Hello, Messrs. Chips

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 ready last week to send off its first six:

P: Mount Holyoke's Cornelia C. Coulter, 66, professor of classics and expert in the field of Renaissance Latin. Her new assignment: Hiram (Ohio) College.

P: State University of Iowa's Erwin K. Mapes, 67, who will continue to lecture on Spanish and South American literature at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

P: Baldwin-Wallace's Hilbert T. Ficken, 67, head of the modern language department, who will go to Furman University in Greenville, S.C.

P: West Virginia University's Wilson Porter Shortridge, 71, professor of American history and since 1929 dean of the college of arts and sciences. His new assignment: Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash.

P: Yenching's Louis E. Wolferz, 65, who went to Peking in 1911, helped open the Tsinghua University, in 1917 joined the Yenching faculty as professor of Western languages. His new assignment: Earlham College in Richmond, Ind.

P: University of Michigan's Arthur Evans Wood, 70, professor of sociology and onetime acting president of the Michigan Corrections Association. He will go to Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio.

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