Taking note of the increasing corporate and institutional pressures on humanities research in American universities, the SCE's two panels at the 1999 MLA in Chicago explored "Humanities Futures": What are the possible missions for humanities programs, and their prospects, in an era of downsizing, outsourcing, and students-cum- "customers" seeking practical job training? How will the humanities shape and be shaped by universities driven increasingly by market demands?
Six panelists addressed these, and related, questions, in what proved to be vigorous and contentious debate. Although the dominant note was largely pessimistic, given the array of threats to "traditional" humanistic research and teaching, the papers as a whole concentrated on strategies for reinvention, rather than retrenchment and complaint; on an oppositional use of the tools of encroachment against their dominant function; on, in Don Hedrick's words, "spending cultural capital rather than critiquing it."
Humanities Futures I
Presiding: Richard M. Ohmann, Wesleyan University
1.	"Humanities for All or None?" Sharon O'Dair, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
2.	"Franchising the University," Jeffrey J. Williams, University of Missouri, Columbia
3.	"Noir Humanism," Donald Keith Hedrick, Kansas State University
Humanities Futures II
Presiding: Max W. Thomas, University of Iowa
1.	"Publishing Futures within (or without) the Humanities," Geoffrey F. K. Sauer, Carnegie Mellon University
2.	"McDonald's U.: Virtual Technology and Humanities Futures in the Corporatized University," Lina Carro, Humboldt State University, and Nancy Knowles, University of Connecticut, Storrs