From Debt to Freedom: How GCAS Is helping save the Humanities by Breaking the Model That Broke Them

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or collective perspective of GCAS College Dublin (GCAS) or its community of scholars, researchers, and students.

In response to Tyler Austin Harper’s “If the University of Chicago Won’t Defend the Humanities, Who Will?” published in The Atlantic (August 26, 2025)

When Tyler Austin Harper writes that “if even Chicago is not willing to support and protect American arts and letters, who will?” he voices a truth that echoes across the entire landscape of higher education: the humanities are not dying of irrelevance—they are being suffocated by debt, bureaucracy, and a system that no longer understands the value of meaning.

The University of Chicago—long the guardian of humanistic inquiry, home to thinkers like Martha Nussbaum, Robert Pippin, and Saul Bellow—has announced a suspension of admissions across its humanities PhD programs. It is a stunning moment, a symbolic fall of one of the last citadels of critical thought. And as Harper notes, this isn’t just about budgets or job markets. It’s about what kind of civilization we wish to sustain. When universities with $6 billion in debt decide to “pause” the study of philosophy, classics, and literature, the issue is not merely financial—it is moral and psychological.

At GCAS, we believe the crisis in the humanities cannot be solved within the same system that caused it. The traditional university has become an administrative labyrinth, designed to generate debt rather than knowledge. It burdens students psychologically and materially—reducing the pursuit of wisdom to a financial transaction. The humanities, under such pressure, wither. How can a student freely explore Plato, Lacan, or Virginia Woolf when the weight of lifelong debt crushes the very capacity to think freely?

Our answer is radical in its simplicity: remove the debt, and you remove the despair. GCAS is the world’s first debt-free, accredited institution of higher education where students and faculty become co-owners and is accredited in the EU. By eliminating financial exploitation, we also free the mind. The humanities flourish not because they are “profitable,” but because they allow us to ask questions that technology, politics, and markets cannot.

What Harper describes as the collapse of faith in the humanities, we see as the birth of a new model—one that restores intellectual life to the people it belongs to. When knowledge is shared rather than sold, when students are participants rather than consumers, when education is structured around cooperation rather than competition, the humanities not only survive—they thrive.

The crisis at Chicago is a warning, but it is also a chance. The humanities will not be rescued by corporate endowments or administrative restructuring. They will be saved by communities of learners and scholars who refuse to equate value with revenue. GCAS stands as a living example that this is not a utopian dream—it is already happening.

In Harper’s words, “If even Chicago will not defend the humanities, who will?”

Our answer is simple: we will.

Together, debt-free and free-thinking, we are building the future the humanities deserve.