You’ve probably heard several times already that the humanities are in “crisis.” The crisis is real. But recent reports on it do not address the particular challenges, and strengths, of the public research university, places like our own institution, the University of Illinois, and other Big Ten schools, or Virginia, or the UC system—campuses where the greatest preponderance of humanities instruction and research takes place. Public universities have undergone a sea change in the past quarter century, as state funding has been steadily, and at times precipitously, withdrawn. Universities, in turn, have come to value especially those programs that can generate revenue through alumni donations, external grants, or tuition. Under this new business model, humanities programs suffer in general and small departments, like classics and philosophy, find themselves perpetually under threat, no matter what their historical significance to higher learning.

Indeed several campuses have closed the doors on entire programs. In 2010, SUNY Albany threatened to end programs in French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theater, though later retreated from the plan. Two years later, the University of Pittsburgh suspended graduate admissions to German, classics, and religious studies. These are two prominent examples of a national trend stealthily proceeding apace. The crisis is also international: U.K. universities have faced steep funding cuts leading, for example, to the closure of Middlesex University’s philosophy department; and just this year Canada’s University of Alberta suspended admission to 20 humanities programs.

At present, university bureaucracies don't have mechanisms for valuing the humanities

Even plans to restore some funding to public higher education appear to be mounted in ways that may well accelerate the marginalization of the humanities. President Obama recently announced his goal of tying federal funding of colleges to affordability, an entirely laudable attempt to combat skyrocketing tuition rates on public campuses. But as these measures have been articulated thus far, affordability will be assessed according to tuition cost, the debt and earnings of graduates, and the percentage of lower-income students attending. On one level, that plays to good old American pragmatism, but the side-effects are predictable: larger class sizes; shrinking of programs that do not lead immediately to high earnings; more in the way of cost-effective online offerings, or hybrids of online and classroom instruction (President Obama has already signaled his affinity for online courses); and artificially assigned grades leading to artificially high matriculation rates. This vision not only marginalizes non-technical fields, but also makes all the more elite and privileged the kind of teaching on which the humanities depend: small groups engaged in sustained dialogue between faculty and students, which so many colleges and universities still trumpet as one of their chief sources of appeal.

Two simple correctives might be applied, neither of which would add to the cost of the program that President Obama proposes. First, instead of emphasizing Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), why not reward those campuses with the most favorable faculty to student ratios? Liberal arts colleges routinely advertise their faculty to student ratios. Why shouldn’t public institutions similarly compare themselves? Second, let’s reward colleges spending more in the classroom and less in the boardroom. Otherwise, we will simply incentivize corner-cutting in instruction while continuing to throw quarter-of-a-million dollar salaries at the Second Associate Vice Provost of Nothing in Particular. So well known is the administrative bloat of public universities that the federal Department of Education already keeps statistics on it. A judicious person would investigate the administrative costs of a charity before signing over a large donation. Why shouldn’t the Department of Education do likewise in identifying schools devoting the greatest proportion of their resources to things that benefit students?

The reasons for applying such correctives are clear. Many people make eloquent cases for the importance of humanistic learning and argue cogently for its vital role in civic life. A democracy can only be as energetic as the minds of its citizens, and the questions fundamental to the humanities are also fundamental to a thoughtful life (What is the good? the nature of beauty? Do we need God?). What does it mean for a culture if these means of grappling with human experience become unavailable on public university campuses but remain available on private ones? Will that not make even more prominent key divisions among us? At stake is not only the civic benefit of the humanities, but the civic benefit of making non-instrumental learning broadly available. Do we really want to become a society where public institutions focus on technical training and elite schools catering to the wealthy have a monopoly on cultivating imagination?