Within the constraints of that little sentence, he freed us. bell hooks writes that love is creating the conditions of freedom. Roger Haight, SJ, showed me that teaching, when it is right and true, is a way of loving.

These are things AI cannot do. Teaching is, first and foremost, a relationship. Learning is the growth that happens inside that relationship. Freedom is the effect of that learning. No AI could have challenged me the way Roger did in our first meeting. No AI can create the conditions of freedom, or love. And certainly, AI is not helping anyone struggle with the practice of writing that creates freedom and independence of thought; it is, as I have written elsewhere, consuming the context of that freedom.

What I have learned since my time at Union is that all of this is an expression of the fact that Roger Haight, SJ, was the consummate Catholic educator. Without getting lost in the jargon of “care of the whole person” expounded at many Catholic colleges, he treated me as a whole person, the things I said as valuable. He showed me that expertise is expressed in communication that is able always to include more people, not fewer. In his commitment to reach every student, he evinced the most important Catholic commitment, to see God, always more, in all things. As colleges and universities implement AI for educating students, we must remember that AI cannot truly teach, and relinquishing this responsibility would be to ignore the spark of God in every one of our students.

Brianne Bell Jacobs is associate professor of theology and religious studies, and coordinator of the Women and Gender Studies at Emmanuel College in Boston. Her monograph “Holy Body” was published in 2024.