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I used to believe that universities ought to make room for people to study whatever they want. If someone wanted to spend years thinking about highly specialised, theoretical, or "unusual" fields, even if such fields had no or very limited contribution to social well-being, that seemed perfectly fine to me. Universities, after all, are places for curiosity. Why police what counts as a "worthwhile" question?
Lately, I have become less confident in that view, as someone who has always shown great intellectual curiosity towards the study of some unusual fields.
Unusual fields can probably be found in almost every discipline, though some disciplines may be more likely than others to contain such fields. Some non-exhaustive examples from different disciplines include:
At first glance, these unusual fields may seem niche, intellectually interesting yet socially peripheral. However, the issue becomes more pressing once we consider how public resources are allocated to their study.
Let us turn, then, to counterfactuality. By counterfactuality, I mean evaluating a practice not only by what it achieves, but by what could have been achieved had the same resources been used differently. After all, the same funds allocated to any of the above could have gone to malaria research, interventions against poverty, pandemic preparedness, or other areas with clear and urgent benefits. Here, the relevant comparison is counterfactual rather than absolute. The question is not "Does this field produce any value?" but "Does it produce more value than what we could have funded instead?"
Once counterfactuality is considered alongside scarcity, the background conditions appear very different. We are no longer living in a mid-eighteenth-century world in which a relatively small number of people attended university. Today, populations are large, demand for higher education is high, and public budgets are under serious pressure. Every resource spent somewhere is a resource not spent elsewhere. That forces a harder question: what justifies funding unusual fields in publicly funded universities when, in counterfactual terms, they have little or comparatively inferior impact on social welfare?
As this question suggests, throughout this discussion I am explicitly concerned with publicly funded universities. What I am trying to explore is the justification for how public resources are distributed.
Private universities are plausibly different. A university funded by a wealthy individual, a family foundation, or a company may have a different status. If a rich founder wants to support research on, say, kinship terminology, that looks importantly different from allocating public funds to the same topic. In the former case, the resources being used are, at least on the surface, the founder's own.
Of course, one could challenge this distinction. One might argue that much private wealth is itself the result of exploitation or unjust social arrangements, in which case we may once again be forced to think of the rich person's resources as, in some sense, public funds after all. If that is right, the problem simply reappears, because even private universities could then be regarded as publicly funded.
For present purposes, however, I will bracket this complication. My focus here is on universities that are straightforwardly funded by the public, on how scarce public resources should be allocated within them from the perspective of counterfactuality and scarcity, and on what status unusual fields should have.
Hence my question: if we are tempted to say that unusual fields have a place in universities, how might this position be defended?
Perhaps these unusual fields already have, or will eventually have, benefits that are comparable to those of other fields that have immensely benefited society.
This is the most familiar defence. Some unusual fields may generate social benefits in indirect or unexpected ways. For instance, ontological work on holes might inform physics or cosmology. Ideas can trickle into other disciplines and, over time, into technologies that improve lives. Moreover, we are notoriously bad at predicting where major breakthroughs will come from. What looks useless now may turn out to be enormously valuable later.
This justification has some force, but it is limited. Once we factor in opportunity costs, the expected value often remains low. Even if the probability of large downstream benefits is non-zero, it may still be swamped by the near-certainty that redirected funding could have saved lives elsewhere. In addition, this story is much less plausible in many fields within the social sciences, where links to technological or medical progress are tenuous at best. As a general defence, this option seems weak.
One more structural response is that universities function as epistemic ecosystems. Progress in knowledge depends not just on efficiency, but on diversity of methods, perspectives, and questions. Even if most unusual fields never pay off in obvious ways, eliminating them might make the system as a whole more fragile, more conformist, and worse at producing knowledge over time. For instance, studying highly abstract art may cultivate careful reasoning, conceptual sensitivity, and intellectual discipline.
However, this defence also raises further questions. Diversity is valuable, but how much diversity is required, and at what cost? An ecosystem analogy does not by itself justify sustaining every unusual field within it. In conditions of scarcity, we still need criteria for deciding which forms of intellectual diversity are worth preserving. Otherwise, the appeal to "ecosystem health" risks becoming too indeterminate to guide allocation decisions.
Even if some of these defences succeed, they would justify only a limited subset of unusual fields. In fact, some areas might cease to be "unusual" in the relevant sense, once their broader benefits are properly recognised. Yet this would not eliminate the category altogether. There would still remain other unusual fields whose contribution to social welfare is minimal in counterfactual terms. Scarcity would therefore reassert itself. Public resources remain finite, and trade-offs remain unavoidable.
If benefits cannot do all the justificatory work, perhaps demand can. A second justification appeals to the fact that some people want to study unusual fields and may have a right to pursue their interests through publicly funded education. On this view, funding should track what people care about, not just what maximises welfare.
This argument can take a liberal form. Public universities might be seen as institutions that respect people as free and equal agents. If individuals have deep intellectual commitments (even to unusual fields), excluding them on purely instrumental grounds may seem disrespectful. A related democratic defence holds that public institutions should reflect pluralism: if people value certain forms of inquiry, universities should accommodate them.
Yet demand alone cannot settle the issue. In a world of scarcity, not all preferences can be satisfied, and public policy must discriminate among them. A preference to study an unusual field competes with other preferences, including preferences not to suffer, not to die prematurely, or to secure basic goods. Once we frame the issue in these terms, it becomes clear that preferences differ not only in number but in urgency, intensity, and moral weight. The mere existence, or even prevalence, of a preference to pursue an unusual field does not automatically generate a claim strong enough to outweigh competing, more fundamental preferences.
A third option is that studying these fields has value in its own right. Knowledge, understanding, and cultural exploration may be intrinsically valuable, even when they do not improve social welfare in obvious ways. On this view, public funding is justified because society has reason to support valuable activities, not just useful ones.
However, two problems arise. First, even if knowledge has intrinsic value, it does not follow that all knowledge has equal intrinsic value. Some inquiries may plausibly contribute more to our shared intellectual life than others. The appeal to intrinsic value therefore requires further discrimination: which forms of knowledge merit collective support, and why? Second, intrinsic value does not by itself determine who should bear the cost. That an activity is valuable does not entail that it must be publicly funded rather than privately pursued.
For these reasons, the intrinsic value defence may establish that unusual fields are not worthless. But it does not yet show that they are entitled to scarce public resources in competition with other morally significant goods.
There is also an "insurance" argument. Once a field disappears, its expertise and traditions are costly (or even impossible) to recreate. From this perspective, maintaining at least minimal funding for unusual fields may function as a form of intellectual insurance under uncertainty.
This argument has force, but its implications are limited. Insurance is justified when the protected risk is sufficiently serious and the premium sufficiently small. Yet preserving every unusual field "just in case" may itself be costly. Scarcity again forces selection: which intellectual risks are important enough to insure against, and at what level of funding? Without principled limits, the insurance rationale risks expanding to cover everything.
We might also consider political and institutional arguments. Universities that fund only welfare-improving research risk becoming extensions of state priorities or market demands. Allowing some apparently "useless" inquiry may help preserve academic independence and sustain public trust in universities as spaces of free inquiry.
However, independence does not require indifference to cost. A university may resist direct political or market control while still engaging in principled prioritisation. The danger of capture does not imply that all fields deserve equal protection from budgetary scrutiny. The challenge is to preserve institutional autonomy without insulating every unusual field from counterfactual evaluation.
Finally, I may turn to the threshold view. According to the threshold view, unusual fields whose benefits fall below a certain threshold may be considered almost entirely undeserving of public support, since their counterfactual impact would be extremely weak. However, if their benefits exceed a certain threshold (even if those benefits are still too low to compete counterfactually with other fields), we may no longer apply counterfactual reasoning, or we may apply it only in a weakened form. In that case, unusual fields whose benefits lie above the threshold may be regarded as deserving of public support, at least to some extent. Accordingly, while some unusual fields would be supported by public resources, others would receive no public funding.
I have written this post as someone who has deeply enjoyed unusual fields. I reflect on and will continue to reflect on the questions arising from them. I am very glad that they exist, as I flourish through intellectual endeavour. I can also understand why people devote countless hours to studying them.
Still, none of the arguments I have presented obviously justifies unlimited public funding for unusual fields in universities. At best, they support modest, carefully constrained funding rather than the assumption that everything currently studied must be publicly defended.
This leads to an uncomfortable possibility: some unusual fields in publicly funded universities may simply not be justified, all things considered. They may persist because of inertia, prestige dynamics, or internal academic incentives rather than strong public reasons.
Of course, we do not need to treat the issue as all-or-nothing: either total intellectual freedom or strict welfare maximisation. Our task is deciding how much an unusual field deserves public support, where, and on what grounds. That question still lingers.
