Norman F. Cantor
ON THE "ROCKEFELLER REPORT"
In 1964, a national Commission on the Humanities, spon–
sored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Council of
Graduate Schools in the United States, and the United Chapters of
Phi Beta Kappa, published a report calling for the establishment of
what became the National Endowment for the Humanities-a re–
port that had important consequences for American culture and
education . In 1978, the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored a new
Commission on the Humanities chaired by Richard W. Lyman, at
that time president of Stanford University and subsequently presi–
dent of the Rockefeller Foundation . The Commission issued its so–
called "Rockefeller Report" in May, 1980, entitled ,
The Humanities in
American Life.
The Rockefeller Commission was an extremely distinguished
one and included a significant number of the genuine luminaries in
higher education, in the foundation world, and in humanistic schol–
arship. It included not only the then president of Stanford, but the
former president of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the
presidents of Smith College, Yale University, the University of Chi–
cago , Tulane University (now president of the University of Penn–
sylvania), the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard,
and the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. It
also included such thoughtful and learned scholars and educators as
the late Charles Frankel , William Gass, Martin Marty, Charles
Muscatine (who was the leader of a very interesting experimental
college in Berkeley in the seventies) , Walter Ong, and Helen
Vendler. The Rockefeller Foundation generously provided for exten–
sive sta!l)upport headed by Gaines Post , Jr. , a history professor at the
University of Texas. One could only expect from such a stellar com–
mission a report that bristled with profound learning, imaginative
proposals, and the most thoughtful and searching examination of the
nature and condition of the humanities, on the campus , at least, if
not in American life in general. These qualities, however, are lack–
ing in this recently published Report.
