Texas Wesleyan University has launched a new bachelor's degree in humanities and artificial intelligence, according to The Business Press, which reported the announcement.
The details available so far are limited to that: a private university in Fort Worth adding an undergraduate program that pairs humanities study with AI. Curriculum specifics, enrollment targets, faculty hires, and start dates were not included in the reporting available here.
Even as a bare announcement, the framing is the interesting part. Most university responses to the AI boom have landed inside computer science and engineering departments, or in business schools teaching managers how to deploy the tools. Putting AI alongside the humanities — history, philosophy, literature, ethics, writing — points in a different direction: toward graduates who can interrogate what these systems do to language, truth, labor, and culture, rather than only build them.
It also arrives at an awkward moment for the humanities themselves. Enrollment in traditional liberal arts majors has been under pressure for years as students chase degrees with clearer job outcomes, and smaller private universities in particular have been rethinking what they offer. A degree that welds humanities training to the most-hyped technology of the decade is, among other things, a pitch to prospective students that the two aren't opposites.
Whether that pitch works depends on things not yet public: how technical the coursework actually gets, whether students graduate able to use and evaluate AI systems or merely discuss them, and whether employers read the credential as serious. Announcements are cheap; curricula are hard.
It matters because the questions AI raises — about authorship, bias, evidence, and human judgment — are humanities questions, and schools are only now starting to build degrees that treat them that way.