An explorer comparing humanities and social science requirements at leading engineering universities, the controversy over humanities departments at the IITs, and what technology leaders have said about the humanities.
What engineering schools teach besides engineering
The IITs are being told to shut their humanities departments. Nearly every peer they are measured against requires humanities of its engineers, and several require far more.
Since 2025, right-wing accounts and publications have targeted humanities and social science (HSS) departments at IIT Gandhinagar, IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi, with calls on social media to close them outright. The critics' case is that these departments waste taxpayer money and carry an ideological tilt. Faculty reply that HSS is part of how an engineer learns to think.
This asset asks two narrower questions. What do the world's most admired engineering schools actually require of their engineering undergraduates outside engineering? And what have the people who run technology companies said about it?
Minimum HSS credits required of every undergraduate, divided by total credits for the degree, from 2023–26 catalogues. IIT Delhi is a range because its B.Tech totals vary by branch (142–155); IIT Madras uses the 2024 electrical engineering curriculum; EPFL is derived (five bachelor semesters at 2 ECTS). Imperial's compulsory 5-ECTS breadth module can be taken in STEM or business, so its required HSS is zero — the dashed line shows the most it could be. ETH, EPFL and Imperial run three-year bachelor's degrees that follow broad secondary schooling, which flatters US-style four-year programmes in this comparison. MIT, Stanford, Tsinghua and Science Tokyo are left out because their requirements are counted in courses, not a comparable credit share; they are in the cards below.
Teaching engineers is one thing. Awarding humanities degrees is another, and the IITs are not alone in doing it.
MIT runs five humanities and social science PhD programmes. Tsinghua's School of Humanities has about 1,200 undergraduates and 210 doctoral students. Shanghai Jiao Tong, KAIST and ETH award master's or doctoral degrees in the humanities. The IIT MAs and PhDs that critics single out follow the same pattern.
Filled dot: offered, per the institution's own pages or national reporting. Hollow dot: reported by a secondary source (education portals, blogs) and not confirmed on the institution's site. Blank: not found in this sweep, which is not proof of absence. Economics is counted as a social science throughout.
A government tried it. Industry objected first.
On 8 June 2015 Japan's education ministry sent all 86 national universities a directive read as calling for their humanities and social science departments to be abolished or converted. The Yomiuri reported that 26 of 60 public universities with HSS departments agreed to stop admitting students or cut electives. The University of Tokyo and Kyoto University did not comply.
The loudest objection came from business. Keidanren chairman Sadayuki Sakakibara said it was false that companies wanted only work-ready graduates, and that they wanted the opposite: people who solve problems with ideas spanning science and the humanities. The Science Council of Japan objected too. The ministry later said the directive had been misread.
Sources: Kingston, Asia-Pacific Journal, Sept 2015; ICEF Monitor; CAUT Bulletin
- May 2025IIT Gandhinagar: viral X posts accuse the HSS department of promoting "Islamisation" through student theses; students call it an attack on their work. ThePrint
- Sept 2025IIT Bombay: a flyer for a "South Asian Capitalism(s)" workshop co-run with UC Berkeley and UMass Amherst triggers calls to shut HSS departments across the IITs. ThePrint
- Oct 2025An IIT Bombay HSS PhD entrance question on Gramsci's hegemony and Hindutva is cited as evidence of ideological capture. Stop Hindu Dvesha
- Jan 2026IIT Delhi: a conference on the critical philosophy of caste and race draws backlash; Organiser questions why the institute's review came only after the event. Organiser
No statements from African, Latin American or Oceanian technology leaders turned up in this sweep that met the sourcing bar. That is a gap in the search, not evidence of silence.
Keep the humanities
- Thirteen of the fourteen schools here require HSS of their engineers; Imperial requires a breadth module instead. None has shut its HSS teaching.
- The IITs sit in the middle, at 6.7–10.6% of the degree — well below Caltech (20.4%) and KAIST (15.2%). The premise that IIT engineers are drowning in humanities does not survive the curriculum.
- Support comes from founders and CEOs in the US, China, Japan and Europe, including the two Chinese firms most often held up as models of technical nationalism.
- Awarding humanities degrees is normal at engineering-first institutions: MIT, Tsinghua, Shanghai Jiao Tong and KAIST all run humanities or social science doctoral programmes.
- Japan tried a top-down cut in 2015. Its business lobby, not its professors, delivered the sharpest rebuttal, and its best universities refused.
The critics' strongest case
- Credit shares measure undergraduate teaching. The objections are mostly about PhD programmes, conferences and research framing — which this chart does not touch.
- ETH (3.3%) and Imperial (zero required) are among the world's best engineering schools. A large HSS requirement is not a precondition for engineering excellence.
- Praise is cheap. Ren Zhengfei also says engineers should not bother with politics; one analysis of Anthropic's job listings found none asking for humanities training; Vinod Khosla calls most liberal arts teaching irrelevant.
- Not every peer awards humanities degrees: no humanities bachelor's turned up at ETH, Imperial or KAIST, which teach HSS to engineers without running full undergraduate programmes.
- The drift inside India is toward less: IIT Mandi cut compulsory HSS credits from 18 to 13 in 2021.
What survives both readings: the dispute is about the range of views inside HSS departments, not whether engineers should study the humanities at all. On the second question the global evidence points one way.
The university sample is a judgement call — institutions famous for engineering across the US, Europe, East Asia and India — not a ranking. "Required HSS" means the minimum every undergraduate must take; definitions differ (IIT Delhi counts "Self, Society and the World" courses; KAIST counts literature and arts; Tsinghua's general education sits alongside compulsory ideology courses from its School of Marxism). Quotes are kept short and linked to where they were reported; where a claim comes from former employees or a translation rather than the leader's own words, the card says so.