{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/philosophy-and-religion-teachers-postsecondary/", "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology", "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.", "scored_at": "2026-08-11", "model": "claude-opus-5", "occupation": { "title": "Philosophy and Religion Teachers, Postsecondary", "soc_code": "25-1126", "category": "Education", "us_employment": 20460, "median_annual_wage": 80260 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 48, "contested": false, "near_boundary": false, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 11, "embodiment": 8, "liability_shield": 3, "trust_premium": 15, "judgment_accountability": 11 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Roughly half the week — building a Kant seminar's reading schedule, writing prompts on the trolley problem, summarizing secondary literature, marking 60 papers against a rubric — is text-in/text-out that a model does at speed, while the part that holds is the unscripted eighty minutes where you hear a student misread Nietzsche and reroute the whole discussion, plus dissertation supervision and departmental judgment about what counts as a philosophy major; that mix of clearly-exposed and clearly-durable is what puts it at 11 rather than in the resistant band.", "embodiment": "The physical demand is standing in a classroom, writing on a board, holding office hours, and moving between campus buildings — nothing that requires manipulating equipment or working in conditions a remote instructor couldn't reproduce, which is why this sits well below the field-and-tool occupations rather than near them.", "liability_shield": "No state licence, no board exam, no certification body stands between you and the lectern — a PhD (often not even a completed one, for adjuncts) is a hiring credential, not a legal monopoly on teaching Aquinas, and nobody sues the instructor for a bad reading of Aristotle; the 3 reflects that even accreditation requirements bind the institution, not you personally.", "trust_premium": "Students take Intro to Ethics and stay for the person: they come to office hours to talk about a parent's death or leaving their church, they ask you for recommendation letters because you know how they think, and a decade later they remember the professor, not the syllabus — a chatbot can produce the argument but cannot be the adult who witnessed them change their mind, and that irreplaceability is nearly the whole product at 15.", "judgment_accountability": "You decide unilaterally whether a paper is plagiarized or AI-written, how hard to press a student defending a repugnant position in front of peers, what to do when a discussion of suicide turns personal, and where a grade lands on the line between B+ and A- with scholarship consequences — real discretion with real cost, but bounded by rubrics, appeals processes, department curricula, and Title IX referral paths, which keeps it at 11 rather than in the owns-the-call band." }, "rationale": "The text-production half of this job — lecture notes, reading guides, discussion prompts, syllabi, essay feedback, and much scholarly summarizing — is exactly what language models do well, and students are already using them to write the papers you grade. What survives is live Socratic argument in a room, reading a student's confusion in real time, and being a trusted adult who talks with 19-year-olds about death, faith, and what a good life is. The bigger near-term threat is not AI but humanities enrollment decline and adjunctification, which has already made the modal worker in this title contingent and low-paid.", "outlook": "The teaching relationship and live argument survive; the writing-and-grading workload compresses, and headcount is set less by AI than by whether institutions keep funding humanities seats.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Institutional codification of in-person, no-device seminar formats as a paid premium: e.g., accreditation-recognized 'oral examination' requirements (already standard at Oxford/Cambridge and in some US honors colleges), or a university adopting Middlebury/Chicago-style small-seminar caps with viva voce assessment as its explicit differentiator against AI-mediated instruction. Also seminary and denominational credentialing (ATS accreditation standards for M.Div. formation, ordination boards) that require face-to-face spiritual formation hours with a human instructor.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Task-mix shift as the routine tier evaporates: if institutions respond to AI-written papers by moving assessment to live oral defense, in-class handwritten exams, and iterative dialogue — a shift visible in the 2023-25 wave of departmental assessment-policy rewrites — the remaining job is real-time argument evaluation and diagnosing confusion, which current models cannot do in a room. Raises task_resistance without any new law, but only where seminar-sized classes survive; large-lecture GenEd sections gain nothing.", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 }, { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Formal role in academic-integrity adjudication: if faculty handbooks or state law make the individual instructor the accountable decision-maker on AI-misuse allegations (a determination with appeal rights and real consequence for the student), and if AI-detection evidence is explicitly non-dispositive requiring instructor judgment — a direction some honor-code offices have already taken after Turnitin detector false-positive controversies.", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 2 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Only a narrow route, and it applies to the clergy-adjacent slice: state clergy-privilege and mandatory-reporter statutes, plus denominational safe-church certification, attach personal duties to named credentialed humans doing pastoral formation. A seminary instructor holding ordination and supervising counseling practica sits inside that. This does not extend to secular philosophy faculty, where no plausible licensure route exists.", "plausibility": "unlikely", "would_add": 2 } ], "ceiling_note": "Every lever here is small relative to the real risk, which is not capability but demand: humanities enrollment decline, program closures (West Virginia University 2023, and successor cases), and adjunctification. A rising trust premium for human seminar teaching does not help if the seminar is cut and the title's modal worker is a per-course adjunct with no claim on it. There is no plausible licensure regime for secular philosophy instruction, so liability_shield is effectively capped in the low single digits." }, "adjudication": null, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2017, "emp": 22920, "wage": 69590 }, { "y": 2018, "emp": 23100, "wage": 71890 }, { "y": 2019, "emp": 23490, "wage": 75240 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 22900, "wage": 76160 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 20850, "wage": 77610 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 21620, "wage": 78780 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 20320, "wage": 79930 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 20840, "wage": 78050 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 20460, "wage": 80260 } ], "from": 2017, "to": 2025, "change_pct": -10.7, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": true }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "law-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Law Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 59, "median_wage": 128500, "overlap": 85, "skills_to_close": [ "Judgment and Decision Making", "Negotiation", "Speaking" ] }, { "slug": "art-drama-and-music-teachers-postsecondary", "title": "Art, Drama, and Music Teachers, Postsecondary", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 58, "median_wage": 78620, "overlap": 78, "skills_to_close": [ "Time Management", "Management of Financial Resources", "Monitoring", "Speaking" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }