We’re delighted to feature this article as part of our new series, “What Universities Are For.” The series, made possible by the generous support of the Mike and Sofia Segal Foundation, will explore the affirmative case for universities as essential institutions of a free society, include rigorous debate about what kind of reform is needed and how to achieve it, and spotlight the institutions, initiatives, and campus leaders that are doing it well.

Ask an academic what they dislike most about their universities and the first answer will most likely be: administrative bloat. This is especially acute in the humanities. As we sit in our classrooms, our students holding paperbacks, sitting in rickety old chairs, and do nothing more than talk for three hours a week, we inevitably ask ourselves: why does this cost so much?

The cost of higher education, especially in the United States, is out of control. Parents, legislators, and students are rightly looking at price tags trending to half a million dollars for a four-year degree and wondering whether it’s worth it. In Canada, we’ve done a much better job of keeping costs down. But affordability has its price, too. Salaries are lower, making it harder to recruit top talent, there are far fewer nice new buildings around, and class sizes are big. Don’t get me started on the chairs.

A host of grassroots “humanities institutes” have begun to emerge to respond to this problem. Organizations like the Catherine Project rely on volunteers to teach upwards of 2,000 people per year with free or low-cost classes on great books. (I taught an evening class on the art of the short story for them to a small group of dedicated adults one semester. It was incredibly rewarding.) Halifax Humanities 101 has been going for 20 years and offers eight-month Great Books courses for free to anyone in Halifax below the poverty line. Professors from local universities volunteer to teach in the program. The Brooklyn Institute offers shorter courses for less money (around $350 for a four-week session), where teachers are paid a gig rate, not a full salary.

However well-intentioned, these efforts necessarily rely on volunteer or contingent labor and/or donations. What they don’t do is provide a model for a stand-alone humanities institution, where students can get the equivalent of a four-year degree and professors are paid full academic salaries.

Like so many of my peers, I’ve been wondering what it would be like to just start over. Get rid of all the admin and focus on the core purpose: teach and do research. To see what the costs for something like this might actually be, I decided to turn to Claude.

Rather than ask it how to remove the bloat (you’d need one of those subway tunnel borers to even make a dent), I decided to approach it the other way around. What would a minimalist humanities-only university (or college or institute) cost? Just a room, some chairs and a table, a professor, and some students. No deans, no dining halls, no dorms, no wellness centers, no gyms, no counseling services, not even… wait for it… a library.

The problem is, the math doesn’t add up. You can check it out for yourself.

Here’s what I did.

I asked Claude: “I’d like you to mock-up the costs of a bare bones ‘humanities institute’ or ‘humanities college.’” I then gave it a bunch of parameters, asked it to do research on things like average salaries, building lease costs, and the all-important “what costs am I not thinking about?” Claude loved that last one. It really enjoyed showing me how smart it was.

The headline number I arrived at was $20,389/year. This includes average professorial salaries of $125,000/year, three courses per semester for faculty, seminar caps at 30 students, a total enrollment of 120 students and eight professors, three credit courses, four courses per semester, 120 total credits for a degree, and leasing space in a city.

You can quibble about every single one of these numbers. Claude built a dashboard that allows you to tweak each of them to your liking. You think professors should be paid less? $100K salaries gets the number down to $18K/year. You think professors should teach less? A two courses per semester load, standard for research universities, brings it to $27K/year. A seminar of 30 students sounds too big to you (even though that is the standard where I teach)? That one’s going to bite, as the AI likes to say. Bring it down to 20 students and you’re back at $27K. A two courses per semester load with 20 students at an R1 salary? You’ve ballooned to $37K/year, heading towards private college costs. What about increasing enrollments to gain the benefits of scale? Doubling to 240 only brings the number down to $18.7K/year. This likely hides a higher administrative burden to manage more students and faculty.

There are also so many numbers that I hadn’t even thought of. And many that are still missing. Payroll tax and benefits: $300K. Leave coverage: $36K. (“Someone will have a baby or throw out their back,” Claude told me.) A registrar: $84K. (“Somebody has to manage transcripts.”) Legal counsel: $22K! (“You will get sued,” said Claude.) And $18K/year for counseling: “Contracted, not staffed—but eighteen-year-olds have crises and you are liable.” The list goes on.