The IHP was founded at Senior's initiative, with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to address a problem Senior had noticed in university education.
It was widely recognized then (less so now!) that students are harmed by immediate specialization in college -- whether academic or pre-professional specialization. As a remedy, in the post-war era, the best and most enlightened universities (Columbia, Chicago, Harvard) instituted some kind of "core" or at least "general education" requirement for the first couple of years. John Senior studied, in fact, at Columbia with the renowned Mark Van Doren, a leading exponent of "liberal education" and a key figure in the "great books" movement.