NORMAN F. CANTOR
573
opportunities for mature adults holding secure nonacademic jobs to
pursue part-time doctoral studies in the humanities.
There is a possible gain from the discouraging academic job
market for Ph.D.s in the humanities that is not mentioned in the re–
port. I have the impression that the proportion of women in doctoral
programs in the humanities is steadily increasing, and if this is the
case, women scholars will be assuming leadership roles in many dis–
ciplines by the end of the century to a much greater degree than ever
before. Thus the labor market will achieve to an important degree
what affirmative action programs in the seventies were able to
achieve only marginally. This raises an important question.
If
the
humanities profession by the end of the century is populated with a
large and perhaps majority group of women, does this development
have any particular intellectual significance; will it condition the
content of humanistic disciplines? I would be both a very wise and
brave man were I to answer this question. I doubt that we have suffi–
cient data to give a persuasive answer at this time.
The Commission made some thirty-one recommendations,
none beyond the range of good intentions and fond hopes.
It
should
have made a thirty-second recommendation: let our major foun–
dations not waste money on such efforts in the future, but rather
use their resources for direct support of high quality research and
training.
Although the president of the Mellon Foundation was a mem–
ber of the Commission, the long-term value of this foundation's
funding of postdoctoral fellowships is not sufficiently stressed in the
report.
If
the Rockefeller Foundation would have applied the funds
expended in the futile enterprise this report represents toward fund–
ing only a handful of three-year postdoctoral fellowships in the
humanities for unemployed Ph.D.s, it would have made a much
more significant contribution both to the happiness of excellent
young scholars and thinkers and to the perpetuation and inten–
sification of the intellectual revolution in a wide array of humanistic
disciplines that is now taking place despite adverse political and
economic conditions .
But then there may be a long-term benefit in the development
of this intellectual revolution within the humanities against unfavor–
able political and economic forces: a political radicalization of
humanists parailel to that which occurred in the later eighteenth
century, when both the then decaying universities and the stultified
bureaucracies of the
ancien regime
failed to accommodate the most
creative minds of that society.
