Washington — The National Endowment for the Humanities is jumping into the debate about the higher calling of higher education with a new grant series, Enduring Questions. The program, which goes public today, will grant up to $25,000 each for “pre-disciplinary” pilot courses designed to tackle “the most fundamental concerns of the humanities.”

Among the “enduring questions” the endowment hopes the courses will ask: What is the good life? What is justice? Is there such a thing as right and wrong? Is there a human nature and, if so, what is it?

The endowment expects to make up to 20 awards, and $15,000 of each $25,000 grant will be a stipend for the faculty member who designs and teaches the course.

Endowment officials said they wanted to respond to a renewed national debate over whether liberal education has strayed from its deeper purpose. In an interview, William Craig Rice, director of the endowment’s Division of Education Programs, cited Anthony Kronman’s recent book, Education’s End, and a slew of much-discussed essays by other commentators questioning whether undergraduate education had become too narrowly focused.

“We hope to allow for conversations that are outside the career and vocational concerns that animate a lot of students, and this is our effort to see how serious that conversation might become,” Mr. Rice said. —Jennifer Howard