NORMAN F. CANTOR
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much more support. The Commission notes the distressing fact that
although corporations are allowed a 5 percent tax rebate on gifts to
higher education , they have used only a little more than 1 percent.
Among larger corporations the gift figure is even less than 1 percent.
But the Commission's hand-wringing and pointing to the exemplary
role of a group of corporations in Minneapolis does not go to the cen–
ter of the problem.
What needs to be said is that we are seeing among corporate ex–
ecutives the impact of the managerial "bottom line" attitude, the
short-term profit maximization that our leading business schools
have been teaching their graduates for two decades. These MBA
graduates not only do not want to share their profits - even at a very
small margin-through more giving to universities, but, in order to
impress stockholders with respect to their supposed skillful man–
agement, they are even reluctant, in a great many corporations, to
invest heavily in long-term product research and development. In–
stead they choose to maximize the short-term profit statements with
catastrophic results we can see, for example, in the automobile in–
dustry. Thus , universities , and especially humanities departments,
suffer from the crude, selfish, go-go philosophy that their own busi–
ness schools teach their graduates. As long as the professional
schools of law, medicine, and business inculcate in their graduates a
dominant attitude of privatism and selfishness , the occasional course
in ethics that it is now fashionable to provide for professional school
students will have modest results.
This lack of support from the corporate sector is also the conse–
quence of the widespread failure of schools of arts and science to im–
press upon the corporate world the critical long-term impact of the
theories and information that humanities departments engender as
the context in which the business decisions of the future will be set.
But it is hard to do this when the humanities are seen primarily
as vehicles of "cultural pluralism" for undergraduates rather than
as formidable shapers over time of specific behavioral and social
assumptions within which American corporations will have to
function.
The Commission is conscious of another issue. It notes the mas–
sive unemployment of Ph .D.s but, again, aside from expressions of
distress and a too tepid praise of the Mellon Foundation-whose
postdoctoral funding grants to many universities for younger hu–
manists have been the only constructive response of any funding
agency to the bad job situation - and the now-conventional urging
