Universities Can Solve the Humanities Funding Problem

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Hartford Courant on May 06, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission.

The humanities are more important than ever, and in many ways, they represent the essence of the university’s mission, especially in how they protect and reinforce our heritage and culture. They cannot be separated from other disciplines, however, as the humanities provide the DNA of everything we do. They need to be put on a solid and reliable financial footing.

A big part of doing that involves first getting the humanities organized in ways that allow them to become more visible and recognized, and to have them part of all the other disciplines.  I discuss one way of doing that, below, and argue that some innovation and efficiency in university organization may make the humanities more obvious as to its role in student success, and thereby broaden its funding base, including from the professional schools like business, law, and medicine.

The White House is currently challenging many university funding programs, including those through the National Endowment for the Humanities. Universities, not surprisingly, object as a matter of course. While resistance may galvanize its base of students and faculty, it doesn’t necessarily provide a longer-term financial solution. Its appeal cannot be just emotional or political: it has to be pragmatic and make some sense economically.

Much of the humanities’ output is fascinating and extraordinarily useful, but all of it struggles to secure an independent, self-sustaining university market. Is that, therefore, a market failure? Not necessarily.

But it does raise a question over how we have thought about the humanities, operating as isolated departments. University faculty are also generally resistant or even outright hostile to organizational innovation. For example, University of Chicago economics professor John List came up with a great idea for students by creating a new undergraduate business degree, but the humanities faculty saw it as pitting “pure knowledge” against practical job preparation. Many faculty members opposed it.

[RELATED: Western Civilization May Not Survive—But Must Be Defended]

Unfortunately, when our humanities departments face some belt-tightening or even some questions about how they do things, the faculty tend to prioritize their interests rather than responding as a business team, for the benefit of students and parents. That is understandable. What they need is a little leadership from above and some patient encouragement.

So, what is a possible solution?

One involves consolidating the department model of the university organization. Departments are not only the wrong way to reinforce the multidisciplinary concept but also create cost duplication, as each department sets up its own “corporation” with enormous inefficiencies. That is, most departments are just too small to make any economic sense on their own, based on student enrollment and demand. What they teach may be important, but can just as easily be transmitted under a shared, open format.

For example, you can combine philosophy and linguistics, with computer science, music, and mathematics, like Stanford does, into a “symbolic systems” category, and create a new degree track that directly responds to the marketplace in technology, media, and more. This creates new knowledge, ignites outside market interest, and attracts finance, because it speaks directly to market applications, investment, and new business ventures.

If the humanities subjects are specifically integrated within a university’s applied technical and professional programs, then they can go a long way toward potentially solving their own funding problems. This also requires a cultural change among humanities faculty who tend to be ideological or idealistic, which is good, but sometimes it stands in the way of figuring out how to constructively respond to the world we have to live in. You can’t isolate yourself in idealism. This partly explains why social science, like psychology, adapted to a more formal model of traditional science and has grown enormously within the university system. This has tradeoffs, but it tends to put concepts and ideas into new forms of insight and invention. Actual knowledge grows.

At many universities, going back to our New England heritage of independence and resilience, a pragmatic sensibility has been our philosophical hallmark since our founding—a practical work ethic that values tangible challenges. The humanities need to join together in that problem-solving enterprise. The money will follow.

Cover by Jared Gould using Grok’s AI text-to-image tool; molded from the cover of “Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities” byDoug Paulin on the Chronicle of Higher Education