1989

The Trustees and staff of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation continue to be committed to the broad areas of emphasis and the general mode of operation that have characterized our activities for many years. The Foundation's long-term interest in higher education, population, the arts, conservation and the environment, and public affairs reflects a judgment that these fields continue to be important their own right--and to offer exceptional opportunities to assist in the advancement of significant purposes. Historical commitment alone is an inadequate rationale for present-day involvement by the Foundation, and we are fortunate indeed to be the inheritors of a tradition of support for fields still judged to be of consequence. 

These fields, however, can be approached in a number of different ways, and almost all of the major programs of the Foundation were reviewed intensively in 1989. It is necessary to think freshly about directions, even within long-established areas, in part because the settings in which we work are themselves constantly changing. This Foundation continues to believe strongly in institution-building, and in providing sufficient continuity of support to make a real difference; at the same time, we also have an obligation to do our best to anticipate emerging problems that we may be able to address with particular effectiveness.

The twin problems of faculty staffing and the organization and financing of graduate education--which will confront essentially all colleges and universities in the 1990s--illustrate well the need to plan ahead, and the first part of this report describes our current thinking in these areas. The second part complements this detailed discussion by providing a more general account of recent developments and initiatives at the Foundation in all other major program areas. The complete record of the Foundation's grants in 1989 is described in the summary table of appropriations (pdf) and list of grants at the end of the printed annual report for 1989.

Graduate Education

In our view, even the most straightforward, pragmatic considerations justify a strong interest in graduate education in the arts and sciences. The "output" of graduate institutions affects directly the pools of talent available to research organizations; civic, governmental, and religious entities; businesses; colleges and universities; and elementary and secondary education. At their best, those who earn graduate degrees in the arts and sciences contribute not only their own ideas to society, but also a capacity to educate and prepare those who will exercise leadership on a broad scale.

In addition, graduate studies can offer less tangible rewards that are as long-lasting as they are sometimes hard to describe. All graduate students who were privileged, as I was, to have had exceptional teachers will understand when I recall the excitement of seeing at first hand, and for the first time, what constitutes scholarship of the highest order, and how the standards and values of scholarship can inform work that otherwise might seem routine or pedestrian.

One of my teachers, and one of the greatest scholars of his or any day, Jacob Viner, wrote:

All that I plead on behalf of scholarship . . . is that, once the taste for it has been aroused, it gives a sense of largeness even to one's small quests, and a sense of fullness even to the small answers to problems large or small which it yields, a sense which can never in any other way be attained, for which no other source of human gratification can, to the addict, be a satisfying substitute, which gains instead of loses in quality and quantity and in pleasure--yielding capacity by being shared with others-and which, unlike golf, improves with age.

Rarely, if ever, has there been a time of more pressing need for the kinds of creativity, learning, and broad perspective that ought to be associated with graduate education. In parts of the world as dissimilar as Lithuania, Hungary, Nicaragua, Brazil, Haiti, and South Africa, there is renewed evidence of deepseated desires for freedom of expression, an unwillingness to accept someone else's dogma, and the need for disciplined intelligence to address both the largest philosophical questions and the most pressing issues of governmental reform and economic revitalization. This country's system of graduate education is admired worldwide and serves interests that extend well beyond a narrow definition of national self-interest. It surely behooves us to take full advantage of it.

This will be no easy task. The immediate pressures on our graduate schools to provide faculty members for colleges and universities will be considerable in the 1990s. The results of recent research persuade us that there will be serious staffing problems in essentially all fields within the arts and sciences. Our projections for mathematics and the physical sciences are generally consistent with the findings of other studies in indicating the likelihood of very substantial shortages. More surprising was our finding that predicted shortages in the humanities and social sciences may be even larger. Specifically, our "base case" model (which assumes no changes in age-specific enrollment rates, in the arts-and-sciences share of enrollments, or in student-faculty ratios) suggests that the ratio of candidates-per-position in the humanities and social sciences can be expected to fall from the current level of about 1.5 to 1 (i.e., approximately 1.5 candidates for each faculty position) to about 0.7 to 1 in 1997-2002. In mathematics and the physical sciences, the ratio of candidates-per-position is projected to fall to about 0.8 to 1 in 1997-2002.

Specious precision should always be avoided, and the main point is Simply that these are dramatic shifts by anyone's reckoning. The competition for faculty members in the arts and sciences could become so acute that it would threaten the quality of teaching and research in all of higher education. Moreover, the kinds of "automatic" adjustments likely to result from rapidly tightening labor markets will not all be salutary: for instance, liberal arts colleges and universities alike could be tempted to offer prospective faculty members lower teaching loads in order to recruit them, even though further reductions in teaching schedules would only exacerbate the overall staffing problem by increasing the number of faculty needed to teach any given number of students.

While there are many possible modes of adjustment that can be considered, we believe that graduate education is by far the most potent "instrument" available to us. An increase in the size of the pool of well-qualified candidates for appointments to faculty positions (and for positions in other sectors of the economy) would make a tremendous difference. And it should be possible--if all of the institutional "actors" are seized of the problem and work cooperatively--to address the projected staffing problems in an orderly way that will avoid the "boom-and-bust" cycle that has bedeviled graduate education since the 1950s. The most severe shortages are not projected to occur until the late 1990s, so there is still time to prepare for the needs that will be experienced then. However, efforts to address problems must begin now because of the many years that it takes most students to earn doctorates (discussed below).

The pattern of doctorates awarded in the 1960s and 1970s is revealing. In the broad field of "letters," for example, Figure 1 shows that there was an unprecedented increase in the number of doctorates awarded annually during the boom years of the 1960s (the number rising from about 500 in 1958 to a peak of nearly 1,900 in 1972), and then a striking decline (to about 1,150 in 1987) as conditions in academic labor markets deteriorated. The dramatic--and prolonged--fall-off in the "output" of doctorates is one of the main reasons why we must anticipate severe staffing problems in the years ahead: unless conditions change, the number of potential faculty candidates will fall well short of the number needed to replace those faculty members recruited during the 1960s and to meet the additional demands likely to be generated by the increases in enrollment projected to occur in the late 1990s. (Figure 1 also shows, for comparative purposes, the corresponding data for mathematics. We see from the figure that the number of doctorates awarded to US residents--the group most likely to seek teaching positions in this country--has declined even more sharply than the overall number of doctorates, especially in mathematics.)

Our hope is that the number of doctorates conferred in fields such as "letters" will now begin to increase once again; indeed, the prospective tightening of academic labor markets should itself encourage more undergraduates to apply for admission to PhD programs. Earlier experience provides no reason to believe, however, that a sufficient response (by institutions offering doctorates and by prospective graduate students) will occur without careful planning and an infusion of additional resources for support of both students and programs.

We are not advocating, we should stress, the kind of rapid build-up that took place in the 1960s, when there was an extraordinary proliferation of graduate programs. That overexpansion of graduate education--which was both too large in scale and poorly timed, in that it started too late and lasted too long--led subsequently to the oversupply of aspiring academics that in turn contributed to a general disenchantment with graduate study in many fields during the 1970s. There is no need to repeat that cycle. Conditions are very different now, and large numbers of strong graduate programs are already in place in most fields. What is needed is a sensible and sustainable flow of new doctorates from these existing programs that will be at least roughly related to the longer-term needs of the educational system and society.

Nor are we advocating an effort to "fine-tune" the system of graduate education too precisely. Projections are inevitably wrong in their details, time lags are long, new internal and external "shocks" to the system will almost certainly be felt, and individuals will react to changing circumstances in ways that are not entirely predictable. In short, there are far too many "moving parts" to allow anything approaching precise calibration of the scale of graduate programs to expected conditions in academic labor markets, even if that were thought to be a desirable goal. But it should be possible to get the general dimensions more or less right.

It is essential that increases in the number of doctorates be achieved without compromising the quality of the education offered. Indeed, the objective should be to improve the entire enterprise. Issues that are genuinely qualitative must be recognized and taken every bit as seriously as issues pertaining to numbers. Qualitative considerations present themselves within individual graduate programs, where they raise questions of curricula and standards, as well as within the larger system of graduate education as a whole, since much will depend on the willingness (and the ability) of the strongest graduate programs to make at least proportionate contributions to the need for increased numbers of doctorates.

Significant amounts of new resources will be required if the problems of staffing and graduate education (including the issues of quality) are to be addressed adequately: these are not problems that will solve themselves or yield to exhortation alone. This reality makes it all the more imperative that we obtain as clear a sense as possible of where the most difficult problems reside, and how they can be addressed most effectively. Under the best of conditions, resource constraints will be extremely tight. Universities will have to make uncommonly good use of available resources, and external providers of funds (governmental and private) will be obligated to search hard for the most effective mechanisms of support.

With the active cooperation of a number of leading graduate schools, several of us at the Foundation (especially William Bowen, Julie Ann Sosa, and Neil Rudenstine) have been working to understand better certain aspects of the process of graduate education, including the twin problems of attrition and lengthy time-to-degree. We have also been collecting data that should allow us to evaluate more rigorously than before the results--quantitative and qualitative--achieved by various types of national fellowship programs (including the NSF, NDEA, Woodrow Wilson, Danforth, Whiting, and Mellon programs). We are seeking to quantify differences in attrition rates and in time-to-degree across fields of study, types of institution, and time periods, and to study as well the effects on these outcomes of different forms of financial support (including the use made of teaching and research assistantships).

Ideally, this research will make some contribution to the national discussion of these issues and, more immediately, will inform the Foundation's internal decisions concerning support of graduate education. It is already known that the time required by most students to complete the doctorate is now very long indeed. At the end of 1985, the typical recipient of the PhD in the humanities spent 8.5 years in "registered study" and needed more than 12 years after completing the BA degree to obtain the PhD. Few would argue that this long "gestation period" should be the norm. While conditions in academic labor markets have had an impact, the difficult labor market conditions of the 1970s by no means explain fully the rise in time-to-degree. We suspect that another part of the explanation may be found in changes in financing patterns--including increased reliance on teaching assistantships rather than on fellowships.

Even more troubling are the less well-known statistics on completion rates (or, defined the other way around, attrition rates). The data that we have collected indicate that less than half the PhD candidates who begin their studies in some of the most highly regarded departments ultimately obtain doctorates. Of course, a certain amount of attrition is desirable. Some students who enroll with high expectations need to learn from their own experiences that graduate study is not for them. Nor would anyone suggest that exposure to graduate study in the arts and sciences is of no redeeming value to those students who subsequently decide to pursue other programs of study or to enter the labor force without an advanced degree. These are more than caveats, but recognizing them does not allow us the luxury of assuming that exceptionally high rates of attrition, at any stage in the process of graduate education, are acceptable. Often there is in fact, considerable cost to individuals as well as to institutions from prolonged periods of study that do not culminate in the award of a doctorate. These "costs" are psychological as well as economic, and they need to be weighed carefully.

The Foundation has been talking with a number of graduate deans, provosts, and presidents about these matters. In particular, we have had several meetings with representatives of programs only by working directly and intensively at the departmental level. The involvement of presidents, provosts, and deans is clearly essential, but in graduate education much of the real decision-making takes place at the departmental level--particularly with regard to factors affecting attrition and time-to-degree--and both standards and incentives need to be considered and set accordingly. There are also reasons to believe that support targeted at students near the end of the process of graduate education (enabling candidates to finish their degrees more expeditiously) may in many instances be more effective than equivalent resources provided earlier.

These tentative conclusions have obvious implications for the design of any potential program of support. Consequently, we are asking this first group of universities to identify particular departments that are committed to thinking hard about attrition rates, time-to-degree, and related aspects of graduate education (including curricula, patterns of financial support, and the use of teaching assistants). While no final decisions have been made, it is likely that we will subsequently invite an additional group of universities (still quite limited in number) to submit proposals for strengthening their graduate programs; and once again we expect to focus on departments in which these universities have special opportunities to contribute to the solution of the overall staffing problems facing higher education.

We are also giving careful consideration to the future of the existing Mellon Fellowship Program in the Humanities. It was well conceived to meet the problems of the 1980s, when it was particularly important--in the context of so much discouraging news about opportunities for prospective teachers--to encourage at least some number of the most outstanding undergraduates to consider entering PhD programs in the humanities. Thus, the emphasis on generous support during the first two years of graduate study was very much in order, as was the more general effort to publicize the program and the opportunities that it offered. The situation is now quite different, and it may well be wise for the Foundation to reallocate some of the resources universities that have attracted the largest numbers of recipients of the Mellon Fellowships in the Humanities, a program that was initiated in 1983 to encourage talented undergraduates to undertake graduate study in the humanities. (Since these fellowships are portable, the choices made by the winners provide a reasonable basis for identifying those programs believed to offer the best opportunities for graduate study in their fields.) We expect to make planning grants to these universities in 1990 and then to review carefully proposals for multi-year support that are designed to improve systemically the process of providing graduate education in selected fields within the humanities and social sciences. This will be an interactive process, which we hope will benefit from the ongoing research mentioned above.

The more we study these questions, the more inclined we are to believe that real progress can be made in improving graduate presently devoted to this program to departmentally-based efforts of the kind described above and to increased support for students at the dissertation stage of their studies. At the same time, we may want to consider a new type of program for first-year graduate students that would retain some of the beneficial "announcement" effects associated with the current program.

Fortunately, there is still time for us to learn more about various approaches, and to seek ways to complement the efforts of others committed to graduate education, before final decisions must be made. One reason for describing in some detail our highly provisional thinking is to stimulate comments, criticisms, and suggestions. We would welcome new ideas. We are convinced that the large objectives which we have set forth--increasing the number of outstanding candidates for faculty positions while seeking at the same time to help improve the quality of graduate education--are worth the best efforts of all of us.

General Program Review

During 1989, Carolyn Makinson, Program Associate for Population, led an intensive review of the Foundation's activities in the field of population. One result was a decision by the Trustees to increase significantly appropriations for demographic research and training intended to improve the capacity of demographers in the United States to work with their colleagues in developing countries to address the issue of population growth. Increased investments by the Foundation in research on applied contraceptive development and on work in the social sciences will more than offset a planned reduction in its support of basic reseach in reproductive biology. The Foundation has also increased its support of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which plays a major role in the analysis of public-policy issues in a field too often dominated by emotional appeals and ideology.

The performing arts, museums, and art conservation received significantly larger appropriations in 1989 than in the previous year, when new programs were being designed. Within the performing arts, grants were made to several early-music and contemporary-music ensembles, as well as to selected ballet schools and dance companies. Rachel Newton Bellow, the Foundation's Program Associate for the Arts, consulted extensively with individuals in these fields before concluding that, in addition to providing targeted assistance for large institutions, the Foundation should seek out exceptionally attractive opportunities to undergird the efforts of some smaller organizations of demonstrated quality. The training of ballet dancers and efforts to rationalize touring and rehearsal schedules of dance companies were given special attention. Grants were also made to support dance preservation and to help the California Institute of the Arts begin a training program in arts criticism.

Eleven major art museums received support for curatorial and scholarly activities related to their permanent collections. Research done by the Foundation's Executive Vice President, Neil L. Rudenstine, demonstrated that these institutions, during the past two decades, have become more and more dependent on earned income (often tied to large "special" exhibitions and sometimes pressing the outer limits of unrelated business income) and are frequently hard-pressed to support significant programs of sustained research or conservation related to their permanent collections. The Foundation's recent grants were intended to help redress the balance in at least a modest way.

Long-standing activities of the Foundation in conservation and the environment developed under the leadership of William Robertson, Program Director for Conservation and the Environment, were expanded but not modified significantly in their basic thrust. Grants to the Trust for Public Land, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the New York Botanical Garden were designed to take advantage of new opportunities as well as to strengthen institutions of central importance in their fields. Grants for basic research and training in ecology reflect the strategic importance of excellent work in a relatively neglected area of science with major implications for the long-term welfare of all of us.

The Foundation's activities in literacy (led by Neil Rudenstine and Gardner Lindzey, former Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences) and in science and society (guided by Harriet Zuckerman, a professor of sociology at Columbia University) followed the outlines described in last year's annual report (pdf). Similarly, renewed support was provided to distinguished academic centers such as the American Academy in Rome, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The American Studies Program of the American Council of Learned Societies also received renewed support. James Morris, Program Director for Higher Education, had general responsibility for these grants, as well as for other grants--described below--related to higher education and libraries.

Special mention should be made of research libraries. A large grant was made to the Commission on Preservation and Access to permit that organization to assist European libraries to link new programs in preservation micro filming with the extensive program already in place in the United States. The international commitment to create close coordination of these projects is very encouraging. A much smaller grant was made to the Association of Research Libraries to allow it to take fuller advantage of the extensive data base and institutional network that it has built up over many years. A grant went to Stanford University for a study of the pricing of serials, and the Foundation is also carrying out research of its own on the economics of research libraries. We expect to continue to work actively in this important--and generally neglected area.

The Foundation's commitment to higher education remains strong. Sizeable grants were made in 1989 to a small number of universities with demonstrated strengths in Middle Eastern Studies, primarily to enhance their capacity to teach the languages of the region. Grants were also made to several universities with commitments to sustain already strong programs of teaching and research in Latin American Studies.

Two new programs were developed for targeted groups of liberal arts colleges under the supervision of Roberto Ifill, Program Associate for Higher Education and Public Affairs. One was intended to provide flexible funds for new presidents, and the other was designed to assist institutions eager to "consolidate" some of their existing academic and non-academic programs so as to achieve greater educational coherence and to help restrain the inexorable upward pressure on costs.

Last year's annual report described the beginning of a major new commitment by the Foundation to encourage larger numbers of outstanding minority students to pursue PhD programs in the arts and sciences. This is an important objective in its own right, and it is also directly related to the Foundation's broader concern for faculty staffing and graduate education discussed in the first part of this report.

Under the leadership of Henry Drewry, Program Associate for Higher Education, grants for "Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellows" have now been made to 19 colleges and universities, and we look forward to following closely the progress of those students chosen to participate in this program. In 1989, a parallel program was initiated to identify and support outstanding students at historically black colleges who are interested in academic careers. Funds are also being made available--on a highly competitive basis--to help faculty members at these same institutions to complete their doctoral dissertations by providing them with fellowships for a year of research and writing. Both of these new programs will be administered by the United Negro College Fund, under the direction of Dr. Cora Marrett, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The Foundation's grantmaking in the broad area of public affairs was further defined and extended in 1989, in large measure as the result of an internal study conducted by Stephanie Bell-Rose, Program Associate for Public Affairs. One goal is to support organizations that work with institutions in Latin America to further a capacity for public-policy analysis and to train individuals who will be active in the public sector there. We anticipate that additional grants will be made in 1990 to institutions with a special interest in the Caribbean.

Our interest in public affairs continues to include selected policy issues with major implications for education at the precollegiate levels. Renewed support was provided for the AAAS "Project 2061, " a national effort to create a new framework--with a more selective core of subject matter and well-defined conceptual approaches--for the teaching of mathematics and science in grades K-12. In 1989, we also began to examine the impact of immigration upon US society and, more specifically, "Immigrant" policy. Considerable staff time has been devoted to studying the education of immigrant children, and we anticipate making grants in this area in 1990.

Starting in 1988, this Foundation has made grants intended to take advantage of what we initially referred to as "openings to Eastern Europe." But we certainly did not even begin to appreciate the pace at which change would occur! When it became clear that there was an unprecedented opportunity to assist in the radical transformation of both political and economic systems that is occurring there, we sought additional staff assistance, and we were fortunate to obtain the help of Richard E. Quandt, a professor of economics at Princeton University who has long had ties to Eastern Europe (particularly Hungary). Grants have already been made to support agricultural activities and business-training in Poland, and Professor Quandt expects to recommend other grants to facilitate the movement to market economies in the countries of Eastern Europe. In addition, the Foundation is giving careful consideration to special ways of assisting academic institutions there in need of revitalization. 

William G. Bowen
President
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
140 East 62nd Street
New York, NY 10021
(212) 838-8400