The harder question is this: What is to happen to the humanities? What is truly uncertain about the decades ahead is whether there will continue to be a flow of articles and books enlarging and deepening understanding of literature, history, and philosophy.
It can be argued, to be sure, that a depression in the academic labor market, even if prolonged and severe, will not seriously affect the quantity or quality of scholarly research and writing. This argument cannot be dismissed out of hand, for it is a fact that the majority of people with doctoral training have not and do not function as scholars. A survey of early 1970's of college teachers in the humanities found that fewer than half had produced a book, and only about 1 out of 7 had written more than 2 books. Almost half had never even published an article. A survey of the late 1970s found only a third of humanities teachers with no scholarly publications to their credit but also not much more than a third entitled to be described as productive scholars.
In the 1930s, the entire pool of people in the United States with scholarly training in the humanities amounted to only a few thousand, yet that decade is generally considered a very creative period in humanistic scholarship. Certainly, it was a fruitful period. The American Historical Review was publishing each quarter-year reviews of more than 30 new books by American scholars. The American Bibliography of the Modern Language Association, listing both books and articles by American scholars, averaged 1710 items a year.
It obviously did not require tens of thousands of scholars to keep the humanities in good health. Indeed, one can go on to note that fifth-century Athens did fairly well with a total population below that of present-day Scranton or Cedar Rapids. The total number of humanists may have no more bearing on the vitality of the humanities than the number of composers and painters has on the vitality of music and art.
Since even the most pessimistic projections envision several thousand career openings on college faculties, there may be no cause for concern about humanistic scholarship. True scholars may know their vocation. Those destined to shape knowledge may obtain the training they need, undeterred by awareness that professorships will be few. After all, people who became scholars in the 1930s faced a scarcity of teaching jobs and, on top of that, the fact that salary levels were still based on an assumption that professors had independent means. Because the 1960s and 1970s saw the upgrading of so many colleges and universities, teaching posts suitable for dedicated scholars are now actually far more numerous than in the 1930s. These posts will probably be filled, regardless of what happens in the rest of the academic labor markets. Scholarly research and publication could thus proceed, largely unaffected by a general depression in higher education.
There are, however, reasons for doubting that, in this respect, the 1980s and 1990s will be analogous to the 1930s. To begin with, it seems possible that relatively fewer talented and ambitious people will seek training. In the 1930s conditions were bad everywhere. Many people saw the alternative to graduate school and a teaching job as no job at all. In the time ahead, most are apt to see their choice as between competing for professorships that are few or poorly paid or both and, on the other hand, entering some profession where opportunities are multiplying and levels of compensation are rising. Humanities B.A's of the 1980s and 1990s could easily conclude that their vocations are in law or public policy or business administration.
A second question is whether people who do go to graduate school will get the training they need if they are to succeed as scholars. As was also pointed out earlier, many students base their choices on short-term economic considerations. They go where paid teaching assistantships are available. The institutions having the most funds for this purpose are not necessarily those best equipped to train scholars. With only a handful of institutions offering doctoral training in the 1930s, would-be scholars had few opportunities to make mistakes. Those of the 1980s and 1990s will face strong temptation to disperse themselves among universities, many of which lack faculty strength or research facilities that most apprentices need if they are to master the scholar's craft. Such an outcome is all the more likely in view of the fact that the strongest research universities have nearly all responded to the prospective shortfall in academic jobs by slicing back admissions to doctoral programs.
Third, people who do enroll in well-equipped graduate departments may drop out before they have sufficient training. With the completion of a doctorate taking on the average 2 years longer than in the 1930s or the 1950s, even dedicated and ambitious students could decide that they should be in a professional school or out in the world. Surrounded by advanced graduate students and junior faculty nervous about job prospects, many students could give up without completing even rudimentary training.
Finally, it is possible that the Ph.D.'s or near-Ph. D's with greatest promise as scholars may not be the ones selected by the colleges and universities best outfitted for scholarship. To be sure, almost all Ph.D.'s are likely to be able to teach. Even if career openings are few, short-term openings are sure to be abundant. If one-quarter of faculty posts are without tenure and are occupied by one person for only 3-4 years on the average, then several thousand posts will become vacant every year. As remarked earlier, however, large numbers of these teaching posts will not be suited to would-be scholars.
Posts that do offer opportunity for scholarly work may not match the scholars available to fill them, for universities and colleges usually hire people to fill instructional needs. Within any 2- to 4-year period, the schools most hospitable to scholarship may have no openings at all in many of the scores of specialties into which the humanities in practice subdivide. The distribution of quality in a given period's crop of Ph.D.'s in modern languages, for example, might be heavily skewed toward Slavic literatures. In the same period, the best colleges and universities might have vacancies only for teachers of Romance tongues. The Slavicists might be shunted into places discouraging for scholarly work, and at some point even the most dedicated scholars might decide to go into a different line of work.
Even if they have appropriate slots, colleges and universities hospitable to research may not pick the people best able to contribute to scholarship. They do not have very reliable criteria for judging scholarly promise. In the humanities, distinguished work requires both depth of original research and reflectiveness. A doctoral dissertation or even a first book seldom serves as a sure indication of the subsequent accomplishments of any critic, historian, or philosopher. Thus, even if adequate numbers of talented people seek and obtain training for scholarship, the academic appointment process could frustrate hopes that the humanities will survive in good health through a long period in which attractive career openings in higher education become fewer.
It follows that some special effort may be required if the 1980s and 1990s are not to be a period in which humanistic scholarship languishes. To specify possible lines of effort, however, is exceptionally difficult. It is probably idle to conjure up notions that call for new outlays of money, whether from public or from private sources. In addition, there exist no readily identifiable organizations or agencies to which recommendations for action might be presented.
The first of these problems needs to be stressed, for panels on the "academic job crisis" at humanists' conventions often feature an argument that the problem would disappear if the nation had its priorities in the right order. It is customarily pointed out that the federal government's annual outlays for defense have shot above $200 billion. If 1% or even a fraction of 1% of that money were used to fund humanistic research, runs the argument, practically all current and prospective Ph.D.'s in the humanities could put their training to work. Though this contention elicits nods and handclaps, it cannot be said to embody much realism. The Armed Services committees and the defense subcommittees of the Appropriations committees of the House and Senate do not authorize money for research in the humanities. The Human Resources and Education and Labor committees and their associated appropriations subcommittees do. Even if not in a mood to retrench on all fronts, these bodies would look at proposals to under-write employment of humanities Ph. D's as in competition with aid to dependent children, elementary and secondary education, equal employment opportunity efforts, and the like. Similar conditions exist at state and city levels. It is probably in vain to hope that public outlays for the humanities will even remain at the levels of the 1970s, let alone be increased by a margin sufficient to promise a secure future for humanistic scholarship.
What holds for public funds probably holds equally for those of universities and private foundations. The revenues of universities have hitherto been the chief source of support for scholarship in literature, history, and philosophy. In an era of declining enrollments, these resources will shrink. Even though funds need not go down in proportion to enrollments, allocations for graduate education, faculty research, and scholarly publication are particularly vulnerable. It is hard to imagine an institution where discretionary money could go to research travel or even to library acquisitions at the expense of maintaining real wage levels for tenured faculty and administrators.
As for private foundations, they reduced outlays on the humanities during the 1970s. New legislation curbed what they could do. Inflation meanwhile lessened their resources, and claims upon them multiplied. Even in the cultural area, petitions for support of scholarship came to compete with appeals for the maintenance of symphonies, opera companies, and galleries. Were foundation contributions to the humanities to inch up during the 1980s and 1990s that would be the most that could be expected?
Any hardheaded approach ought thus to assume almost no new money from any source. It should ask only transfers of resources, the total amount of which could well be diminishing rather than growing.
The second obstacle may also need more ample description, for panelists discussing the "academic job crisis" are also prone to call upon their professional associations for remedial action. In fact the MLA, AHA, and APA are powerless bodies. They are not at all analogous to the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association. Though their annual meetings can adopt resolutions, those resolutions are even less enforceable than planks in a party platform. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is for practical purposes a collective bargaining agent for certain college teachers who already have jobs. The Association of American Universities, the American Association for Higher Education, and other such organizations of college and university administrators exist chiefly for exchange of information. Each such organization can serve as a forum for the discussion of various approaches to protecting the future of humanities scholarship. In the end, however, any approach that succeeds will have to be one entailing independent, largely uncoordinated moves by large numbers of individuals and organizations.
Even so, the prospect may not be hopeless. The question is whether current resources could be shifted about to ensure (a) that sufficient numbers of able young people obtain advanced training in humanistic scholarship and (b) that those so equipped and motivated be able to do research and to publish the results. Many people would like to see these things happen. Almost no one would oppose them. Something may therefore occur if interested parties merely make the right choices among alternative ways of doing what they already want to do.
With regard to the first hazard-that the numbers of talented people seeking scholarly training may fall off-the obvious remedy is not, in any case, to spend more money. Rather, it is to alter attitudes. The pool of potential trainees will remain large, for even "worst-case" assumptions yield projections of humanities B.A's running well over 50,000 a year with perhaps 15,000-20,000 enrolling in graduate school.
The nation's universities have ample capacity to train scholars in these or even larger numbers, and they need no new resources for the purpose. Prior to the 1960s, 25 universities trained two-thirds of humanities Ph. D's. By the mid-1970s, the top 25 were turning out less than 40%, and the top 40 accounted for not quite 60%. Not all of these 40 had strong departments in all the humanities. On the other hand, some schools not among the 40 offered training equal to the best. Princeton and Bryn Mawr are examples. There can be almost no question that the United States has graduate departments in the humanities able to accommodate any B. A.'s interested in a crack at scholarly training.
And it is probably the case that universities could train graduate students in such numbers with little or no strain on their budgets, perhaps even with some net financial gain. Since graduate seminars are small and doctoral candidates receive a great deal of individual instruction, on the surface graduate education seems to be an expensive business. If a professor spends half of his or her classroom time on a large group of undergraduates and the other half on a small group of graduate students, simple arithmetic suggests that the university's per-student costs are much higher for the second group.
This is, however, an illusion. In the first place, the professor's time is not perfectly transferable. The replacement for the small group of graduate students would probably not be a second large group of undergraduates. It might be a small group of undergraduates. It might equally well be an equivalent number of hours simply doing research, for the university professor whose specialty is Goethe or medieval economic life or the philosophy of Heidegger is likely to have a limited repertoire of courses, many with less than universal appeal to undergraduates.
In the second place, for professors, the training of graduate students is often only in part a teaching activity. In small or large part, it is likely to overlap with research and scholarly writing. Students in a graduate seminar often pursue aspects of a subject on which their professor is doing research. Sometimes they are, for all practical purposes, research assistants paid with course credit rather than money. Sometimes-in the very best seminars-students and professors are collaborators. Even though some of the doyens of humanistic scholarship are at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, which has no students, one may argue that many scholars do better work as scholars because they train graduate students. It is even arguable that, if universities see their function as partly the advancement of learning, they need critical masses of graduate students both for the stimulation of their current faculty and for its ultimate replenishment. If these universities do not have graduate students, in other words, they would have cause to try to create them.
Those who do teach do not see the experience as having improved their ability to teach. Teachers and non-teachers alike see it as having enhanced critical thinking and ability to do research, the latter something almost as prized outside academe as within it.
