Beyond Humanities: Why We Need Humanitics

1. The Problem Is Bigger Than the Humanities

The debate over the future of the humanities has become increasingly familiar. Universities are asked whether disciplines such as history, sociology, philosophy, literature, anthropology, and political science continue to have sufficient intellectual or economic value in a world increasingly shaped by technology, data, artificial intelligence, and rapidly changing labour markets. Some critics question the usefulness of individual disciplines; others question the university's ability to deliver education that remains relevant to contemporary society.

There is certainly a legitimate question here. Universities cannot assume that disciplines, curricula, teaching methods, and institutional structures should remain unchanged simply because they have existed for generations. The arrival of artificial intelligence makes this question even more urgent. AI is changing how knowledge is produced, retrieved, analysed, communicated, and applied. It is therefore reasonable to ask whether the inherited architecture of the university remains adequate.

But there is a danger in framing this as a question of whether the humanities should survive.

The deeper problem is larger.

The modern university has organised knowledge by dividing it into disciplines. That division has enormous intellectual value. Disciplines provide depth, develop specialised methods, preserve bodies of knowledge, create scholarly communities, and allow researchers to develop expertise that would be impossible to acquire through a permanently generalist approach. Yet the world that universities are expected to understand does not arrive in disciplinary compartments.

Consider something as apparently concrete as the construction of a new industrial cluster. It is an engineering undertaking, an economic investment, a technological project, a labour-market intervention, a land-use transformation, an environmental intervention, a governance challenge, and a social transformation at the same time. It can alter migration patterns, housing demand, local government finances, cultural practices, educational requirements, infrastructure, and the relationship between a town and its surrounding villages.

No single discipline owns this problem.

The same is true of a rapidly growing city, a new digital public infrastructure, an artificial-intelligence ecosystem, a large renewable-energy project, a changing agricultural region, a pilgrimage centre experiencing a sudden increase in visitors, or the transformation of a traditional industry. These are simultaneously economic, technological, political, cultural, social, ecological, and institutional phenomena.

The university has accumulated enormous knowledge about each of these dimensions. What it often lacks is an institutional and intellectual architecture for bringing that knowledge together around the human systems in which these dimensions actually interact.

This is where I believe we need to think beyond the conventional meaning of the humanities.

I propose the term Humanitics.

Humanitics would not be a replacement for the humanities. Nor would it be an attempt to merge every discipline concerned with human beings into one undifferentiated field. Rather, it would be an integrative field concerned with understanding human beings, societies, institutions, technologies, environments, and the systems that human beings create and inhabit.

Its purpose would be to connect knowledge that currently exists in separate intellectual domains and apply that knowledge to the investigation of complex human systems.

This distinction matters. Humanitics is not simply 'humanities made useful'. Nor is it a softer version of economics, sociology, public policy, or management. It would have its own intellectual questions, methods, and objects of inquiry, while drawing extensively upon established disciplines.

The proposition, therefore, is not to abolish disciplinary knowledge.

It is to create another layer of knowledge.

Disciplines generate depth. Humanitics integrates.

And if the university is to remain relevant in the age of AI, this additional layer may become increasingly important.

2. Humanism, Humanities and Humanitics

The word 'humanities' itself contains an interesting historical puzzle.

It sounds, at first glance, as though it ought to mean the systematic study of humanity. Yet that is not quite how the term emerged. The modern idea of the humanities has roots in the Renaissance studia humanitatis, associated with the study and cultivation of the human person through subjects such as grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. The emphasis was not on studying Homo sapiens as an object of scientific inquiry, but on cultivating human capacities and understanding human culture and expression.

That historical inheritance remains important. But it also creates an interesting conceptual gap.

If we want a systematic field concerned with how human beings and the systems they create actually function, evolve, interact, and respond to intervention, 'humanities' may not be the most precise word.

Nor is 'humanism' quite the same thing.

2.1 Humanism: the normative question

Humanism is fundamentally concerned with the human condition in a normative sense. It asks questions such as:

- What should human beings value?

- How should human beings treat one another?

- What constitutes human dignity?

- What obligations do societies have towards their members?

These are indispensable questions. A society that can measure everything but cannot ask what ought to matter is hardly a successful society.

Humanism can therefore provide a moral orientation towards human welfare, dignity, freedom, responsibility, and flourishing.

But it does not, by itself, provide a complete analytical framework for understanding how a social intervention will actually work.

Suppose a government decides that a particular group should receive additional welfare support. Humanism may provide a compelling normative basis for the decision: vulnerable people deserve support.

But many further questions immediately arise.

Who constitutes the relevant population? What are the causes of vulnerability? What form of support is appropriate? What institutional capacity is required to deliver it? What will the fiscal implications be? How will households respond? Could the intervention create unintended incentives? How should success be measured? What happens when the intervention ends? What capabilities should beneficiaries possess afterwards?

These are questions of analysis, institutional design, implementation, and consequence.

That is where Humanitics begins to differ.

2.2 Humanities: the question of human meaning

The humanities approach human life primarily through fields concerned with meaning, expression, memory, culture, interpretation, values, and civilisation.

History helps societies understand their past. Literature explores human experience through language and narrative. Philosophy examines questions of knowledge, existence, ethics, and reason. Languages preserve and transmit cultures. The study of art, religion, literature, and intellectual history reveals how human beings have interpreted themselves and their worlds.

These are not dispensable activities.

Indeed, a society without cultural memory can become extraordinarily powerful while becoming increasingly incapable of understanding itself.

But again, the humanities do not exhaust the field of human inquiry.

Social sciences developed partly because understanding human societies also required systematic investigation of institutions, behaviour, economies, political systems, demographic change, organisations, and social structures.

Humanity, in other words, is already studied through many different intellectual traditions.

What is missing is not necessarily another discipline that studies one more aspect of humanity.

What is missing is a field that deliberately integrates these forms of knowledge around the functioning and transformation of human systems.

2.3 Humanitics: the analytical question

Humanitics would therefore ask a different, though overlapping, set of questions:

«How do human beings, societies, institutions, technologies, and human-made systems function, evolve, interact, and respond to intervention?»

Its concern would extend from the individual to the institution, from the community to the city, from the organisation to the economy, and from the local ecosystem to complex technological systems.

Humanitics could therefore be represented through a simple distinction:

Humanism: Fundamental question: What ought human beings to value, and what do they deserve?

Humanities: How have human beings understood, expressed, remembered, and represented themselves?

Social sciences: How do societies, institutions, and human behaviour function?

Humanitics: How do human beings, societies, and human-made systems function, evolve, and respond to intervention?

These should not necessarily be understood as competing intellectual camps.

Humanism can provide normative orientation. The humanities can provide cultural and historical understanding. The social sciences can provide systematic knowledge of society and institutions. Humanitics can bring these forms of knowledge into an integrated examination of human systems.

Its ambition is therefore not to replace the existing intellectual traditions, but to create a space in which their knowledge can interact without losing its disciplinary character.

3. What Does Humanitics Actually Study?

If Humanitics is to become more than an attractive new name, it needs a reasonably clear object of study.

That object should not be 'humanity' in the narrow biological sense. Biology, medicine, genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary science already investigate human beings as biological organisms.

Nor should Humanitics attempt to become a universal science of everything humans do. That would make it so broad that it would have no meaningful identity.

Its distinctive object should be human systems.

A human system is any system in which human beings, their relationships, institutions, technologies, cultures, resources, environments, and decisions interact to produce outcomes and shape future possibilities.

A city is a human system.

A corporation is a human system.

A village economy is a human system.

A university is a human system.

A digital platform is a human system.

An industrial cluster is a human system.

A pilgrimage economy is a human system.

A public-health system is a human system.

A regional agricultural economy is a human system.

Even a technological system such as an AI ecosystem ultimately operates within human institutions, markets, cultures, regulatory structures, and patterns of behaviour.

Humanitics would study these systems not simply to describe them, but to understand their capabilities, constraints, trajectories, interactions, and possibilities.

3.1 From what exists to what is possible

This introduces an important difference from conventional description.

Humanitics should certainly ask:

What is happening?

But it should not stop there.

It should also ask:

What could happen?

And:

What should happen?

And:

How could the preferred outcome actually be produced?

Finally:

What happens after we intervene?

This produces a basic analytical sequence:

IS → COULD → SHOULD → HOW → THEN WHAT?

IS requires empirical investigation.

COULD requires understanding capabilities, constraints, alternative trajectories, and possible futures.

SHOULD introduces values, objectives, and normative reasoning.

HOW moves towards institutional design and implementation.

THEN WHAT? brings us back to consequences, feedback, adaptation, and further investigation.

This cycle is important because Humanitics should neither become purely descriptive nor purely prescriptive.

It should be capable of moving between reality, possibility, values, intervention, and consequence.

3.2 The question of capability

This leads to what may become one of the defining concerns of Humanitics: capability.

A society may possess considerable resources and still lack the capability to use them effectively.

A region may attract billions of rupees in industrial investment but lack skilled workers, housing, municipal capacity, logistics, regulatory expertise, or educational institutions capable of supporting the resulting transformation.

A city may receive funding for urban infrastructure while lacking the institutional capacity to maintain it.

A university may possess highly qualified professors but lack the systems through which their knowledge reaches industry, government, communities, or students in meaningful ways.

A country may acquire advanced technologies without possessing the human and institutional capabilities required to adapt them to local conditions.

Humanitics should therefore investigate not merely what a society has, but what it needs to become capable of doing something.

That distinction is fundamental.

It also prevents Humanitics from being reduced to a simple exercise in measuring economic value.

Capabilities can be financial, technological, institutional, social, cultural, ecological, organisational, or intellectual. Some can be quantified reasonably well. Others involve trust, memory, legitimacy, relationships, cultural knowledge, or collective learning and are much harder to express through conventional metrics.

The challenge for Humanitics is not to reject measurement, but to understand what measurement leaves out.

This gives the field a potentially distinctive purpose: to connect the measurable with the meaningful, the existing with the possible, and the specialised knowledge of individual disciplines with the complex systems in which human beings actually live.

4. From Criticism to Diagnosis

If Humanitics is to become a meaningful field of study, it must make a conscious choice about the character of its inquiry. It should be analytical without becoming technocratic, normative without becoming prescriptive, and critical without becoming inherently confrontational.

This distinction matters particularly when Humanitics examines powerful institutions, technologies, or industries.

Some forms of scholarship can begin an inquiry with a predetermined diagnosis. An industry, institution, technology, social group, or policy may first be identified as the source of a problem, and research then becomes an exercise in demonstrating or elaborating that initial judgement. There is nothing inherently wrong with criticism. Indeed, criticism is indispensable to intellectual life. But criticism becomes intellectually limiting when the conclusion is effectively built into the question.

Humanitics should approach the same subject differently.

Consider an industrial project. Instead of beginning by asking how to expose the project's harms, a Humanitics inquiry would first seek to understand the system itself.

What does the project produce? What resources does it consume? What capabilities does it create? What capabilities does it require? Who participates in the resulting economy? Who benefits from it? Who bears its costs? What happens to land, labour, migration, housing, local institutions, and the environment? What new dependencies might emerge? What risks are visible, and which remain hidden? What institutional capabilities are necessary to govern the transformation? What alternative trajectories are possible?

The answers may reveal serious harms. They may also reveal substantial benefits, new opportunities, unexpected trade-offs, or capabilities that were previously absent. They may reveal that an apparent problem is actually a symptom of another institutional weakness. They may even show that an intervention intended to solve one problem creates another.

That is precisely why the investigation must precede the verdict.

Humanitics should therefore be critical without being predetermined.

Its criticism should emerge from evidence, comparison, interpretation, and analysis. Its normative conclusions should be explicit rather than smuggled into the research question. And where competing objectives exist, it should make the trade-offs visible rather than pretending that every desirable outcome can be achieved simultaneously.

This does not make Humanitics politically or morally neutral in the sense of having no values. No serious field concerned with human beings can completely escape normative questions. Humanitics can recognise human dignity, social welfare, ecological sustainability, institutional responsibility, and human capability as important concerns.

But it should distinguish between having values and pre-deciding empirical conclusions.

That distinction could become one of its intellectual strengths.

4.1 Beyond the economics of what can be counted

There is an equal danger at the other end of the spectrum.

If Humanitics reacts against ideological or predetermined criticism by simply converting every human question into an economic calculation, it will have failed to justify its existence.

Not everything important can be reduced to a price.

A historic building may have little commercial value and enormous cultural significance. A community may possess forms of ecological knowledge that have never been formally documented. A municipal institution may have years of accumulated institutional memory that does not appear on its balance sheet. Trust between citizens and an institution can determine whether a policy succeeds, even though trust is difficult to measure precisely.

Humanitics should therefore not ask only:

What is the measurable value?

It should also ask:

What human capability, relationship, knowledge, memory, institution, or possibility is involved?

This is where its analytical ambition becomes broader than conventional economic evaluation.

Humanitics should be capable of recognising value without assuming that every form of value can be expressed in the same unit.

4.2 The missing-capability question

The concept of missing capabilities may therefore become one of the most useful analytical tools within Humanitics.

Consider a region receiving a large industrial investment. Conventional analysis might examine the investment amount, employment generated, tax revenues, output, exports, and multiplier effects. These are important.

Humanitics would add another set of questions.

Does the region have enough technicians? Are local colleges capable of producing the required skills? Is there adequate housing for incoming workers? Can local government manage the additional demand for water, roads, sanitation, and public services? Are local suppliers capable of entering the value chain? Are there mechanisms for reskilling displaced workers? Does the regulatory system have the expertise to govern the technology? Does the region possess institutions capable of preserving ecological and cultural knowledge while undergoing rapid transformation?

The absence of any of these capabilities can become a constraint on the success of the investment.

This is a different way of looking at development.

Instead of asking only:

What resources are available?

Humanitics asks:

What must a human system become capable of doing for a desired future to become possible?

That question can be applied to almost anything: a university attempting to adopt AI, a municipality attempting to manage rapid urbanisation, a village attempting to build a local economy, a manufacturing cluster attempting to move into higher-value production, or a society attempting to adapt to demographic change.

Humanitics therefore becomes concerned with capability formation.

And once capability formation becomes a central concern, the field naturally moves beyond criticism towards diagnosis, design, experimentation, evaluation, and learning.

5. Why the AI Era Makes This Necessary

The emergence of artificial intelligence gives this intellectual project a particular urgency.

AI is not simply another subject that universities can add to their curricula. It is becoming an infrastructure through which knowledge itself can be produced, analysed, organised, communicated, and applied.

This transformation affects every discipline.

Sociology can work with much larger bodies of social data and develop new forms of computational social research. Historians can digitise and analyse archives at scales previously difficult to imagine. Economists can work with richer datasets and increasingly sophisticated models. Geographers can combine spatial information with large-scale computational analysis. Anthropologists can experiment with new forms of digital ethnography. Linguists can analyse enormous language datasets. Philosophers can investigate questions arising from increasingly capable artificial systems.

The appropriate response is therefore not to create an isolated academic category called 'AI'.

It is to make every discipline increasingly AI-enabled.

This is important because AI does not eliminate the need for disciplinary knowledge. In many cases, it makes disciplinary knowledge more valuable. An AI system may be capable of analysing thousands of historical documents, but it does not thereby become a historian. It may identify patterns in social data, but interpreting those patterns requires theories of society, institutions, behaviour, and context. It may generate an economic model, but understanding the assumptions and limitations of that model remains an intellectual task.

AI can amplify the reach of a discipline without replacing the discipline.

At the same time, the ability to work across enormous bodies of information makes interdisciplinary integration increasingly feasible. A researcher examining an urban transformation can potentially combine demographic data, economic information, satellite imagery, historical records, transport patterns, environmental measurements, public-policy documents, and qualitative evidence in ways that were previously much more labour-intensive.

This creates a new opportunity for Humanitics.

If disciplines become increasingly capable of generating and analysing knowledge, there is greater value in having an intellectual field capable of bringing that knowledge together around complex human systems.

Humanitics can therefore be understood as part of the broader transformation of the university in the AI era.

The university should not respond to AI by asking which academic disciplines AI will eliminate. It should ask how AI can make each discipline more capable, how disciplines can interact more effectively, and how knowledge can circulate between the university and the wider society.

That requires a corresponding transformation in the way students are educated.

It also requires a reconsideration of the relationship between disciplines, degree programmes, and academic departments.

That is where Humanitics moves from being an intellectual proposition to an institutional one.

6. The Three-Level Humanitics Architecture

If Humanitics is to become more than an intellectual proposition, it needs an educational architecture. The objective, however, should not be to create another rigid discipline and another conventional departmental degree programme. The more interesting possibility is to use Humanitics to rethink how specialisation develops within the university, while ensuring that every academic level produces capabilities with value in the world of work.

The central principle is:

At undergraduate level, integration should be the starting point. At postgraduate level, diversity and specialisations should increase. At doctoral level, diversity, specialisations, and depths should be the most.

But there is an equally important principle:

Each level should constitute a viable employment endpoint in its own right. Progression to the next level should expand capability, not rescue an otherwise incomplete qualification.

This matters because students, parents, employers, and sceptics of higher education will reasonably ask what a qualification enables its holder to do. A university cannot answer that question simply by pointing towards the next degree.

The three levels should therefore produce progressively different forms of capability:

BA → breadth of employability

MA → specialised employability

PhD → advanced expertise and knowledge-creation capability

The progression is not from an allegedly 'incomplete' qualification to a 'complete' one. It is from one kind of capability to another.

6.1 Undergraduate education: BA Humanitics

At the undergraduate level, Humanitics should be offered as a BA Humanitics.

The nomenclature matters. There is little reason to invent a new category of undergraduate degree when the established Bachelor of Arts already provides an appropriate and internationally intelligible framework. Humanitics can be a new academic field without requiring an unfamiliar degree nomenclature.

The BA Humanitics should provide students with an integrated intellectual foundation in the study of human beings, societies, institutions, cultures, technologies, and environments.

Its curriculum could draw upon:

- history and civilisation;

- sociology and anthropology;

- economics and political economy;

- political science and governance;

- geography and regional studies;

- philosophy and ethics;

- literature, language, and cultural studies;

- psychology and human behaviour;

- technology and society;

- environment and human systems;

- quantitative reasoning;

- research methodology;

- data and computational methods;

- AI-enabled research.

The purpose would not be to turn students into superficial generalists who know a little about everything and deeply understand nothing.

Nor would it be to eliminate disciplinary knowledge from undergraduate education.

Rather, the BA Humanitics would introduce students to the relationships between disciplines before asking them to specialise within one of them.

A student should be able to understand, for example, that an urban transformation cannot be understood through economics alone, that an industrial investment cannot be understood through engineering alone, or that a cultural landscape cannot be understood through history alone.

At the same time, students should encounter enough disciplinary depth to understand how different forms of knowledge are actually produced.

The traditional disciplines would therefore remain essential contributors to undergraduate Humanitics.

The difference is that they would no longer necessarily be the organising principle of the entire undergraduate degree.

The student begins with the human system.

The disciplines provide the intellectual instruments with which that system can be understood.

6.1.1 Employment after the BA

A BA Humanitics should also be understood as a terminal employment qualification, not merely as an entrance ticket to postgraduate education.

Its graduates would possess a broad set of capabilities relevant to organisations that need people able to research, observe, interpret, synthesise, communicate, and understand human contexts.

Potential employment could therefore extend across:

- market and consumer research;

- research assistance and junior analytical roles;

- business research and knowledge management;

- customer and user research;

- HR and people operations;

- communications and content research;

- media and publishing;

- CSR and social-impact programmes;

- NGOs and development organisations;

- cultural and heritage institutions;

- tourism and regional-development organisations;

- survey and field-research organisations;

- public-sector programme support;

- sustainability and ESG functions;

- education and academic-support roles;

- project coordination; and

- research-oriented roles within corporate and GCC environments.

AI will increasingly change the productivity of such graduates. A Humanitics graduate who can formulate research questions, conduct interviews and fieldwork, understand social context, assess evidence, use AI tools critically, analyse qualitative and quantitative material, and communicate findings could contribute to knowledge-intensive work across many sectors.

The objective is therefore not to create a single occupation called 'Humanitics graduate'. It is to create a portable analytical foundation.

The employment value of the BA lies in its breadth.

6.2 Postgraduate education: the emergence of diversity

At postgraduate level, the academic universe should become substantially more diverse.

There is no reason for every student who has studied Humanitics at undergraduate level to continue into an MA Humanitics. Nor should every postgraduate programme be forced into the Humanitics label.

Instead, the postgraduate ecosystem should contain at least three broad categories.

6.2.1 Humanitics itself

The first would be the direct continuation of the field:

MA Humanitics

This programme could deepen the theoretical and methodological foundations introduced at undergraduate level and develop advanced capabilities in:

- human-systems analysis;

- institutional analysis;

- capability formation;

- systems thinking;

- technology and society;

- political economy;

- cultural systems;

- environmental-human systems;

- futures and scenario analysis;

- intervention design;

- evaluation;

- computational and AI-enabled human research.

Students could develop specialisations within Humanitics without turning those specialisations into rigid departments.

A university might, for example, develop pathways concerned with urban systems, industrial transformation, ecological systems, heritage, technology, or regional development.

6.2.2 Interdisciplinary disciplines

The second category is perhaps the most dynamic.

Universities should be encouraged to develop interdisciplinary fields that have acquired sufficient intellectual coherence to become recognisable programmes in their own right.

These could include:

- Urban Studies;

- Development Studies;

- Heritage Studies;

- Technology and Society;

- Science and Technology Studies;

- Environmental Studies;

- Regional Studies;

- Public Policy;

- Migration Studies;

- Behavioural Studies;

- Industrial Studies;

- Digital Humanities.

Some of these may remain explicitly interdisciplinary. Others may gradually develop stronger theoretical and methodological identities and, over time, become disciplines in their own right.

That evolution should not be prevented by an overly rigid taxonomy.

The university should allow intellectual fields to develop before bureaucratic categories are imposed upon them.

Thus, postgraduate education becomes a landscape in which Humanitics and interdisciplinary disciplines coexist.

The student's intellectual options become more diverse, not less.

6.2.3 Employment after the MA

Postgraduate education should produce a corresponding increase in professional specialisation.

An MA Urban Studies graduate could contribute to urban research, infrastructure planning, mobility, housing, municipal programmes, real-estate intelligence, urban technology, and city-focused consulting.

An MA Development Studies graduate could work in development programmes, impact assessment, CSR, rural development, livelihoods, social-sector research, and public programmes.

An MA Technology and Society graduate could work around technology adoption, responsible AI, technology policy, user research, digital transformation, technology assessment, and social impact.

An MA Humanitics graduate could undertake integrated human-systems analysis, institutional research, policy analysis, programme design, foresight, social and cultural intelligence, and interdisciplinary consulting.

The employment landscape could therefore include corporations, GCCs, consultancy firms, research organisations, government agencies, thinktanks, development organisations, infrastructure and industrial companies, technology companies, financial institutions, healthcare organisations, cultural institutions, sustainability organisations, and regulatory or policy bodies.

The important point is that the labour-market value of a discipline does not depend solely upon an occupation bearing the same name as the degree.

The Master's therefore provides depth of employability.

6.3 Doctoral education: maximum intellectual diversity

The doctoral level should be the most intellectually diverse layer of the system.

At this stage, there should be room for three broad categories of doctoral research.

6.3.1 Humanitics doctoral education 

Universities should be able to offer:

PhD Humanitics

This would be appropriate where the research question genuinely requires an integrated human-systems approach that cannot be adequately contained within a single established discipline.

A Humanitics doctorate might investigate, for example, the transformation of a pilgrimage economy, combining questions of migration, infrastructure, cultural change, ecology, local government, tourism, technology, and regional economic development.

The thesis would not simply be a collection of chapters borrowed from different disciplines.

It would need to develop a coherent Humanitics question, conceptual framework, methodology, and contribution to knowledge.

That requirement is important if Humanitics is to become an intellectual field rather than a convenient label for interdisciplinary work.

6.3.2 Interdisciplinary doctoral disciplines

The second category would consist of doctoral programmes in mature interdisciplinary fields:

PhD Urban Studies / Development Studies / Heritage Studies / Technology and Society / Regional Studies / etc.

These would occupy an interesting middle ground.

They would draw upon multiple disciplines but develop enough theoretical and methodological coherence to sustain their own scholarly communities.

The boundaries between these fields and Humanitics should remain porous.

A doctoral researcher in Urban Studies might draw substantially upon Humanitics. A Humanitics researcher might use urban theory.

This intellectual overlap should be considered an asset rather than an institutional problem.

6.3.1 Traditional disciplinary doctorates

The university should continue to support doctoral research in established disciplines:

PhD Economics / Sociology / Civics / History / Geography / Philosophy / etc.

A Sociology PhD should remain recognisably Sociology. It should engage deeply with sociological theory, literature, methodology, and scholarly debates. A History PhD should retain the intellectual standards of historical scholarship. An Economics PhD should possess genuine economic analytical depth.

Humanitics should not become a mechanism for dissolving disciplinary expertise into an amorphous interdisciplinary space.

6.3.4 Employment after the doctorate degree 

A PhD should also be treated as a qualification with value beyond academic employment.

Its distinctive capability is original knowledge creation and advanced expertise.

Doctoral graduates can contribute to:

- universities and research institutions;

- corporate R&D and strategic research;

- specialised research organisations;

- government research and policy institutions;

- regulatory institutions;

- think tanks;

- advanced consulting and advisory work;

- technology and AI research;

- industrial research;

- market and consumer intelligence;

- cultural and heritage institutions;

- international organisations; and

- specialised knowledge and intelligence functions within large corporations and GCCs.

For instance, a PhD in Sociology does not have to produce only a lecturer of sociology. A sociologist may become a specialist in consumer behaviour, labour markets, organisational change, social forecasting, public policy, technology adoption, or cultural intelligence.

Likewise, a Humanitics researcher could become a specialist in human-systems analysis without there being an occupation formally called a 'Humanitics researcher'.

The doctoral qualification therefore provides advanced expertise and knowledge-creation capability.

6.4 Increasing specialisations, increasing diversity

The resulting progression is therefore not simply:

Broad → narrow.

It is:

Integration → specialisations → intellectual diversification.

At undergraduate level:

BA Humanitics

At postgraduate level:

MA Humanitics / interdisciplinary disciplines

At doctoral level:

PhD Humanitics / interdisciplinary disciplines / traditional disciplines

This matters because different kinds of questions require different kinds of knowledge.

Some questions demand disciplinary depth.

Some require an established interdisciplinary field.

Some require Humanitics.

The university should be capable of accommodating all three.

The principle, therefore, should not be to determine which category is superior. It should be to ensure that each has a legitimate place in the academic and employment ecosystem.

Here a useful question arises:

What becomes possible when these disciplines remain intellectually strong but are no longer required to carry the entire burden of organising structure around themselves?

That question leads directly to the institutional problem at the heart of the existing university: the department.

7. What Happens to the Departments?

If Humanitics becomes the principal integrated undergraduate programme, and if undergraduate intake is deliberately reduced to create more room for research, fieldwork, mentoring, and external engagement, another question follows naturally: why retain departments at all?

The answer may be that, at least within the Humanitics School, we do not need to.

This is a more radical proposition than simply decoupling departments from degree programmes. The traditional department has historically performed several functions simultaneously. It is the home of a discipline, the administrative unit for faculty, the organiser of courses, the owner of degree programmes, the location of research, the custodian of infrastructure, and the institutional community through which academics organise their professional lives.

These functions became fused because the university itself was organised largely around disciplinary degree programmes.

But there is no inherent reason why they must remain fused.

If the undergraduate programme is already organised around integrated human systems rather than individual disciplines, and if research is increasingly concerned with questions that cross disciplinary boundaries, the department can become an unnecessary organisational container.

This does not mean that disciplines disappear.

Quite the opposite.

Disciplinary depth and organisational structure are not the same thing.

A university can preserve economics, sociology, civics, history, geography, philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines as rigorous intellectual traditions without maintaining a separate administrative department for each of them.

The distinction is particularly important for the university's humanitics school because its research infrastructure is comparatively light and flexible. Much of its essential infrastructure consists of computing, digital archives, libraries, databases, GIS, survey systems, field-research networks, AI tools, behavioural research facilities, regional observatories, and collaborative spaces. These resources can be shared.

The situation is different in many science and engineering fields. They require expensive and specialised infrastructure: laboratories, workshops, fabrication facilities, clean rooms, specialised instruments, technical staff, safety systems, and equipment - that demand dedicated stewardship. In such schools, departments may continue to have a strong practical rationale.

The humanitics school, being different, has an unusual opportunity.

It does not have to reproduce the organisational architecture of infrastructure-intensive disciplines and departments simply because that architecture exists elsewhere in the university.

Where knowledge production is relatively infrastructure-light, institutional boundaries can be considerably more fluid.

The question, then, is not whether departments are inherently good or bad.

It is:

Which functions of the department actually require a department?

For Humanitics, many of those functions can be redistributed.

Disciplinary depth can be preserved through Faculty Groups. Undergraduate education can be organised through Humanitics. Postgraduate education can provide increasing specialisations and diversity. Research can be organised through interdisciplinary research centres. Students can form disciplinary communities of their own. Shared libraries, archives, datasets, computing infrastructure, and other resources can become school-wide assets.

The department does not have to carry the entire institutional architecture on its back.

8. Faculty Groups: Preserving Disciplinary Depth Without Disciplinary Silos

Removing departments should not mean removing disciplinary identity. Indeed, it would be a mistake to imagine that integration makes disciplinary knowledge less important.

The answer is to preserve disciplines as Faculty Groups.

The humanitics school chool could therefore have Sociology, History, Economics, Geography, Anthropology, Political Science, Philosophy, Psychology, and other Faculty Groups. These would be intellectual communities rather than territorial administrative units.

Their principal responsibilities would include maintaining disciplinary standards, developing methods, organising scholarly seminars, contributing courses to degree programmes, supporting postgraduate and doctoral education, facilitating faculty development, and sustaining professional and scholarly networks.

But membership would not necessarily be exclusive.

A scholar working on urbanisation could belong to both Sociology and Geography Faculty Groups. A researcher studying artificial intelligence and society could participate in Sociology, Psychology, and Technology and Society groups. Someone working on heritage could belong to History, Anthropology, and Geography groups.

The same faculty member could therefore possess a disciplinary home while participating in several research communities.

This is important because interdisciplinarity should not require academics to abandon their intellectual foundations.

This entails a useful separation:

Humanitics integrates. Faculty Groups preserve disciplinary depth. Student Groups cultivate disciplinary communities.

None of these requires the department to remain the basic organisational unit.

9. Research Centres: Organising Around Questions Rather Than Departments

If departments cease to be the principal research units, what replaces them?

The answer should be interdisciplinary research centres organised around questions, systems, and areas of inquiry.

Consider the kinds of questions a humanitics school might investigate.

How are certain cities and towns changing as tourism, migration, infrastructure, climate risks, and digital commerce interact?

How do changing family structures affect housing, consumption, care, and employment?

How are new technologies changing work and organisations?

How do cultural calendars influence consumer markets?

How do communities respond to industrial investment?

How should cities develop institutional capabilities for managing new infrastructure?

None of these questions belongs naturally to one discipline.

A research centre could therefore bring together economists, sociologists, historians, geographers, psychologists, data scientists, and other specialists according to the requirements of the question.

The research centre need not become permanent bureaucratic structures either.

Research centres could be established, expanded, merged, or closed as knowledge needs evolve. A new regional economic transformation could justify a new centre. A mature research area could become an independent institute. Two centres could merge when their questions increasingly converge.

This gives the university something departments often struggle to provide: organisational adaptability.

It also changes the relationship between faculty and the outside world.

A research centre has a natural reason to engage with municipalities, companies, government agencies, cultural institutions, civil-society organisations, industry associations, and other knowledge users. These relationships are not merely consultancy arrangements. They can provide research questions, datasets, field sites, institutional knowledge, and opportunities to test ideas.

The faculty member consequently becomes less defined by the teaching requirements of a departmental timetable and more by a combination of disciplinary expertise,student mentorship, research capability, and external engagement.

This does not eliminate academic disagreement, nor should it. Universities need intellectual disagreement.

But it can change what academic energy is directed towards. Instead of institutional structures being primarily organised around the protection of departmental territories, they can increasingly reward research, knowledge production, collaboration, and engagement.

That would be an important cultural change.

10. Recalibration, Not Dispossession

Such a proposal might initially sound like an exercise in dismantling existing institutions.

It should not be.

The intention is not to take anything away from the people who currently constitute a department. It is to recalibrate and repurpose the components of the existing structure.

The faculty remain.

Their disciplinary expertise remains.

The university's accumulated intellectual capital remains.

The buildings remain.

Libraries, archives, datasets, computers, research equipment, seminar spaces, and other infrastructure remain.

What changes is the institutional relationship among them.

A former Sociology Department, for instance, could become part of a Centre for Social and Cultural Intelligence or a Centre for Labour, Organisations and Work. Its faculty would become members of the Sociology Faculty Group and participate in one or more research centres. Its library and datasets would become part of the shared knowledge infrastructure of the humanitics school. Its students would encounter sociology through the BA Humanitics programme, disciplinary Student Groups, postgraduate programmes, and research projects.

The physical infrastructure is therefore not discarded.

It is repurposed.

This distinction matters because institutional reform becomes much easier to imagine when it is not presented as a choice between preserving everything and abolishing everything.

The existing school is a stock of accumulated public investment and human capability. The question is how to make that investment more productive.

Reducing undergraduate intake can create the physical and intellectual space for this transition. Instead of filling classrooms with large annual cohorts simply to sustain outdated departmental work loads, some of that capacity can be converted into research spaces, archives, data labs, project offices, fieldwork facilities, seminar rooms, and collaborative workspaces.

Faculty time can similarly be recalibrated.

Less time need be consumed by repetitive mass teaching and departmental administration. More can become available for mentoring, research, fieldwork, collaboration, and engagement with real institutional and social problems.

This is particularly significant for Humanitics because its relatively light infrastructure requirements allow experimentation that may be difficult in infrastructure-intensive schools.

The humanitics school can therefore become a laboratory for institutional innovation within the university itself.

It can test whether universities can move from departments as the basic units of academic life towards a more fluid architecture in which disciplines, research questions, degree programmes, and student communities interact without being forced into the same organisational box.

The principle can be stated simply:

Do not abolish disciplinary knowledge. Abolish the assumption that disciplinary knowledge requires a separate administrative department.

The disciplines remain rigorous.

The faculty retain their intellectual identities.

Students retain access to disciplinary communities.

Research becomes more interdisciplinary.

And the university gains greater freedom to organise itself around public matters that require diagnosis and treatment.

Humanitics thus becomes more than a new undergraduate degree. It becomes an opportunity to experiment with a different way of organising a part of the university itself.