Although Huntington says many government agencies often also have political agendas, numerous restrictions on those grants tend to prevent significant shifts in interest over short periods of time.

In addition, these restrictions often make government grants difficult to attain. Gregory R. Crane, an assistant professor of the classics at Harvard, says the government often wants to see matching funds before they will release grant money.

"It's difficult to get outright funds from the federal government," Crane says, adding individual donors often set these kinds of limitations as well.

Humanities

Humanities scholars are rarely funded for their research at the same level as either pure scientists or social scientists, says Crane, who currently runs a $2 million foundation-sponsored project.

"In my neck of the woods, it's very unusual that a classics professor would raise money [of this magnitude]," Crane says. "I'm the only person I know in the humanities who has this kind of support."

And Crane secured the funds in part because he identified an approach that appealed to a foundation and went ahead with it.

"Clearly, we could not be doing what we're doing now if not for the Annenburg-CPB [money]," Crane says. "Their guidelines shaped our project."

Crane received almost all of his money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which has been supporting his Perseus Project since 1987. The grant subsidizes work on a multi-media database that collects information about a civilization and then organizes it for public access.

"We're looking at ways telecommunication technology could help people who did not have access to higher learning," Crane says.

In this case, as a classics professor, Crane is collecting information for a database on Ancient Greece. But his larger goal, the professor says, is to make information on any civilization available to the public through computer disks.

Although younger scholars tend to be more influenced by foundation priorities, Nye says even more established professors will sometimes shift their focus slightly to meet funding source goals. "Foundations do have an impact on the directions people take," he says.

Some organizations define this impact more closely than others, seeking to fill a specific role in higher education support circles.

"Our thought is we like to fund things that would not really happen otherwise," says James Pierson, executive director of the Olin Foundation, which supports a number of projects at Harvard. Some foundations, he says, will make money available in a particular field, hoping to move scholarship into areas that reflect the organization's goals.

These pressures, although influencial, are not overriding, Huntington says, because many professors quickly learn to structure their proposals to meet foundation interests.