Worried that colleges and universities will face a shortage of well-qualified faculty members in the mid 1990’s, some foundation and university officials are hoping to persuade bright students in the humanities to pursue academic careers despite the current dismal job market.
The most ambitious effort to address the problem is a new program of graduate fellowships in the humanities, financed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton, N.J.
Starting in the 1983-84 academic year, 100 to 125 Mellon Fellowships will be awarded annually to outstanding students who are beginning graduate school. The first fellows will be named next March.
The foundation estimates it will spend $24-million on the program over 10 years.
In announcing the fellowships, Robert F. Goheen, director of the program, said it had two purposes:
- “To help assure that the next generation of teachers and scholars will include men and women of the highest ability.”
- “To help sustain the nation’s leading graduate schools and the continuity of teaching and scholarship in fundamental fields of learning.”
Mr. Goheen, a former president of Princeton University and a former U.S. ambassador to India, said in an interview that, because of the dismal job prospects facing young scholars in the humanities over the next several years, many faculty members had been discouraging some of their best students from going to graduate school. “A lot of the students don’t need much discouragement,” he added. “They read the newspapers.”
As a result, Mr. Goheen said, “too much of our best talent is not even trying” to pursue academic careers. “We’ve got to get it back into the stream.”
One graduate-school dean who asked not to be identified put the problem more bluntly: “We don’t want all the brightest students going into business, law, or medicine, and the less bright going into college teaching.”
John E. Sawyer, president of the Mellon Foundation, said it had developed the program because “one of the opportunities, and obligations, of independent private foundations is to act countercyclically - to look beyond immediate circumstances and try to anticipate future needs where long lead times are required and alternative support is not in sight.”
Such concerns have spread to some graduate schools as well.
“I really feel that higher education is going to be in a difficult situation in the 90’s because we don’t think of these things quickly enough,” said Francis L. Lawrence, academic vice-president and provost at Tulane University. “Not enough high-quality people are going to graduate school.”
Mr. Lawrence, who serves as dean of the graduate school at Tulane, has recently completed an internal study of how the school can adapt to smaller budgets and fewer applications. He has recommended that graduate departments give a high priority to recruiting students.
“We have recruited at the undergraduate level,” he said, “but very few graduate departments recruit students or even know how to.”
Earlier this year, a 17-member commission of faculty members at the University of Chicago issued a report on the future of graduate programs there that addressed many of the same issues.
In its report, the commission said enrollment in Chicago’s graduate programs had dwindled from about 3,400 in 1968-69 to about 2,150 in 1981-82.
“The impending shortage of positions for junior faculty members will restrict the flow of innovative young scholars into academic life, thereby threatening the creativity and vitality of research and scholarship long after the crisis in enrollment has subsided,” the report said.
In his annual report for 1981, which was devoted to graduate education, William G. Bowen, president of Princeton University, warned of the danger of “discouraging a generation or more of the most promising fresh talent” from following academic careers.
Hanna H. Gray, president of the University of Chicago, has issued similar warnings.
“It is on the qualifications of those who will become the faculty and shapers of the disciplines of learning 10 and 20 years from now that the future of higher education depends,” she said.
Both the Chicago commission and Mr. Lawrence of Tulane recommend that graduate schools provide workshops and courses that could help graduate students in the humanities find nonacademic jobs.
In addition, Mr. Sawyer and the authors of the commission’s report warn that the present tendency toward highly specialized scholarship in the humanities could be discouraging to some potential college teachers from entering those disciplines.
To make the academic profession attractive to the best students, Mr. Sawyer said, faculty members in the humanities must “moderate tendencies toward hyperspecialization and self-isolating vocabularies, and reach out to far larger numbers receptive to, even hungry for, what they could offer.” Otherwise, he said, undergraduates will not be likely to pursue the study of the humanities beyond their introductory courses.
Mr. Sawyer said the Mellon fellows would be chosen for both “their intellectual depth and their breadth of interest.” The program will seek to encourage those who “have a larger vision of both teaching and learning than has characterized many of the products of recent graduate education,” he said.
The commission’s report called for broader and more flexible graduate programs and urged faculty members “to identify opportunities to create more general programs of graduate study linking particular fields and disciplines in ways that would offer a broad preparation for academic and nonacademic careers alike.”
Mr. Sawyer said he hoped that the Mellon program would lead other foundations to develop strategies to assure what he called “the steady flow of talent” into the academic profession. While the problems appear most severe in the humanities, he added, the social sciences and the natural sciences may also face a shortage of highly competent new professors in the 1990’s. Thus far, he said, there have been expressions of interest but no firm commitments to support similar programs.