Will Republicans Save the Humanities?

For the first time in decades, humanities fields are a growth sector in higher education, thanks to the creation of new academic units devoted to civic education in red and purple states across the country. Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, who have spearheaded this movement at AEI, document this surprising revival and explain what it will take for these schools to be institutionally and intellectually successful.

This broader movement to reform higher education faces deep resistance, as evidenced by elite institutions’ response to the end of affirmative action. On the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision, AEI Education Policy Director Frederick M. Hess and Greg Fournier explain how colleges are continuing to evade the ruling and use racial preferences in admissions.

Congress faces a similar crisis of institutional identity as performative partisan acrimony crowds out its legislative duties. Over-transparency has eroded congressional deliberation, but Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies Director Yuval Levin argues that C-SPAN could be an ally to congressional reform by shaking up how it televises and covers Congress.

As President Joe Biden continues to underfund the military in his proposals, an effective, deliberative Congress is more essential than ever to provide for our national defense. In a new report, AEI scholars Elaine McCusker, former deputy under secretary of defense (comptroller), and John G. Ferrari, former director of the Army’s Program Analysis and Evaluation, survey the latest list of unfunded priorities that US military leaders have provided to Congress.

A major defense challenge the US faces is the threat China poses to Taiwan. In testimony before the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, historian and semiconductor expert Chris Miller shows how China’s ambitious chip manufacturing plans could upset the military and economic balance of power.

Most debate around the long-term fiscal sustainability of US entitlements and debt relies on official medium- and long-range projections made by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Social Security and Medicare trustee reports, and other federal bodies. But these projections include unwarranted assumptions and lack important budgetary and economic interactions. In a new paper for the Journal of Policy Modeling, Mark J. Warshawsky, John Mantus, and Gaobo Pang develop a unified macroeconomic model to capture the interrelationships among entitlements, the federal budget, the health care sector, and the economy at large. While the CBO projects the ratio of federal debt to gross domestic product (GDP) will be 160 percent in 2052, the authors’ model—by incorporating the likely effects of labor shortages, higher interest rates, and an aging population—projects a far more unsustainable long-term picture, with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 223 percent in 2052. Nonetheless, their model shows that policymakers can still avert this fiscal disaster with the right policies.

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