Artificial intelligence has become a cultural touchstone. Linda Rabieh, a senior lecturer in MIT’s Concourse first‑year learning community, sees AI not just as a business tool but as a catalyst for humanistic thinking. Since 2010 she has shown students how AI makes the question “what does it mean to be human?” strikingly vivid: Is intelligence merely mathematical computation or information aggregation, or does human intelligence differ?
Founded in 1970, Concourse was designed to let humanities, engineering, and science faculty co‑create curricula, forming a “concourse” of ideas. It offers MIT’s science‑focused undergraduates a parallel foundation in the humanities, reading classics such as Plato, Homer, Aristotle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, which spark rich debates. Each year 50 diverse freshmen—athletes, humanities‑curious students, and those with no prior exposure—join, creating a space where “magic happens.”
Concourse occupies a dedicated area in Building 16 with a classroom, seminar room, lounge, and kitchen. Outside of class, students share meals, attend community events, and build trust that enables deep conversation. Weekly Friday advising seminars over lunch focus on the human condition in the fall and on concrete political or moral issues—gene therapy, immigration, gun control—in the spring. Since 2023 the MIT Civil Discourse Project has co‑hosted debates, and many students stay on as teaching assistants, debate fellows, or advisors, guiding newcomers and preserving the program’s ethos.
This interdisciplinary immersion teaches students to exercise judgment in non‑quantitative domains. While MIT students excel at quantitative reasoning, they often lack a framework for evaluating political or ethical questions. Concourse provides a rigorous yet non‑quantitative approach, allowing them, after a long day of research, to sit with a great book and converse with an author who lived three centuries ago. As the program enters its next half‑century, Lily Tsai has taken over as director, expanding collaborations between the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and other units through the Compass Initiative, the MIT Human Insight Collaborative, and shared faculty positions in the Schwarzman College of Computing. She stresses that Concourse’s ethos—reflecting on individual and collective values—cultivates engineers and scientists who are also responsible citizens and leaders.
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