When the two-year-old John Hay Whitney Foundation first began asking educators where & how it should spend its money, it got a prompt and unanimous answer: "Support the humanities." Last week the foundation announced that it was doing just that, through its new Whitney Visiting Professors in the Humanities Program.
Each year the program will pick six outstanding retired professors who want to go on teaching, send them to small liberal arts colleges that might otherwise be unable to afford them. The foundation will pay their salaries ($7,500 a year) but the host institutions will have to furnish the housing. It was...