572
PARTISAN REVIEW
that humanists be prepared somehow for nonacademic jobs, the
Commission has nothing to say.
What needs to be stressed as a very critical situation is not only
that current Ph.D.s in the humanities are extensively unemployed or
miserably underemployed, but also that this adverse labor market is
powerfully discouraging the superior minds of the current college–
age population from pursuing doctorates and possible careers as aca–
demic humanists. So when in the nineties the labor market for
Ph.D.s is expected to improve because of a national wave of retire–
ments, there will be very few first-rate trained humanist minds ready
to take the academic jobs that will be available. We are in the course
of repeating the dysfunctional educational manpower history of the
fifties and sixties. The depressed labor market for Ph.D. s in the
fifties impeded superior students from entering graduate school in
the humanities . When the jobs were available in the sixties, humani–
ties departments often had to settle for mediocre personnel who still
dominate many of our faculties, particularly in the new or expanded
state universities.
There are two things that need to be done : NEH (assuming its
survival in the neo-Neanderthal age) should give priority to alle–
viating the unemployment situation through extended postdoctoral
fellowships: this will be far more beneficial than for NEH to put its
limited resources (limited even before the Reagan cutbacks) into ele–
mentary and secondary education, where the same dollars that could
be spent on postdoctoral positions will have very little positive im–
pact. Secondly, given that so many of our best young minds are now
headed from college to law, medical, and business schools, special
situations and strategies should be established to allow these super–
ior people, once they are relatively secure in their jobs, to pursue
doctoral work in the humanities over extended periods of study, and
then to teach part-time.
If
this is done and should the academic hu–
manities job situation improve, there will be a cadre of first-rate
minds that can possibly be recruited in the nineties from the law,
medicine, and business professions back into university faculties.
To achieve this alternative, our humanities faculties will have to
become much more receptive and hospitable to the part-time grad–
uate student than they are at present. When the big academic de–
pression hit in the mid-seventies, it was not enough for our major
graduate schools to have restricted access by postadolescents coming
out of colleges, as many institutions did, especially in the Ivy
League. This should have been accompanied by development of
