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This past fall I returned to Princeton after three years of retirement to teach eighteen-year-olds about the self. My colleagues were consumed by one question: how do you stop students from using AI to write their essays? The seminar turned out to be one of the best I have taught in thirty-five years.

The course was a First-Year Seminar on the formation and transformation of the self, drawing on original texts in anthropology and psychoanalysis. My aim was to develop what I call people skills—not the measurable skills specific to technical puzzles or professional roles, but the capacity to understand oneself and others with honesty and depth. I had taught versions of this course before, to both graduate and undergraduate students.…