Institute for Humane Studies

08/28/2026

CivicsMind is a free AI tutor that answers only from founding documents, the Federalist Papers, and Supreme Court rulings, and cites its sources every time. Read more:

The Institute for Humane Studies has launched CivicsMind, a free AI civics platform at CivicsMind.ai. It answers questions about the Constitution and the workings of American government from a fixed library of sources—founding documents first—and it cites them.

08/26/2026

Housing, healthcare, transportation, and energy now claim two-thirds of the average household budget. At the SPN Annual Meeting today, Alicia Plemmons of the Knee Regulatory Research Center, Yang Zhou of the University of North Texas, and IHS's Shane Courtland and Reed Dhein outlined state-level reforms that could bring those costs down.

08/25/2026

America turned 250 this year, and the questions the founders debated are still the ones students are asking.

CivicsMind provides a place to ask real questions about the Constitution, the courts, and the duties of citizenship, and get answers grounded in the founding documents, not opinion. Every answer ends with a question that sends students back to the original texts.

Free access for your classroom at https://hubs.la/Q04vc7Tp0

08/21/2026

Does your research shed light on foundational questions about the nature of liberal civic virtue? If your project explores the virtues necessary for life in a free society, we welcome you to apply for funding.

Submit your proposal by August 31:

The Nature of Liberal Civic VirtueFor FacultyLiberal democracy places a number of demands on its citizens, including accepting constitutional constraints on majorities, extending rights to people one disagrees with, and tolerating deep differences of belief and practice, to name a few. These disposi...

08/21/2026

IHS partnered with Pubkey DC for the first time to bring start-up founders, investors, technologists, and scholars into a room built around Bitcoin. The conversation covered permissionless innovation, property rights, energy and AI infrastructure. It included Marty Bent's evidence for why data centers can be viewed as a net gain for the towns that host them.

Watch this clip, then head to our YouTube for the full conversation with Marty Bent and Gideon Powell.

08/20/2026

Twenty-eight thinkers. One conversation partner for every student in the room.

This recording walks through Classical Liberal Mind, a free AI platform built on the work of Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, and 26 other voices from the classical liberal tradition. See how an instructor could fold it into a syllabus, how a student could turn it into a standing tutor, and how one question leads to the next primary text.

Try it for free while watching the demo: https://classicalliberalmind.ai/

08/10/2026

IHS is calling scholars of journalism, mass media, information systems, communications, and media production to submit proposals on agentic artificial intelligence transformations in news and information ecosystems.

Submit your proposal by August 17 for funding consideration:

Agentic AI and the Future of News and InformationFor FacultyAgentic artificial intelligence is transforming how news and information are produced, distributed, and consumed. IHS seeks to fund research that examines these transformations with a particular eye towards emergent news institutions, journ...

08/07/2026

In 2009, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera moved ten minutes from the birthplace of Mexico's most violent cartel to start her first faculty job. Eight years there reshaped her research: what stops cartel violence from crossing borders isn't a wall, it's whether public institutions work. An IHS grant is now helping her to finish her next book. Read her story:

In 2009, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera took her first faculty job in Brownsville, Texas—a ten-minute walk from the birthplace of Mexico's most violent cartel. Today she studies the markets that borders create.

08/03/2026

A mailman in Calgary whose professor saw a spark. Forty years later, a chaired professor who helped build the field of PPE. Read IHS scholar David Schmidtz's story:

David Schmidtz spent five years delivering mail in Calgary, Alberta, before a professor told him he had a spark. Forty years later, he is a chaired professor who helped build the field of philosophy, politics, and economics. It almost didn't happen.

07/30/2026

Capping hospital, drug, and insurance prices sounds like the fix for US health care. In the The New York Times, IHS scholars Lorens Helmchen and Tony LoSasso say these price controls don't erase costs, they push them into longer waits and thinner care.

A government bureaucrat doesn’t know how much your medicine or doctor’s visit should cost.