Bill Gates on the Humanities
Jun 27, 2025
At a time when so much focus has been on the need for the U.S. to nurture more graduates who specialize in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, a call was put out by the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences for a commitment to the study of the humanities. Actor John Lithgow and President of Duke University Richard Brodhead join NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown to talk about how a humanities education supports a lifelong mission of learning.
The goal should be that everybody gets a chance to read great books and participate in the
richness that the humanities brings us.
If you die of malaria, you don't get that opportunity.
So absolutely, it's the wonderful thing that we get to experience, those of us who live
in the United States and have reasonable opportunity.
I love movies, I love books and things like that.
I think we need to make it so that everybody gets to engage in those things.
And so continued creativity there, it's wonderful.
But that's more an end goal than the thing that enables the equity.
Most people today, if you're in the bottom billion, you don't get to read many books or see
many plays.
And so that's what I put my work into.
I don't have the talent to create those things, but I applaud the people who do.