The humanities are considered here as the systematic effort to understand and evaluate human understanding of ourselves, of fellow humans, and of the social and cultural world we create together. Such a program includes the quest for sound knowledge of particulars and of general patterns, sensitivity to the linguistic and situational challenges that come with any effort to understand others, the hermeneutical interest in dialogue, and the challenge to justify one’s own judgements regarding knowledge and behavior. These may be issues that are important to humans. And perhaps we may be able to go beyond personal opinion and preference, and address these in a scholarly way. However, even if important and scholarly, in the content of science policy one might ask whether the humanities deserve a place in our universities.