Chapter Three The Humanities and Higher Education

Like a Janus with two unhappy faces, higher education in the United States gazes upon a tumultuous recent past and an uncertain future. Emerging from a period of extraordinary growth, during which they extended access to new students and performed new services for society, our colleges and universities are implicated more deeply than ever before in our national life. They contribute immeasurably to material progress and public discourse as well as to education, and they are scrutinized as never before. The campus turmoil of the late 1960s has abated, but so has the boom in higher education. The prospects now include little or no growth in enrollments, financial difficulties, complex relationships with government and the public, and conflicting demands from a society itself riven with uncertainties.

How higher education responds to the many claims upon it during the next two decades will be a crucial chapter in the history of our culture. Whatever the response, we know that it cannot depend on major increases in financial support. We take this harsh fact into account as much as possible. Such constraints give even greater urgency to the task of revitalizing the services that higher education and the humanities render each other.

One great strength of American higher education, both public and private, is its diversity. This and the autonomy of individual

institutions are to be cherished, but they give no license for the incoherence that is for some institutions among the legacies of change. Colleges and universities must manage limited resources prudently and see their social missions clearly. They must also reconsider their educational ideals and translate them into coherent, purposeful academic programs. The humanities, concerned with what human beings know and how they use their knowledge, can share in no more fitting task than this rethinking.

At many institutions liberal or general education, which for several generations guaranteed a presence for the humanities in every undergraduate's course of study, has so declined that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has called it "a disaster area" (Missions of the College Curriculum , San Francisco, 1977). Faced with an uncertain economy and job market, a disorderly curriculum, and educators' diminished confidence in the purpose of a college education, many undergraduates choose majors narrowly aimed at obtaining a first job. They seem unaware that most subjects, disciplines, and careers intersect the humanities. Humanists themselves often neglect the connections between their disciplines and education in the natural and social sciences, engineering, business, and other fields. Laden with narrowly conceived courses and lacking clear progression through the disciplines, the curriculum in the humanities at some institutions has become so overspecialized that it merely prepares for graduate study in the humanities rather than contributes to a liberal education. Students confront a welter of courses that bear little relation to each other, to other disciplines, or to their own interests. Finally, the college curriculum has yet to find a satisfactory accommodation between the idea of a common cultural tradition and the legitimate claims of racial and ethnic cultures to their own traditions in the humanities.

The diminishing of the humanities is only one aspect of a disarray in liberal education whose consequence is well known: college students whose education leaves them uneducated. Many have no command of written and spoken English. Without well-developed skills in foreign languages, most lack the valuable understanding of other cultures that grows from such skills. Many

scarcely know their own culture—its history, literature, art, and thought—and how it shapes their lives.

Schools and departments of graduate education for the professions are paying more attention to questions of value, choice, and responsibility that often link their fields to the humanities. Yet many students, responding to the admissions policies of professional schools, seek little exposure to the humanities during their undergraduate years and are ill equipped for examining the humanistic dimensions of their professional training. Faculty in the humanities show little willingness, often less than their colleagues in the professional schools, to explore these dimensions.

Graduate education in the humanities is in a state of uncertainty. As undergraduate enrollments and faculty expansion have subsided, new and mid-career Ph.D.'s in the humanities have found fewer and fewer positions as teachers and scholars. The plight of these people is a pressing concern. So is the need to insure the continuity of humanistic scholarship by attracting the best talent to graduate training of the highest quality. Graduate programs must adapt to a smaller academic job market. They must also help return the humanities to the mainstream of undergraduate education: to demonstrate anew the importance of the humanities in liberal education, higher education will need generalists as well as specialists in the humanities.

Our colleges and universities have helped make American humanistic scholarship competitive with the finest in the world, but support for advanced research in the humanities is insecure. Rising costs threaten sabbaticals and library resources. Declining government support for science may leave institutions less able to fund the humanities. Inflation also diminishes the purchasing power of funds from private foundations, corporations, and government agencies.

The diversity of American colleges and universities allows no single agenda for strengthening the humanities. In recent years many institutions have begun to reassess their aims, often with a view to strengthening the humanities in the regular curriculum and in adult or continuing education. Here and in the next chapter we cite ways the humanities might best serve, and be served by, our colleges. We are aware that what works for one institution will

not necessarily work for others. We offer proposals flexible enough to help many kinds of institutions, but we emphasize that the humanities must be a part of all public and private higher education. Because the humanities ask what it means to be human, their importance to higher education is self-evident: in work or leisure, parenthood or friendship, citizenship or solitude, our college and university graduates should be sensitive to the moral, spiritual, and cultural life of the community. The methods common to the humanities enable educated people to share their experience and define its quality.

Undergraduate Education

To claim that the humanities today form the core of a college education would sound a hollow cry. When the Commission on the Humanities of 1964 associated the humanities with a program of education "based on the liberal tradition we inherit from classical antiquity," it rightly invoked an enduring connection that once unified the curriculum by virtually identifying the humanities with the liberal arts. But the growth of knowledge and the multiplication of educational missions over the past century have repeatedly challenged this liberal tradition of learning and thus the humanities' place in the curriculum.

Until well into the nineteenth century, the humanities dominated an undergraduate curriculum whose vocational, educational, and social purposes were in harmony. The early American college had three basic aims: to train young men for the clergy or political leadership; to develop the mental discipline and moral and religious habits appropriate to a cultivated gentleman, whatever his vocation; and to maintain, through induction into the traditions of classical culture, a small elite of the educated in a predominantly agricultural society. These goals, educators thought, could be achieved through studies in the literature, history, and culture of Western antiquity, combined with religious instruction. Through the humanities the early college expressed its faith in the coherence of knowledge, in a single cultural tradition, and in the community of the learned.

Revolutionary intellectual and social changes weakened that

faith. The explosion of knowledge in the second half of the nineteenth century scattered the fields of academic inquiry beyond the reach of a single curriculum or small faculty. To impose order on this fragmentation, newborn universities divided into schools, departments, disciplines, and specialties. Universities also took on a new responsibility for higher education: research, the pursuit of new knowledge for its own sake and for the benefit of society. The sciences gained a prominence in the universities that has never since been challenged. Humanistic learning also profited from the new emphasis on research, but in the curriculum the division and subdivision of knowledge eroded common ground formerly occupied by the humanities.

Founded as institutions where, in the words of Ezra Cornell, "any person can find instruction in any study," the new universities also expanded the social mission of higher education. They did not educate an elite as socially exclusive or all-male as the earlier colleges had. Studies preparing students for skilled occupations, formerly relegated to apprenticeships, found their way into the curriculum, especially at the comprehensive land grant institutions established by the Morrill Act of 1862. Vocational training in college education attracted new students and taught new technologies required by a society growing rapidly in population and industry.

As new arts and sciences arose and utility rivaled cultivation, liberal education was redefined as a synthesis of new studies and old ideals. The curriculum became a catalog—much as we know it today—of branches of knowledge and kinds of expertise needed by society. Colleges and universities entered the twentieth century offering an emporium of courses in place of the old curriculum of humane studies. Organization of the undergraduate course of study into the major and electives reflected the increasingly specialized character of knowledge and gave students freedom to follow their own interests. Undergraduate education was called liberal insofar as institutions required students to take survey courses in the major fields of knowledge and satisfy distribution requirements.

The humanities remained an essential part of liberal learning

through the first half of this century. They claimed far less of the curriculum than previously, but institutions still looked to them to fulfill inherited ideals of liberal education. One of these was civic: the humanities helped prepare students for responsible participation in society. A second ideal was personal: the humanities offered spiritual and emotional enrichment. Liberal education, which became widely known as general education, usually included requirements in the humanities. Through survey courses in Western culture, for example, many institutions expected generations of students to shape their civic and personal values. Surveys of the Western tradition also provided a common educational experience—another traditional ideal of liberal education—for an increasingly diversified student body.

The synthesis of modern curriculum and older educational ideals, never an entirely stable one, has disintegrated since the Second World War. The steady extension of educational opportunity—first under the G.I. Bill and later through civil rights reforms, affirmative action, and the growth of community colleges—challenged the notions of a common culture and an even partially unified curriculum. Disturbed by our nation's policies at home and abroad and suspecting higher education of complicity in them, students in the 1960s rejected the idea that educational institutions inculcated civic virtue or offered personal enrichment. The idea of a central Western cultural tradition came under attack as elitist and irrelevant. Many institutions granted students greater freedom in their course of study. Distribution requirements were cut back, required courses in the humanities often abandoned, the ideal of a common educational experience lost.

After a century of readjustment and some years of disintegration, liberal education and the humanities were especially vulnerable to the wave of vocationalism that swept undergraduate learning in the 1970s. Students saw that they would have to compete with millions of other college graduates for employment in an uncertain economy. They looked to their undergraduate years not for breadth, civic ideals, or personal enrichment, but for the skills that would get them a job. Nationwide between 1969 and 1976 the number of preprofessional majors grew dramatically.

This growth coincided with a reduction of general education or breadth requirements from 43 percent to 34 percent of the typical course of study. Majors and total enrollments in the humanities declined (Missions of the College Curriculum ). Some of our more than three thousand colleges and universities were able to maintain a firm commitment to liberal education; yet no type of institution proved immune to vocationalism. Indeed, some traditional liberal arts colleges, facing financial hardship and falling enrollments, shifted their focus to career education.

At all kinds of institutions, faculty and administrators withdrew from the business of shaping a coherent philosophy of education. Free to choose, students chose vocationalism. Liberal education and the humanities, their fates still linked, were willed to the periphery of undergraduate learning.

As higher education enters the 1980s, it must formulate afresh the ideals of liberal education. New models of a liberal curriculum must accommodate the various backgrounds and goals of today's students, including their concern with careers. Liberal education has in fact always served career needs. As Alfred North Whitehead said:

The antithesis between a technical and liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical: that is, no education which does not impart both technique and intellectual vision. (The Aims of Education and Other Essays , New York, 1929)

The humanities—without excluding other kinds of learning— are essential for intellectual vision. Properly conceived, liberal education includes the humanities along with the other major fields of knowledge. But liberal education must aim beyond breadth; it must search for the connections among fields of knowledge and between knowledge and its uses. As the home of philosophy, history, and criticism, the humanities guide that search and thus have a special place in liberal education.

Every institution of higher learning must affirm the importance of the humanities. In the highly specialized circumstances of military education, for example, the humanities should be consid-

ered necessary for training responsible leaders; we have been struck with the fact that, in letters to us, the commanders of several military academies have stressed that the humanities help develop the ability to reason and communicate and that they confer an understanding of the social and ethical dimensions of military policy. A fundamentally different kind of institution, the private liberal arts college, has traditionally honored the humanities as central to the curriculum; colleges with religious affiliations have long upheld the humanities as essential for religious education. Yet even these customary homes of liberal learning will have to revivify the humanities for students ignorant of the cultural and social values of past generations.

In general, it may be that the more dependent an institution is on public funding and the more vocational its charter, the more broadly administrators and faculty should construe the idea of brokerage between the humanities and the career interests of students. Liberal studies such as the humanities must often justify their importance alongside the technical and vocational missions of state colleges and universities, land grant institutions, community colleges, and technical institutes. These institutions may find it particularly fruitful to draw students toward study of the humanities through programs that integrate the humanities with career preparation.

Community colleges have become leaders of the movement to provide greater equality of opportunity in higher education. With over four million students, these institutions now account for over one-third of all enrollments in higher education. Career and technical education are among the most important services provided by community colleges. But the notion that community colleges need not provide all students a general education—a view shared by some state legislatures and regulatory agencies, many students, and indeed some community college administrators—is mistaken. Two recent conferences on the humanities in two-year institutions issued far-reaching recommendations for strengthening the humanities; both conferences emphasized the need for curricula integrating the humanities with occupational education (Challenges Before the Humanities in Community Colleges , ed.

Donald D. Schmeltekopf and Anne D. Rassweiler, Cranford, N.J., 1980; and Strengthening Humanities in Community Colleges , ed. Roger Yarrington, Washington, D.C., 1980).

In times of tight budgets, colleges and universities of all kinds will find it difficult to add new programs in the humanities. As the Committee on the Humanities of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) reported to us, "Given the difficulty of maintaining existing programs, administrators and faculty regard the development of new programs as impossible. Ironically, the ability to initiate change may now be particularly critical to the humanities." Educators will have to make some hard choices. Humanities departments, the Council of Graduate Schools has said to us, should

consider whether, as is typical, the largest portion of their course offerings should be directed to departmental majors. Offerings for the major should, perhaps, be reduced and even then be more varied, so as to be only one strand of a department's offerings, while new courses of interest and service to students in other preparations should be developed.

Reasserting the humanities' central place in liberal education depends on connecting them with other fields of study without abandoning the valuable contribution of traditional, discipline-centered courses in the humanities. As the AASCU Committee concluded,

Often movement toward change is seen as an erosion of the strength of traditional programs. The real challenge is to discover ways of maintaining the balance between meeting changing student needs and identifying new roles for the humanities and maintaining the strength of the humanities disciplines.

Underlying our recommendations on undergraduate and professional education is a belief that the humanities develop capacities and perspectives necessary for every individual: they are essential in careers over a lifetime; they are essential beyond careers. The first of these ideas is one that students and administrators—and indeed humanists—need to be reminded of today. The second idea liberal education has kept alive always.

Recommendation 11:

Efforts to give fresh meaning to liberal education must continue; all such efforts should emphasize the importance of the humanities for developing the mental capacities and historical knowledge needed for

—effective command of written and spoken English;

—enjoyment and informed judgment of the arts;

—understanding (preferably based on knowledge of foreign languages) of other cultures;

—analysis and assessment of ethical problems, issues of public policy, and the questions of value underlying science and technology.

Rooted in language and dependent in particular on writing, the humanities are inescapably bound to literacy. From reading works of literature, history, and philosophy, or the symbolic texts of music and the visual arts, humanists proceed to elaborate their insights through language. Traditionally the humanities, especially departments of English, have trained undergraduates in the use of language. Yet the effective use of English does not end with the humanities or with formal education. To read and listen for comprehension; to have a feeling for the complexity of discourse; to speak and write clearly and persuasively: these are useful in every area of learning, working, and living.

In literature and the arts, acts of the imagination give public expression to private experience. Liberal education should develop the senses for appreciating form and beauty. Literature, painting, music, dance, and other art forms have intimate connections with ideas. Thus the fullest response to art depends on knowledge of the history and characteristics of the artist's chosen medium, and on an understanding of the interplay of individual talent, aesthetics, artistic tradition, and historical context. Study of the humanities fosters this knowledge and understanding.

The humanities have always been associated with the civic purpose of liberal education—to prepare the individual for making informed choices and acting responsibly. This purpose must be reasserted today, with a special urgency. As instant communications deluge us with information on social and political issues, we face civic choices more complex and perhaps more numerous than

ever before. The humanities emphasize interpretation and criticism, indispensable techniques for participating in community life and keeping watch over its values. Each major branch of the humanities helps educate men and women for citizenship. History provides clues for understanding the present. Literature broadens personal moral vision through exploring character, circumstance, and choice. Philosophy supplies rules of analysis and criteria for belief.

Today the responsible citizen must look beyond native borders. The political, economic, and cultural interdependence of nations affects our everyday lives and will shape our common future. Under these circumstances, the dwindling of foreign language and international studies in American higher education represents a dangerous parochialism. Knowledge of a foreign language improves comprehension of one's own language and of foreign culture. Knowledge of geography and the history of other societies illuminates one's own culture and the complexity of culture in general.

In 1966, according to the President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies, one-third of American colleges and universities required knowledge of a foreign language for admission; only 8 percent do now. The percentage of undergraduates enrolling in international studies is now barely half of what it was a decade ago (Strength Through Wisdom , Washington, D.C., 1979). We concur with the President's Commission: liberal education must renew its commitment to foreign language and international studies by strengthening foreign language requirements, expanding programs in area studies, and teaching more courses in the regular curriculum from an international perspective. (Similar concerns guide the Council on Learning's current project, Education and the World View, which will assess college students' understanding of global perspectives and identify needs in international education.)

A more than passing acquaintance with the natural and social sciences is inseparable from the critical and interpretive capacities developed through the humanities. Science and technology transform the conditions of life in beneficial ways. They also raise serious moral and civic questions: generic engineering; the chemi-

cal control of human behavior and reproduction; euthanasia; the distribution of space, fuel, and other diminishing natural resources; the electronic invasion of privacy; and so forth. The social sciences—psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science—furnish insights into the organization of human societies, and these interpretations influence public policies as well as the day-to-day behavior of individuals. The humanities offer historical perspective and critical methods necessary for discussing the problems presented by other disciplines. If the aim is to make invention creative and humane, knowledge of the humanities must be coupled with an understanding of the characteristics of scientific inquiry and technological change.

Liberal education must define scientific literacy as no less important a characteristic of the educated person than reading and writing. As an especially important part of this literacy, students must learn about new informational technologies, which affect society today as significantly as did printing centuries ago and television during the last thirty years. At present no more than 40 percent of American college students graduate with some basic knowledge of how to use a computer. Computer literacy must now be considered among the goals of a liberal education by all colleges and universities; the training of undergraduates in the use of computers should include consideration of the social repercussions of informational technologies.

Liberal education must find an effective compromise between the individual's choice among many courses and the institution's responsibility to provide a coherent educational experience. Faculty from all disciplines must sacrifice personal and parochial interests if these work against a new synthesis of curriculum and ideals.

Recommendation 12:

While no single curriculum is appropriate for all colleges and universities, we recommend the following general strategies for strengthening education in the humanities at various kinds of institutions:

—instruction in writing that is spread across the course of study;

—courses integrating themes and subjects from the humanistic disciplines with each other and with other fields of study;

—clear sequences of courses in each of the disciplines of the humanities;

—use of resources from local cultural institutions;

—the development of new materials for teaching the humanities.

Until prior schooling meets the need, instruction in writing should be more thoroughly integrated with the entire undergraduate curriculum, through writing workshops supplementing majors in all fields of study or through sequences of requirements in writing. For at least a decade, parents, faculty, and employers have joined in deploring the inadequate writing skills of high school graduates and even students who have passed courses in college English. Many institutions have improved their programs in basic composition, many have created or revived learning centers to help students in reading and writing. But more needs to be done.

Students should write essays regularly in as many courses as possible and throughout the undergraduate years. Good writing in any field becomes more difficult as knowledge of the field leads to a specialized vocabulary and special modes of thought. The basic training offered in a freshman composition course should—but usually does not—suffice for upperclassmen in disciplines from anthropology to zoology. The teaching of writing must be the responsibility of all faculty, not only of English departments. Just as English faculty should not limit writing assignments to the subject of literature, faculty outside departments of English must consider the quality of writing in their normal evaluations of student work.

• At the University of Michigan, for example, the relatively new English Composition Board (ECB) coordinates a multileveled program in writing for all students and most departments in the college of liberal sciences and arts. The Board assesses a writing sample from each entering freshman and transfer student. According to the results, students are placed either in "special help" tutorials staffed by the Board or in introductory composition courses taught in the English department; some may be exempted from any required course. Every student, however, must take an

upperclass writing course at some time after the sophomore year and before the final semester of undergraduate studies. These courses, normally taken in the student's major field and often taught by faculty from that field, explore the writing problems peculiar to each discipline. The Board offers faculty seminars for colleagues interested in creating upperclass writing courses in the various fields, and provides training for all faculty and graduate teaching assistants involved in the writing program. As noted in our chapter on the schools, ECB also offers help to regional high schools wanting to improve their instruction in composition.

The curriculum should include courses integrating various disciplines of the humanities with each other and with studies in other fields. In the early undergraduate years, such courses can effectively introduce students to the humanities by connecting humanistic studies with the students' own concerns; they can also stimulate students to take more courses in the humanities later on. At all levels, integrative courses allow students to explore the interrelationships among various kinds of knowledge and to gain perspective on a major field or chosen career.

Integrated approaches to the humanities may be particularly appropriate in two-year colleges, which now enroll more than half of all freshmen in the country. Two-year college students vary widely in academic preparation, educational goals, and cultural background. Some attend two-year colleges to prepare for matriculation in four-year institutions; others with shorter-term educational goals view the two-year curriculum as the extent of their formal education. Still others—young people, retired persons, and working adults of all ages—have goals ranging from vocational education to recreation and personal enrichment.

With this mix of purposes and constituencies, two-year institutions must be especially flexible and innovative in designing curricula in the humanities. According to the Center for the Study of Community Colleges, courses that integrate literature, art, history, and other subjects have proved particularly successful in recent years. The Center surveyed 178 institutions between 1975 and 1977; while enrollments in single-discipline courses in the humanities declined, the study showed, multidisciplinary courses

grew in number and enrollments. As the Center observes, these latter courses represent "fertile ground for further exploration." Many are aimed at occupational and nontraditional students, for whom "the integrated approach affords an opportunity to maximize exposure to the humanities in a shorter time interval" (The Humanities in Two-Year Colleges: Trends in Curriculum , Los Angeles, 1978).

• The Humanities in Two-Year Colleges describes several integrative programs recently developed at two-year institutions. In some, a single theme or series of problems is studied from the perspectives of the humanities and other disciplines. Others blend contemporary popular culture with classic works of literature, philosophy, art, and music. For example, in a two-semester sequence developed jointly by three community college districts—Coast (of California), Chicago, and Miami-Dade—students proceed from the study of contemporary popular culture to an examination of the arts and humanities in historical perspective. Designed by nine humanists from various disciplines, the course can be taught either by an individual or in teams.

• The League for Innovation in the Community Colleges, a national consortium of fifty-two institutions, has encouraged several efforts to integrate the humanities with career education. At Moraine Valley Community College in Illinois, a course in design builds skills in human relations, writing, cultural understanding, and decision making. Nursing and business students at Johnson County Community College in Kansas explore ethical perspectives in occupational courses; the college's law enforcement training program includes studies in history. Johnson County is also developing a clearing house for information on strengthening the humanities in two-year institutions.

Four-year institutions can look back on a long tradition of integrative courses in the humanities, including the "Great Books" surveys found in general education after the First World War. Introductory surveys, if sufficiently probing, remain useful for acquainting lower division students with the humanities. However, education in the humanities should not be confined to the first year or two of a four-year curriculum. As the Carnegie

Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has pointed out, students ought to have opportunities throughout their course of study to integrate their growing knowledge in various subjects (Missions of the College Curriculum ). These opportunities should include intermediate and advanced courses cutting across disciplines in the humanities, and courses connecting the humanities and arts with the sciences, social sciences, engineering, and communications. Courses relating the humanities to preprofessional studies should also be offered, in coherent sequences, throughout the undergraduate years.

• Under a grant from the Northwest Area Foundation, Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, developed a cross-disciplinary program based on the study of values and moral choices. In a year-long course for freshmen, teams of faculty from various disciplines compare characteristic approaches to issues of value and choice. Students explore how the major academic fields have influenced each other and study classics from each field in their historical context. Students at all levels may take "course clusters" representing the perspectives of two or more disciplines on a common theme.

• With support from several private foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Department of Humanities at the University of Florida, Gainesville, has developed a program relating the humanities to seven professions including medicine, engineering, and business administration. After multidisciplinary core courses, preprofessional undergraduates take special courses exploring humanistic issues in greater depth.

Ideally, integrative courses should reveal relationships among areas of knowledge. Scholars have given us fascinating accounts of the connections between optics, geometry, and art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the philosophical foundations of science, mathematics, and religion from ancient Greece to the modern era; the reflection of public function and aesthetic preference in architecture and structural engineering; the social characteristics of particular geographic regions; and the tension between compartmentalization and synthesis of knowledge in any given historical

period. At an increasing number of colleges and universities, often with support from the NEH and private foundations, new curricular programs have examined the interdependence of science, technology, and human values, or introduced ethics and other humanistic themes into programs of professional studies.

Courses combining several fields do not automatically evoke superior faculty wisdom or student comprehension. Indeed, the terms interdisciplinary and team-taught have acquired a mystique that may be misleading; they can disguise shoddy, ill-conceived courses that merely dilute a variety of subjects rather than unite them in any coherent or imaginative synthesis. Humanists are often reluctant to undertake a genuine exploration of crossdisciplinary problems and their social or ethical implications. In planning interdisciplinary courses, faculty often skirt the craggy terrain of intellectual and pedagogic assumptions and stay in the bureaucratic foothills of interdepartmental coordination. Such courses, if poorly conceived, may mislead students into believing that a superficial collection of facts about a variety of subjects is evidence of a depth of knowledge. On the other hand, there are courses in single disciplines where a genuine synthesis of various kinds of knowledge is nearly achieved by a teacher who has thought deeply about the relationships among disciplines.

In recommending integrative courses, we do not mean to diminish the importance of the traditional, discipline-based curriculum. No given course structure guarantees that students or faculty will discover new insights or pursue newly awakened interests. Integrative courses can introduce students to the disciplines of the humanities while connecting these with students' vocational or intellectual interests. But these courses should also encourage students to explore the regular curriculum of the humanities.

To help students choose wisely, the curriculum in the humanities should be arranged in clear sequences of courses taught at every level by the best faculty available. At many institutions, specialization has fragmented the humanities and narrowed the scope of separate courses, especially at the intermediate level. Often students must select from a catalog with few signposts to

meaningful progressions from introductory to advanced courses and with few correlations among subject areas of each discipline. Senior faculty often shun lower division courses and sometimes teach upper division courses as if they were graduate seminars. In the humanities, no less than in other disciplines, some specialization is necessary for achieving depth of knowledge in the major field. Faculty must remember, however, that very few of even the most committed undergraduate majors will go on to graduate study in the humanities. Departments should look closely at the balance of majors and nonmajors who enroll in their courses, and ask whether their curriculum has become too diffuse or professionalized. The answer may well turn on the extent to which a subject offers insights that students can apply to other courses in and outside the discipline.

Undergraduate curricula in the humanities should include cooperative ventures with local cultural institutions. Many departments in the humanities can share resources with cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, historical societies, and theaters. Cooperative programs can expand the horizons of students, teachers, and staff. In preparing or teaching a course using museum materials, for example, museum staff can increase their knowledge of the cultural contexts of their collections and humanists can learn how artifacts might contribute to their subject fields and teaching techniques. Not all colleges and universities have access to a major museum or cultural institution, but many will find unsuspected treasures in their own backyards: a dig where students can learn the techniques of field archeology; a local historical organization or library with resources for historical research; a theater where students can see or perform dramatic literature.

• One model of cooperation was developed at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. In a course on American civilization between 1865 and 1914, students examined the humanities against the background of technological and material culture. University faculty in literature, art history, and the history of music joined with curators from the neighboring Henry Ford and Greenfield Village museums, combining lectures with tours of the museums

and study of artifacts. Students rated nearly every aspect of the course as outstanding, and a museum staff member went on to offer a course in material culture for university credit.

New texts and educational materials should be developed for teaching the humanities. The paperback revolution, now more a familiar fact of life than a revolution, has benefited the academic humanities by enabling more students to own more books and helping the curriculum keep pace with knowledge. Computer, phototypesetting, and video readout technologies are increasing access to written materials and to learning still further. Whether through new technologies or more traditional means, we need educational materials integrating the humanities with vocational and preprofessional studies and introducing into humanistic studies themes from professional fields—for example, case studies in the ethical problems of doctors, lawyers, and engineers as a part of the curriculum in philosophy. Materials offering a view of the many cultural traditions in this country and abroad—for example, more and better translations of foreign literatures, ancient and modern—are needed. Foreign language and international studies suffer, in the words of the President's Commission, from "a lack of imaginative curricula dealing with other countries and cultures; and a similar lack of imaginative language-training courses." Noting that "foreign language instruction at any level should be a humanistic pursuit," the Commission has recommended more experimentation in foreign language instruction and in the integration of this instruction with cultural studies (Strength Through Wisdom ),

• Several recently developed interdisciplinary courses in the humanities have led to the creation of study guides, textbooks, and anthologies. Community colleges have been particularly active in mixing text with television in such courses as "The Ascent of Man." Many four-year institutions have adopted "The Art of Being Human," another text and course developed by community college humanists. As an example of integrating the humanities with the professions, the American Bar Association's Commission on Undergraduate Education in Law and the Humanities has commissioned scholars in history, literature, and philosophy to

prepare essays, curriculum guides, and supporting documents. Although these materials will be useful in undergraduate lawrelated studies, their primary aim is to incorporate legal themes into courses in the humanities.

Students and teachers depend on publishers and libraries for the thousands of books they read in the humanities. Many of these are standard classics, widely used and available in reasonably priced editions from university and commercial publishers. Ways must be found to keep important titles in print when demand for them falls below a certain level. Superior translations of foreign literature, important older works of scholarship, minor works of major writers, works of significant new writers—though these often sell fewer copies than standard classics, they are no less important to education in the humanities. Academic libraries must make every effort to maintain adequate collections in the humanities. As the costs of materials and services have escalated and as students have turned increasingly to technical and career education, many libraries have reduced their budgets for acquisitions in the humanities. Whatever the mission of the institution, librarians and administrators should sustain collections that reflect an institutional commitment to learning in the humanities.

Strengthening the curriculum will require considerable human and financial resources. Many outside sources of support offer funds for curriculum and faculty development. The NEH's Division of Education Programs makes grants of various sizes for projects ranging from an experimental course to the overhaul of an entire curriculum. Less well known, perhaps, are grants from other federal agencies as well as associations and private foundations. These too vary in size and duration. The National Humanities Faculty has a small but promising new program to assist community colleges. The associations usually regrant modest funds provided by a major donor; for example, the Association of American Colleges offers up to ten thousand dollars to individual faculty members for "grassroots" experiments in the curriculum under its Quality in Liberal Learning program funded by the Ford Foundation. The federal Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (an office of the Department of Education) makes

grants for curricular improvement and innovation in disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies. The Fund periodically publishes Resources for Change (Washington, D.C.) to encourage dissemination of the projects it has supported. Some associations, often with support from the NEH, sponsor conferences where faculty and administrators can exchange ideas.

Sources of support outside colleges and universities must supplement institutional efforts, but the primary obligation for invigorating the humanities belongs to undergraduate institutions themselves. They must use whatever resources they have, reallocating them where necessary to concentrate the faculty's energy on the curriculum. This is not a mechanical matter of raising average departmental enrollments, not a limited exercise in crisis management for the humanities. For all administrators, faculty, and students, the issue is fundamental: the reconstitution of liberal education as the best educational philosophy for this democracy.

The Commission on the Humanities of 1964 observed, "Students are no different from other people in that they can quickly observe where money is being made available and draw the logical conclusion as to which activities their society considers important" (Report of the Commission on the Humanities , New York, 1964). This has not changed. Behind the vocationalism that has narrowed undergraduate education is a job market that offers few rewards for a liberal education. Students are probably more responsive to trends in the job market and the biases of employers than to any statement of mission, however ringing, or any curriculum, whether time-honored or innovative. In the past few years, the job prospects of college graduates have recovered somewhat from the recession of the late 1960s and early 1970s; according to the College Placement Council, job offers to new recipients of the bachelor's degree in 1979 were up 30 percent over the previous year's level. The real increase, however, occurred in technical and professional fields. Liberal arts graduates, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, remain at a disadvantage in the job market.

College placement services advise liberal arts students to acquire technical skills and knowledge along with their more

general education. It is just as important for colleges to advise employers that a liberal education with solid grounding in the humanities cultivates technique as well as intellect. Many of today's employers are themselves liberally educated men and women; yet in hiring college graduates they underestimate such qualities as imagination, critical judgment, and sensitivity to values. Not only students, teachers, and administrators, but also employers must recognize that a humanistic education is invaluable for the trained technician.

Graduate Education for the Professions

The humanities have recently gained some visibility in professional education, and not by accident. The professions today face perplexing issues whose solutions are not quantifiable or easy to find. Many professionals find themselves suspect in the eyes of a public that demands accountability from experts it formerly trusted. In giving physicians new powers over human death and disease, biomedical technology does not reconcile the "ought" of ethics with the "is" of the clinic. Lawyers and public administrators are often caught in the glare of controversy over issues of public policy and in the civil feuds of an unprecedentedly litigious citizenry. In a complex international economy, men and women in business must negotiate in unfamiliar languages and cultures, while at home they are asked to weigh profit against social responsibility. Alert to the value of humanistic perspectives on these issues, some educators in the professions have sought the contributions that history, literature, foreign languages, and philosophy can make to the training of future professionals.

Ironically, the policies of professional schools often conflict with their efforts to integrate the humanities with professional education. As many as half of all undergraduates plan to undertake some post-baccalaureate study. Competition is keen for places in professional schools. Like the preferences of employers, the admission practices of these schools have a powerful influence on how undergraduates shape their course of study. The "pre-med syndrome" of recent years is a deplorable example of this kind of

influence. Commission member Dr. Lewis Thomas has commented,

The influence of the modern medical school on liberal-arts education in this country over the last decade has been baleful and malign, nothing less. The admission policies of the medical schools are at the root of the trouble. If something is not done quickly to change those policies, all the joy of going to college will have been destroyed, not just for that growing majority of undergraduate students who draw breath only to become doctors, but for everyone else—all the students and all the faculty members, as well.

The medical schools used to say they wanted applicants as broadly educated as possible, and they used to mean it. . . .

There is still some talk in medical deans' offices about the need for general culture, but nobody really means it. . . . ("How to Fix the Premedical Curriculum," New England Journal of Medicine, 25 May 1978)

Dr. Thomas's point is true of educational policy in other professions as well. Preprofessionalism has had severe effects on undergraduate life and learning. More disturbing are the effects that preprofessionalism may have on the standards of professionalism itself. Doctors, lawyers, and businessmen and women who pass over the liberal arts in a premature quest for expertise are not likely to be better professionals. Indeed they will probably be less capable than colleagues whose professional training rests, in Dr. Thomas's words, on "the bedrock of knowledge about our civilization."

Recommendation 13:

We recommend that joint conferences of professionals, professional school administrators and faculty, and humanists be convened to discuss the kinds of preparation in the humanities that professional schools should expect of their applicants and graduates. Participants and sponsors for these conferences should include such organizations as the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, the Association of American Law Schools, and the Association of American Medical Colleges, as well as public and private agencies with an interest in the humanities in professional education.

Professional schools' obligation to undergraduate education is commensurate with their influence on the undergraduate course of study. If they believe, as increasingly they seem to, that the humanities are an important part of professional training, they ought to require applicants to have substantial background in the humanities. The integration of the humanities with professional education must build upon a foundation of knowledge gained in undergraduate study; otherwise, it is likely to be remedial and ineffectual.

Graduate professional study should include courses providing humanistic perspectives on every phase of professional training. Well-designed individual courses on "Ethics in . . ." or "The Professional Responsibilities of . . .," now fairly common, can be instructive; but if these are random and belated, as is often the case, they do a disservice to the professional degree candidates whom they purport to educate. As Daniel Callahan and Sissela Bok observed, following an extended survey of the place of ethics in higher education,

In practically every professional school, courses on ethics are considered peripheral to the curriculum and teachers often have no special qualifications. Moreover, those who teach ethics rarely gain professional rewards for their efforts; it is often a personal commitment, well outside the mainstream of status and prestige. ("The Role of Applied Ethics in Learning," Change, September 1979)

Nor, we would add, does an exclusive preoccupation with professional ethics take advantage of the many ways that the humanities can better a professional's life and work.

• With support from private foundations and the NEH, several institutions have begun to blend the humanities with professional studies. Through its Interface Program, for example, the Commonwealth Fund has made major grants for the reexamination and reform of the premedical and preclinical years of medical education at seven institutions: Boston University, Brown University, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth College and Medical School, Duke University, the Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Rochester. The scope of reform varies

among these institutions. In every instance the major objective is to improve medical education by such means as eliminating the redundancy of undergraduate and medical school science courses. However, as the Fund's description of the Interface Program emphasizes, a major benefit of revising premedical and medical education is to broaden the education of physicians:

Every institution supported under the Interface Program must concern itself with the "premedical syndrome." An astonishingly large percentage of the students entering college each year are intent upon a medical career. They load their schedules with courses in the natural sciences and mathematics, often well beyond those necessary for admission to medical school. . . . In too many cases, premedical students themselves treat humanities and social sciences as strictly secondary. . . . (1978 Annual Report )

• The Interface Program enables students to combine their professional training with serious study of the humanities, social sciences, and other disciplines.

• Integration of the humanities with professional education has been a priority of the NEH's Division of Education Programs for some years. The Endowment provided substantial support, for example, for the development of a Department of Humanities in the College of Medicine at Pennsylvania State University in Hershey. Since the college opened its doors in 1967, the department has offered seminars combining literature, philosophy, religion, and political science with medical students' clinical studies. A course called "Dying, Death, and Grief" includes fiction, biography, religious literature, clinical material, and interviews with dying patients.

• With NEH support, the Claremont Graduate School developed a pilot series of courses in the humanities for its Management and Policy program. Comprising one of seven areas in the program's core curriculum, the humanities' offerings include philosophy, history, and literature.

The continued development of a role for the humanities in graduate education for the professions will require the involvement of individual humanists and their departments. It often seems

that professional school faculty are more eager than their colleagues in the humanities to discuss common goals and to pool resources. Humanists should give more consideration to how their disciplines overlap with the professions; faculty and the administrators who determine incentives should regard professional education as a legitimate extension of the capabilities of departments in the humanities.

Graduate Training in the Humanities

Current discussions of graduate education take place in the shadow of the job crisis confronting young Ph.D.'s. Gloomy statistics and predictions abound, the darkest of which relate to the humanities, where advanced training has traditionally led almost exclusively into college teaching. The academic job prospects for today's Ph.D.'s in the humanities seem dismal indeed, especially in contrast to the prosperous period of higher education that followed the Second World War and lasted into the 1970s. Particularly in the years following Sputnik, soaring college enrollments, large federal expenditures on university-based research, and a generally favorable economic climate encouraged doctoral study in most of the arts and sciences, including the humanities. According to the Commission on Human Resources of the National Research Council, the number of Ph.D.'s awarded in the humanities rose from 3,210 in 1968 to 5,364 in the peak year of 1973—an increase of over 60 percent in five years. Of all Ph.D.'s in the humanities conferred in the United States since 1920, more than 25 percent were awarded in the 1960s and over 44 percent in the 1970s (Science, Engineering, and Humanities Doctorates in the United States: 1977 Profile, Washington, D.C., 1978; and Employment of Humanities Ph.D.'s: A Departure from Traditional Jobs, Washington, D.C., 1980).

Insofar as academic job opportunities depend on the growth of undergraduate enrollments, the new Ph.D.'s of the early 1970s might have expected to find jobs—between 1967 and 1975, enrollments grew steadily from just under 7 million to nearly 11.3 million. In fact, however, there was a sharp turn for the worse in

the academic labor market. Faculties in the humanities leveled off, college and university budgets began to feel the pinch of inflation, and undergraduates started taking fewer courses in the humanities. In a report to the National Board on Graduate Education in 1975, David Breneman noted "the mood of despair" in university English departments that had difficulty placing new Ph.D.'s. Two highly rated departments had placed only seven out of twenty-one and eleven of fifty of their students seeking jobs in 1974, and many of the successful ones had found only one-year, terminal appointments. At the same time, Breneman noted, graduate applications in the humanities showed little decline despite growing publicity about the shortage of jobs (Graduate School Adjustments to the "New Depression" in Higher Education, Washington, D.C.). Soon, however, the shortage of jobs did begin to affect graduate education in the humanities. By 1978, the last year for which complete figures are available, the number of doctorates awarded had decreased to 4, 235. Total applications for graduate programs in the humanities have declined over the past few years.

For young humanists today the circumstances are disheartening. Many who obtain teaching posts have little realistic hope for tenure, for a "buyers' market" among academic employers—coupled with austere departmental budgets and uncertainties about future enrollments—has led to frequent use of short-term, nontenurable contracts and has created a growing number of academic nomads.

Forecasts of the future academic job market vary, since they depend on such variables as student enrollment patterns and the number of Ph.D.'s awarded. There is little ground for optimism, however. Two things seem clear. First, higher education's era of spectacular growth is over, and there will be reduced demand for new college teachers for at least a decade. Second, faculties have emerged from the era of growth top-heavy with tenured professors. This imbalance and a higher mandatory retirement age will further reduce the opportunities available to young Ph.D.'s. A study by the American Council on Education estimated that age-seventy retirement laws would result in almost two-thirds fewer faculty job openings from 1983 to 1990 than under current

retirement policies (Thomas Corwin and Paula Knepper, "Finance and Employment Implications of Raising the Mandatory Retirement Age for Faculty," Washington, D.C, 1978). Some observers predict that the job crisis will subside in the 1990s, when a substantial number of the present faculty will retire. Others contend that if graduate schools continue to award doctorates at present rates, in 1995 the new Ph.D. in the humanities will have a one-in-six chance of finding an academic post.

There is a need for complete, consolidated information on Ph.D. enrollments, current unemployment and employment prospects, and kinds of training that Ph.D. candidates have or should have. Projections of the need for Ph.D.'s in the next decade vary widely, partly because vital bits of information are missing. For example, what is the impact on the job market of recent recipients of the Ph.D. who have not obtained academic jobs or who fail to achieve tenure in their initial appointment? How many decide to stay in nonacademic jobs and how many, hanging on in marginal jobs, compete with the newest graduates for the few academic positions that become available? The National Research Council's Employment of Humanities Ph.D.'s: A Departure From Traditional Jobs , which documents some recent shifts in patterns of employment, ought to help graduate departments, learned associations, and young humanists plan for the future. We hope that further studies now planned by the Council—on Ph.D.'s in nonacademic jobs and how their training relates to their work—will begin to show how best to use the talents of humanists who cannot find teaching positions.

In the meantime, there is little consensus on what to do. In our own deliberations as a Commission, we too have disagreed on how graduate education should adjust to the shortage of jobs. On the one hand, we believe that some graduate programs in the humanities should lessen their emphasis on scholarly research and increase the preparation for teaching or for nonacademic jobs. On the other hand, the continuity of humanistic scholarship requires that some institutions concentrate on scholarly training. In either case, groups of universities should consider consortium arrangements, based on particular institutional strengths and regional

convenience, as a way of maintaining graduate programs at a reduced level. The missions and resources of graduate schools vary no less than those of undergraduate institutions. Not all will adjust in the same way to the new climate surrounding higher education, nor should they. All graduate schools, however, should warn applicants of the difficulty of finding teaching positions. Graduate programs in the humanities that cannot offer students reasonable prospects of employment, whether academic or nonacademic, should be abolished.

Recommendation 14:

We recommend that graduate schools and departments reassess their purposes and curricula, and consider how the training they offer in the humanities might be better adapted to both academic and nonacademic employment.

Over the last decade, more and more Ph.D.'s in the humanities have gone to work outside the academy—a trend that is likely to continue as long as there is a shortage of teaching jobs. Yet neither graduate faculty nor their students have responded realistically to changed prospects for employment. According to Lewis Solmon, many faculty are not well informed about the various labor markets open to graduate candidates; particularly in the humanities, he has found, few faculty look upon job preparation as part of their role (Alternative Careers for Humanities PhDs, New York, 1979). Most graduate students apparently still expect to find teaching jobs; since the early 1970s, despite the well-known severity of the job shortage, the percentage of Ph.D. candidates who plan exclusively on academic employment has declined only slightly.

Some educators advise graduate students to take courses in other fields, including business. They argue that graduate students should plan on—and be seen to have planned on—a nonacademic career. They suggest that students should consult campus placement services throughout their graduate careers in order to stay abreast of changing employment possibilities and the skills they will need to develop in tandem with their usual graduate studies. This argument should not be taken to extremes. We see no reason

why a student should pursue a Ph.D. in the humanities to prepare for a career in banking. On the other hand—and this should be true whatever the state of the job market—graduate schools should encourage students to assess their prospects for employment and prepare for a specific career path, whether in college teaching, research, educational or public administration, school teaching, or cultural preservation.

• The academic job shortage has already given rise to some creative experiments in the graduate curriculum. In history, for example, over forty programs in public and applied historical studies train students to adapt historical research methods to problems of public policy, corporate archives, and local and municipal history. The Philosophy Department at Bowling Green State University places master's degree candidates in internships where they use skills gained through studying philosophy to examine problems of public policy and administration. Some private foundations and the NEH support projects adapting graduate training to nonacademic employment. Many learned societies have stepped up their efforts to inform members about nontraditional labor markets and how graduate curricula might adjust to them.

We would caution that the preparation of students for nonacademic careers should not be based on mere curricular artifice. Particularly when preparing for jobs in museums, historical preservation, or archives, students should have practical experience (through internships, for example); their teachers should have had solid training or experience themselves in such fields. To offer superficial crash courses is to serve students poorly. It is also to lose an opportunity for the humanities to transcend an emergency mentality by undertaking a genuinely creative reexamination of their own methods, assumptions, and importance.

Doctoral and master's degree programs might offer specific preparation for teaching in two-year colleges, and should consult them on what they need. These institutions, understandably unwilling to become dumping grounds for surplus doctorates who would rather teach elsewhere, would like to see graduate schools provide the kind of training necessary for teaching in community

colleges. A number of programs, including the Doctor of Arts programs in English departments at the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan and the graduate program in history at Princeton University, have successfully used community college internships as a part of graduate training. The recently established Community College Humanities Association can help coordinate such efforts at collaboration between universities and two-year colleges.

Graduate education must train students in the specialized research required for the thesis or dissertation. Graduate study should also insure breadth of knowledge. As teachers, or as nonacademic humanists, many Ph.D.'s will act as brokers between specialized knowledge and the interests of students and the broader public. Good teachers are generalists in their own and adjacent disciplines. Advanced study should encourage students to look critically at the subject each will teach—at its assumptions, methods, and relationship to the sciences, social sciences, and public life. All graduate programs in the humanities should include training in the teaching of writing. Graduate departments of foreign languages should offer thorough preparation in the teaching of beginning and intermediate language courses; the majority of their graduates, if they are fortunate enough to get academic jobs, will have to do at least some such teaching.

The continued vitality of the humanities depends on the successful adjustment of graduate education to the job crisis. Some programs will scale down as applications diminish. Some departments will offer training for the new kinds of jobs available. Whatever the duration of the crisis, however, we must argue the compelling need for continuous support of graduate education in the humanities. In every discipline, knowledge is found and refined in the exchange of ideas. Perhaps especially for the humanities, our universities—with their outstanding scholars and library holdings—provide the richest medium for this exchange, and graduate education the most certain guarantee of continued intellectual vigor. Particularly if the shortage of academic jobs should subside in the 1990s, it is important that the humanities attract outstanding undergraduates in the 1980s. A major interruption in the flow of

talent through our graduate schools would jeopardize the continuity, and thus the quality, of education and scholarship in the humanities.

Our society must and can afford adequate financial support for graduate students. At the same time that the cost of graduate education has risen dramatically, funds have dried up for the support of graduate study in the arts and sciences. The Woodrow Wilson Fellowships have disappeared and the Danforth Foundation's fellowship program soon will. Support for minority graduate students has declined; for example, the Ford Foundation has reduced its once generous aid. Many funding agencies, notably the National Science Foundation, have set assistance levels below the full cost of graduate study, thus burdening hard-pressed university budgets and graduate students with additional costs. Reduced federal support for advanced study in the sciences may further shift institutional resources away from the humanities as universities take up the slack in support of science programs.

Teaching assistantships can cover part of the cost of graduate study while enlarging the experience of students. But teaching and other wage-earning activities should not seriously impede advancement toward a graduate degree. Nor should graduate students have to incur enormous debts that cannot soon be repaid from beginning salaries that are now scandalously low in humanistic fields—from 1969 to 1979, the typical starting salary for an assistant professor of English rose from about $ 10,000 to $ 15,000 in current dollars, but inflation reduced the latter salary to about $ 7,500 in constant 1969 dollars. Advanced research, usually a prerequisite for the Ph.D. dissertation, often requires the student to travel some distance to find essential materials; yet few dollars are available for travel or dissertation subsidies.

There is no national program of graduate fellowships for advanced students in the humanities. We think there should be. In 1974 the National Board on Graduate Education recommended that federally funded merit fellowships for graduate study be extended to all academic disciplines. The Board proposed that the NEH administer a counterpart to the National Science Foundation's fellowship program and recommended an additional two

thousand portable, three-year federal awards (Federal Policy Alternatives Toward Graduate Education, Washington, D.C.). A similar recommendation appeared in the report by fifteen university presidents. Research Universities and the National Interest (New York, 1978), which noted, "It is surely in the national interest to support and encourage high achievement in every domain of intellectual endeavor. Extending the merit fellowship program to humanistic fields would . . . demonstrate that the national interest in graduate education is not limited to science and technology." Recently, the Sloan Commission on Government and Higher Education has proposed a program of three thousand federal merit scholarships for graduate study in all academic disciplines. As our own report went to press, Congress was considering two proposals for federal support of graduate study: a National Graduate Fellows Program of portable merit fellowships in the arts, humanities, and social sciences; and a program of National Talent Grants, to be administered by institutions, for exceptionally needy first-year graduate students. We urge Congress to take favorable action on these proposals.

The strength of our graduate schools is hard won. We are confident that, with characteristic resilience, graduate education in the humanities will adapt to changed employment prospects for Ph.D.'s and indeed other circumstances in the decades to come. Looking beyond the job shortage or any other crisis, universities, private foundations, and the federal government must help graduate training in the humanities uphold its traditional purpose: to prepare especially gifted students to be outstanding scholars and teachers in their fields.

Research and Scholarship

Research in the humanities has nourished in recent decades. Each major branch of the humanities has developed new methods for criticism and interpretation, sometimes borrowing from other disciplines and often opening up new fields of inquiry. Using paradigms from linguistics and anthropology, for example, literary scholars have developed a science of signs for analyzing the social

and psychological significance of texts; the very notion of what constitutes a text has been expanded. The field of political and social philosophy has grown, and philosophers have helped map terrain in the behavioral sciences. The comparative study of religions has provided useful models for comparative studies in general. Interdisciplinary research in American and area studies has spread. Using demographic data and methods from social science, social historians have drawn attention to the common people and how they have lived.

Imaginative and solid scholarly activity in the humanities must be sustained in the years to come. The future of humanistic research will depend on how successfully the entire system of scholarly production and dissemination—scholars, academic institutions, libraries, research centers, publishers and learned journals, and foundations and other sources of support —solves problems created by the growth of scholarship and indeed of knowledge itself.

The expansion of higher education, libraries, and faculties over the past three decades has stimulated a proportionate increase in the amount and quality of American humanistic research. The sheer volume of research threatens to inundate libraries, scholars, students, and the reading public with unmanageable masses of printed matter. For scholarly presses and libraries, the proliferation of materials raises urgent questions of what shall be published and purchased, how it shall be stored, and who shall read it. New technologies of microprocessing and communications can help solve problems in the management of scholarly information. The National Enquiry into Scholarly Communication has recently focused attention on uses of technology in the production, transmission, storage, and retrieval of research materials. New technologies also promise to transform scholarly activity itself, and in some cases the material form of its results, in significant ways. Technology affects old forms of inquiry and expression, and it will surely create new ones. It will shape the ways people pursue literature, history, philosophy, and other subjects. As use of the new technologies increases, humanists must share responsibility for insuring that the use is rational, open, and productive.

Computers and their software can assist scholarship. To many scholars in the humanities, computers represent quantification and seem to require forbidding expertise in programming, design, and interpretation. With relatively modest skills, however, and without the quantitative methods of social science, humanists can use computers to increase the accuracy and completeness of their scholarly work. Computers offer an efficient and reliable tool for comparative analysis of texts, composing and editing, and publishing. With computers a scholar can rapidly retrieve information in printout or video readout form from bibliographic and factual data bases, books and articles, or indeed from other scholars.

Scientists and social scientists have built data bases of scientific, historical, political, and social information. Humanists can tap these convenient resources for interdisciplinary study. In their own disciplines, humanists can electronically compile and consult dictionaries, indexes, and bibliographies.

• Among learned societies, the Modern Language Association (MLA) leads in the exploration of computer-aided research. Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Division of Research Grants—Research Took Program), the MLA has published the MLA International Bibliography (available through Lockheed's DIALOG system) and with help from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is studying new methods of indexing and retrieving bibliographic information. The Center for Computer Assisted Textual Analysis (at the University of California, San Diego) plans to develop an archive of machine-readable texts in modern languages, and has links with other language centers. The Classics Department at the University of California, Irvine, is using computers to compile a thesaurus of ancient Greek.

Convenience, accuracy, and access to nonhumanistic disciplines are not the computer's only benefits to humanists. Technology can free scholars' time for analysis, interpretation, and appreciation, giving them the opportunity to write essays for broad audiences. With evidence available on computer in the library through codes in an essay's appendix, footnotes could guide readers to supporting information stored and retrievable in a new mode. This practice is especially suitable for scholarship in which the

humanities and social sciences intersect—where the assembly of data is needed to support humanistic argument in, for example, economic and social history, the history and philosophy of science, and linguistics. In these and other fields, technology enables humanists to return to the ideal of writing interpretive essays for the general reader in which high literary quality is possible because of easy separate access to the mass of data.

In the distribution of resources for humanistic study, the revolution in communications is a necessity. Without new technologies, which themselves increase the volume of information and the means of handling it, compatibility between the preservation and the accessibility of materials would be impossible to maintain.

Computer and duplicating technologies assist scholarly communication. Computers and phototypesetters can accelerate the preparation, publication, and distribution of scholarly materials to individuals or libraries and other institutions. Computers enable libraries to compile bibliographic information and to supplement it through networks such as the RLG/RLIN and OCLC; the Library of Congress, for example, plans to make its vast bibliographies available to others. Libraries can share their resources through computer cataloging and electronic modes such as tele-electronic copying and the transmission of images on cathode-ray equipment. The storage and retrieval of already published sources is provided by such data systems as LEXIS and DIALOG. These technologies expand the individual's access to library materials and extend access to more people, including many from outside academic institutions—a step that many research libraries have already taken as public demand increases and budgets for public libraries are cut back.

As new technologies change the functions of research libraries, however, they also raise questions about the scholarly use of library materials. How, for example, will users' expectations change as bibliographic tools change? What impact will selective acquisitions or electronic storage and retrieval have on the working methods of scholars?

Indeed the rapid growth of informational technologies raises

many questions. How can machines be used and access to materials be extended without infringing copyright? Can libraries, university presses, and scholarly journals achieve economies without depreciating their services to faculty and students? Who gains and who loses as the storage and delivery systems of journals and other materials become centralized? Who will decide what gets published in any form, and who will select what libraries should preserve and what economies they should make? What is the effectiveness and economic feasibility of different technological processes? Who will subsidize presses whose expenses exceed net sales, or journals whose circulation drops? What place do fees and royalties have in the world of printouts and readouts?

The partial list of organizations or groups that have begun to answer such questions is impressive: the Association of Research Libraries (ARL); the American Library Association; the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science; the National Science Foundation; the Council on Library Resources; the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU, which submitted its final report in July 1978); the Library of Congress; the Center for Research Libraries; the Research Library Group (and other consortia or networks); the Authors Guild; the Association of American University Presses (AAUP); the Association of American Publishers; the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS); the National Enquiry into Scholarly Communication.

In its report, the National Enquiry recommends the establishment of a "linked, national bibliographic system," a national periodicals center, a national library agency, an office of scholarly communication within the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a standing committee (jointly sponsored by ACLS, AAUP, and ARL) "composed of scholars, publishers, and librarians for continuing discussion of the nature and direction of technological change in the system of scholarly communication" (Scholarly Communication: The Report of the National Enquiry, Baltimore, 1979).

We share the Enquiry's conviction that the revolution in communications should not be allowed to overshadow the human

values to be served: "Technologists must understand that humanistic scholarship is not merely information or data and that its human character must somehow be transmitted through the medium of the machine." We join the many groups who, like the National Enquiry, want to get on with the work of developing a national bibliographic system and a national periodicals center. The National Endowment for the Humanities already supports scholarly publishing and projects in library automation. While it does not plan to set up a specific office for the purpose, the Endowment will improve its capabilities in the area of scholarly communication. With support from private foundations, the Enquiry's proposed committee for monitoring and directing technology into important areas has been set up by the ACLS. Its membership includes scholars, librarians, publishers, and technicians. We suggest that this committee regularly consult other constituencies as well, such as university administrators, students, and the NEH. Among the committee's many tasks should be the continuing analysis of uses, costs, and needs; and the discussion of what kinds of journals, modes, and incentives could encourage scholars to write interpretive essays separated from the scaffolding of data.

Humanists must play a major role in stating the objectives and controlling the applications of informational technology. Currently, the influence of scholars, teachers, and students in the humanities on the uses of technology is negligible. This is not surprising, for most humanists are concerned with the idea, the document, the manuscript, and the published work much more than with the processes by which scholarship is produced and distributed. Many assume that computers serve only the research needs of scientists, social scientists, and engineers. We urge humanists to learn technology's capabilities so they can employ it, describe its limitations, manage its uses. and ultimately guide its course. Above all, humanists should participate in such cooperative mechanisms of control as the ACLS committee. By so doing, they will insure that important qualitative issues are discussed: criteria for sorting, evaluating, and using information; the proper balance between access and other individual rights; and the different ways

that scholars from many disciplines define fact, accuracy, and error.

As a beginning, we suggest three guidelines concerning the uses of informational technology. First, constraints on access to bibliographic information should be eliminated worldwide. A world dependent on information cannot tolerate a new category of "haves" and "have-nots." Second, information in the humanities, as in other fundamental disciplines, should transcend national boundaries. The application of technology to improve the transnational flow of information will benefit scholars' work and will reduce intellectual and cultural isolation. Third, humanists should insure that new technologies add to, not reduce, our methods for using the record of human achievement.

Humanistic research will require support from many sources. For university and independent research libraries, the new technologies are not an unqualified boon. They cannot solve, though they may help control, the problem of basic operating expenses that has hit libraries particularly hard because increases in the costs of energy, paper, and other library materials have exceeded the rate of inflation. Computers cannot reverse the deterioration of books, a massive national problem threatening to reduce to dust within our lifetime perhaps half of the 227 million volumes held by research libraries. These libraries are the foundation for humanistic research. Their mission goes beyond service to the institution that, in the case of university libraries, pays most of their costs. University and independent research libraries serve the nation, and support for them is in the national interest. We recommend that federal funding under Title IIC of the Higher Education Act, which amounts to $ 6 million in fiscal year (FY) 1980, be raised to the authorized ceiling of $ 20 million by FY1982.

The homes of libraries and scholars, our colleges and universities are by far the most constant sources of support for scholarship in the humanities. As these institutions—and the public agencies and boards of trustees that govern them—reassess faculty responsibilities in a period of declining enrollments and economic stringency, we urge them not to cut back on the sabbatical time and financial resources that allow teachers to be scholars as well. We emphasize the importance of their sustaining young scholars

through a period of limited academic job opportunities, lest the continuity of humanistic scholarship be jeopardized. Two-year colleges have a growing obligation to support the scholarly life of their faculties in the humanities. Humanists at these institutions are hampered in their efforts to pursue research interests; some teachers have had to resign their posts in order to accept grants for independent study. No state legislature, no governing board, no college or university should neglect the reinforcement that scholarship gives to teaching.

Research institutes and centers—such as the National Humanities Center, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison—serve humanistic scholarship in valuable ways. They provide a nonhierarchical setting for dialogue among older and younger humanists. Through seminars and colloquia, they allow more sustained communication among scholars in various disciplines than is possible at many colleges and universities. They provide a climate for study undisturbed by the day-to-day pressures that scholars often face at their academic institutions. The outstanding collections of independent research libraries (such as the Huntington, Morgan, Newberry, and New York Public libraries) and of museums draw scholars from all over the world, affording opportunities for American and foreign humanists to share their ideas. Some research libraries, such as the Folger Shakespeare Library, have developed cooperative institutes to serve the research interests of faculty and graduate students from several surrounding universities.

The uniqueness of these institutions derives in part from their modest size and the collegiality it affords. They suffer from some of the same financial constraints as universities. Nevertheless, they should consider how they might serve the scholarly needs of more humanists, if possible by expanding the number of research positions they make available to scholars. Through postdoctoral and mid-career fellowships, for example, they could help young humanists. Support from parent universities, private foundations,

and government agencies should at least remain at present levels and, if at all possible, should expand.

The academic system of rewards will have to recognize the new kinds of scholarly achievement made possible by informational technologies. What impact technology will have on the quality of scholarship is under debate; by allowing speedier publication of large quantities of scholarly work, new technologies may also eliminate the process by which additions to humanistic knowledge have always been screened. Assuming adequate processes of review for scholarship published in new modes, committees of appointment and promotion must be willing to consider, say, an electronic printout as part of a scholar's dossier. They should also view essays (published separately from their supporting data) as legitimate and sometimes preferable alternatives to monographs.

Of the outlets for publication of humanistic scholarship, learned journals are the most heterogeneous, ranging from newsletters to handsomely produced quarterlies. They number more than twenty-five hundred, about half in the humanities and social sciences. Some are supported by universities or colleges, others by learned societies or commercial publishers; still others are labors of love for scholars sharing a common interest. Their limited circulation and dependence on outside sources of support make the existence of many journals precarious indeed. Many nonacademics and some scholars see journals as "publishing mills" run chiefly to advance academic careers. Other scholars view journals as "closed shops" defining fields too narrowly or delaying editorial decisions for unconscionable periods of time. Certainly the growth in the number of journals over the last two decades—a 114 percent increase in four major humanistic disciplines between 1960 and 1975—has added to the budgetary problems of research libraries: between 1970 and 1976, expenditures on serials rose from 32 to 46 percent of the total acquisitions budgets of 119 libraries, while the portion spent on books decreased from 63 to 47 percent (Scholarly Communication ).

The learned journals remain invaluable for the dissemination of knowledge in the humanities. Particularly in interdisciplinary studies and fledgling subdisciplines, journals are a primary means of

communication among scholars and between scholars and interested general readers. Their major problem in the future will be funding, particularly to the degree that automation and resource sharing enable libraries to reduce serial acquisitions. The National Enquiry observes that a reduction in library subscriptions will force journals "to seek new markets, new sources of revenue, and new ways of publishing that reduce costs" (Scholarly Communication ). We suggest that some journals might find all three by devoting more space to general or synthetic essays of interest to scholars from many disciplines and to the general reader. Journals such as Daedalus and The American Scholar have already gained a wide readership by publishing essays of broad appeal.

The chief publishers of book-length studies in the humanities are of course the university presses, which have one foot on the campus and the other in the world of commerce. Their fortunes over the past three decades have paralleled, in some respects, those of higher education. Roughly from the end of the Second World War to the late 1960s, university presses prospered and nearly doubled in number. During the same period, the total output of titles by the entire American publishing industry more than tripled. After about 1970, however, university and commercial presses suffered a decline in sales. For the past decade, university presses have felt the financial pinch on their parent institutions, changes in libraries' policies of acquisition, and such general economic factors as the rising costs of paper, production, and distribution. Some have been forced out of existence.

The mission of the university press is scholarly, its clientele chiefly academic. Unable to tap large commercial markets, university presses rely on subsidies from the institutions they serve and other sources. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Ford Foundation granted nearly $ 3 million to a group of presses for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences; in the 1970s, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave substantially for similar purposes. The NEH has increased its support of scholarly publishing; it now makes subventions to university presses of up to $ 10,000 per work. Such subsidies must continue from various sources—private foundations, government agencies, and perhaps also universities without presses, as suggested by the National Enquiry—if the

dissemination of scholarship in the humanities is to keep up with its production. The NEH has also made Challenge Grants to a few university presses, but the three-to-one matching requirement is particularly difficult for institutions like presses that lack any natural or established constituency of support.

Aside from materials for research and outlets for publishing, the single greatest need of scholars in the humanities is for time. Time means weekends, summers, and sabbaticals; it requires money in the form of fellowships, grants, and stipends. Private foundations have long provided such support, recognizing both the intellectual and social value of humanistic research. For at least a decade, however, shrinking or stable endowments have combined with high rates of inflation to impose new limits on some of the best-known fellowship programs. Between 1968 and 1977, for example, the total cost of the Guggenheim Foundation's prestigious fellowship program doubled as the amount of each award increased to onset inflation, but the number of fellowships awarded rose only slightly. Added to the effects of inflation, the weakness of the dollar abroad has since 1964 considerably reduced the number of Fulbright-Hays Awards for Research Abroad in the humanities.

Thorough evidence is lacking on the changing amounts of support for fellowships in the humanities. Some representative figures are available, however. According to the Foundation Center, private foundation support for fellowships in all fields declined in current dollars from $ 38 million in 1975 to $ 29 million ($ 23.9 million in 1975 dollars) in 1978; or, expressed as fractions of the total dollars granted by foundations, from 5.6 to 3.5 percent. Statistics compiled by the Guggenheim Foundation for the period from 1968 to 1977 (Reports of the President and the Treasurer, 1977, New York) show an increase in the number of senior fellowships awarded in all fields by private sources, federal agencies, and centers for advanced study (43 percent over the decade). But most of this increase happened by 1973 and was onset by an even greater rise in the number of applications received (60 percent over ten years). Moreover, the average amount of individual grants increased at barely half the rate of inflation.

The Foundation Center's categories do not show clear trends in support for fellowships in the humanities, nor do they distinguish between fellowships for research and for other purposes. The Guggenheim Foundation's statistics cover only senior fellowships and do not distinguish among research fields. Still, we can draw two general conclusions from such evidence. First, the total number of fellowships for research in the humanities leveled off around 1973–74 and has declined since then in the case of some major private sources of support. Second, the purchasing power of the average grant has declined.

Except for the Rockefeller Foundation, which established a fellowship program in 1974, the NEH is the only major funding source to have significantly increased its direct support for fellowships in the humanities since 1973. In 1979 the Endowment's Division of Fellowships awarded nearly four hundred fellowships of different types for advanced study and research. Since 1974 it has also provided some funds for the fellowship programs of independent research libraries, centers, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In addition, the NEH's Division of Research Grants supports collaborative research projects in the development of primary research materials, editing and translation, and conferences designed to identify particular needs for basic humanistic research.

The NEH's support of humanistic research has been timely and generous. As private philanthropic support has declined, however, scholars have placed a greater and greater burden on the Endowment's resources: increases in the number of grants made by its Fellowship and Research Divisions have been more than equaled by increases in the number of applications these programs receive each year. We probably cannot expect the financial resources of the Endowment to grow as fast in the future as they have in the past. Moreover, the hard times ahead for higher education will probably create new pressures on all agencies of support.

Recommendation 15:

Federal agencies and private foundations must increase their commitment to support the interlock-

ing parts of the system of research and scholarship in the humanities. We recommend that the major sources of support for fellowships (NEH, Fulbright, Guggenheim, Mellon, Rockefeller, and the American Council of Learned Societies, which grants funds provided by other sources) expand the number of fellowships available to humanists.

In our discussion of graduate training in the humanities, we noted the shortage of tenurable academic posts for Ph.D.'s. Against the day when this condition eases, it is essential to maintain the careers of younger humanists who represent the future of teaching and scholarship in their fields. The best of these will need the opportunity to earn a livelihood, whether through teaching or in a nonacademic setting, and support for the development of their potential as scholars. Fellowship agencies should provide support for scholarship to humanists at various stages of their careers, from postdoctoral to senior.

The NEH's Division of Fellowships has started to give special attention to applications from humanists at two-year and smaller four-year institutions and from young scholars at major universities. Among private foundations, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has liberally supported younger humanists. Between 1974 and 1976, the foundation provided $ 22 million to various universities for over three hundred postdoctoral appointments. The foundation has also supported humanists at mid-career, granting $ 9.3 million on a matching basis in 1978 and nearly $ 5 million in 1979 to a number of major universities "to enable them to create opportunities for appointing, retaining, or advancing to tenure some outstanding younger talent where this would not otherwise be possible." In 1978 Mellon also awarded $ 1 million to the American Council of Learned Societies in support of a fellowship program for young Ph.D.'s (Report of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 1978, New York).

For sixty years the American Council of Learned Societies has provided services to scholars in the humanities. Its programs of support, though not on a grand scale, are exemplary in their distribution of resources among various levels of scholarship; in

1978, for instance, the Council awarded 70 postdoctoral fellowships to scholars at different stages of their careers, 31 fellowships to recent recipients of the Ph.D., 171 grants-in-aid of the research projects of established and younger scholars, 143 travel grants, and 22 awards to senior graduate students. Now the future financial stability—indeed the very existence—of the ACLS is imperiled. The ACLS is a regrant agency, and funds to support its central programs will be exhausted after June 1982. To insure long-term financial security, the ACLS has undertaken a Sixtieth Anniversary Campaign to gain sufficient endowment and program funds to continue its activities at their present level. It is seeking support from major foundations, leading business corporations, and the federal government, and is asking for a federal charter to the ACLS as the private organization, analogous to the National Academy of Sciences, symbolizing our nation's concern for the humanities. We believe it is in the national interest that the ACLS receive both the federal charter and the necessary financial support, for its role in relation to humanistic scholarship is essential.

Scholarship in the humanities is vital to the nation. It seldom leads straight to widely visible results. In times of retrenchment and increased accountability, this fact is perhaps the humanities' misfortune. It is also their virtue. Scholarship should never be the handmaiden of public policy or public whim. Society must be the subject of scholarship, not its master, its finest insights are often achieved in quite private regions of specialized study long before they can reach a wide audience.

From its inception, a major purpose of the NEH has been "the development and dissemination of knowledge of the humanities through research and other scholarly activities in order to increase our national resources in the humanities" (First Annual Report, Washington, D.C., 1966). The Endowment's allocations for scholarship have remained substantial as the agency has developed its other missions, especially its mandate to acquaint the general public with the humanities. In connection with this mandate, the NEH has regularly emphasized scholarly projects with a special "relevance to important problems of the day" (Third Annual Report, 1968) or studies "that appeal to the imaginations of

Americans in general" (Thirteenth Annual Report, 1978). Some private fellowship programs have posted similar guidelines for their awards. Since 1973, moreover, the Endowment's Division of Fellowships has allocated considerable sums for fellowships and seminars for the professions—journalism, medicine, and the like.

We have argued throughout this report that the humanities must be more accessible to the public, and we have urged humanists to explore the avenues open to them for "going public." But we are concerned about a possible overemphasis on tailoring humanistic scholarship for relevance to contemporary issues or for immediate accessibility. Research is as important in the humanities as in the sciences; often it cannot be applied, and indeed it often reveals applications never before dreamed of. Scholars in the humanities continually reinterpret our world, whether the subject be the energy crisis or the Peloponnesian Wars. The results of their work filter into society through classes in schools and colleges, through reviews and articles in the popular press, through the reading of individuals and discussions among friends. The relevance and vigor of the humanities can be maintained only by nurturing research and scholarship in a manner free from constraint.

Historically, being a professional humanist has meant being a teacher and a scholar. But the face of the profession is changing. The shortage of academic jobs has driven many individuals with advanced training and scholarly ambitions into careers outside educational institutions and beyond easy access to libraries, professional colleagues, and students. Yet these individuals, too, are humanists, trained for scholarship and capable of contributing to their fields.

Independent institutes and research organizations have sprung up, expressions of the scholarly interests of nonacademic humanists. New York's Institute for Research in History, for example, encourages research through workshop, symposia, and the like. Its members, some of whom have published in scholarly journals, include academic and nonacademic historians.

Learned societies are fast becoming professional associations, and we recognize that some of our suggestions may accelerate this

evolution. Traditionally dedicated to the advancement of scholarship, they now also help young scholars find jobs, raise funds, sponsor programs on teaching in high schools and community colleges and on the needs of ethnic minorities, and so on. These functions bring learned societies into political and social realms that, to some of their members, seem to be the antithesis of scholarship. Other members, however, would argue that the learned societies have not yet adequately discharged the responsibilities imposed on them by their role as guardians of humanistic learning and by their pleas for public support. A number of humanists, believing that the humanities need a general membership association, established in 1978 the American Association for the Advancement of the Humanities. It emphasizes the need for more effective advocacy and outreach by humanists, in education and in the community, and it has close ties with another fledgling group, the Community College Humanities Association.

New modes of sharing scholarly knowledge, the changing fortunes of higher education, the many new roles imposed on humanists by the "learning society": these promise to stretch the meaning of the word humanist and change the profession. Regulating the pace of that change, making it work for the benefit of education and scholarship in the humanities, will be up to individual humanists, educational and cultural institutions, and the learned societies. Their first duty—to preserve the integrity of learning in the humanities—will need a fine touch for the possibilities and limits of innovation. Their most noble aspiration should be to bring the past to life today and pass it on to tomorrow.

The experience of the last three decades has clearly shown that the fortunes of the humanities, higher education, and our culture are closely interwoven. The prosperity in higher education in the 1950s and 1960s, itself a reflection of our nation's material and technical progress, was in some respects a boon for the humanities. The economic stringencies and social reappraisals of the 1970s, and the consequent reassessments of higher education, will inevitably continue to test the strength of the humanities. Administrators and legislators, humanists, students, and the public must share respon-

sibility for preserving and channeling that strength. All must reaffirm that the equation linking our culture with higher education and the humanities runs in both directions: the humanities are a part of what we need to know about ourselves and a broad avenue to discovering the uses of that knowledge.