Ed. Note. The following article is reprinted with permission from Humanities, magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, January/February 1987 issue. The chairman of the Endowment speaks here of her role in the agency and of the importance of increasing American’s knowledge of their history.
Q: Why should there be an NEH? Why should this country have a government agency deciding which ideas should be supported by public monies for public consumption? How can you as a conservative defend grant making that’s the equivalent of taxpayer-subsidized advocacy?
A: I feel very comfortable with the mission of this agency. It’s our mission to promote history, to promote heritage, and those seem to me to be profoundly conservative undertakings.
As for advocacy, I don’t think that we get that many proposals that promote one political position or another, and when we do, they don’t tend to fare very well in the grant process. I sat in on a panel discussion about a month ago in which I heard one of the panelists say, “It looks to me as though this applicant has already made up his mind about what his results are going to be,” and that was regarded as a mark against the application. This reflects a very healthy attitude on the part of the panelist to ward applicants who might come with a previous position on a topic rather than a genuine, open-minded interest in it.
Q: If the support of history and heritage is so important, then shouldn’t you, Mrs. Cheney, be asking for dramatically increased budgets every year?
A: In a perfect world that might be a reasonable option, but this particular world we live in isn’t a perfect one. In fact, it’s a world where there’s real fiscal desperation in terms of federal deficits and where there is a necessity for all government agencies, including this one, to make some sacrifices. Beyond that, it seems to me that it is healthy for an agency, just as it is healthy for a human being, to have to make some hard choices. When we do make hard choices, we’re more likely to be fulfilling our mission, which is to fund excellent projects and not merely those that are good or acceptable.
Q: Given your experience in political circles, the fact that you are the spouse of a congressman and the fact that your nomination itself is political, is it not unrealistic to imagine that grant making at the Endowment can be always apolitical?
A: Here, the proof has to be in the pudding. I think if you look at the whole list of projects that we’ve funded in the last two cycles, it would be very difficult to say that there’s a political leaning one way or another. It is true that the head of this agency is a political appointee, and I think that’s the way it should be. The person in charge of this agency must be accountable, must be somebody without tenure who is accountable to the taxpayer whose money we’re spending. So I think that having a political head of the agency is not only the way things are, but the way things should be.
As for my being the spouse of a congressman, I can’t see that that has much relation to NEH. I have a deal with Dick. He doesn’t seek my advice on foreign policy, and I don’t seek his advice on the humanities.
Q: You’ve spoken out against deconstruction in literary studies and against social history in historical research. What are your objections to these approaches? Are your objections reflected in funding decisions?
A: I think it is important to be very specific about what I’ve objected in literary studies, I’ve objected to the idea that the great texts of literature are intellectual playthings as opposed to important sources of knowledge—even of wisdom—about the human experience. In history, my objection has been to the notion that events are somehow unimportant, that individuals are of little account in the face of long-term historical forces.
Will these objections be reflected in funding decisions? Again, I think that if you look at projects that have been funded in the last two cycles, you’ll see that when a proposal comes through our review process, and when it is judged excellent all along the way, and seen to be of importance to the humanities and of significance to the culture, the project gets funded, despite my own reservations about some approaches.
Perhaps the strongest reservation I have to newer modes of scholarship is the assumption on the part of some people who practice those methodologies that anyone who practices any other methodology is somehow hopelessly retrograde, that any other approach is not legitimate. If I seem to speak more forcefully for traditional historical and literary approaches, I do so because, in today’s academic climate, there is a need to speak up for the tradition.
Q: You’ve spoken before about the importance of biography as a teaching tool. Are biography and social history contradictory approaches?
A: Certainly the biographies of great men and women run against the current of social history. Biographers who take on such subjects make the assumption that it is important for us to consider these lives because they have changed history for the rest of us. But my main reason for being fond of biographies is that I think they can be such an important tool for drawing young people, for drawing the general public, into history. There’s something in all of us that likes to know how other people lived, how they failed, how they succeeded.
Q: Isn’t the NEH procedure for evaluating proposals, that is, review by a panel of peers, inimical to funding risky, innovative projects proposed by lesser-known people? NEH prides itself on the number and the variety of its evaluators, but doesn’t this very number increase the chances that unusual projects will be disliked by someone and that only safe projects will be funded?
A: Yes, it may well be true that the peer-review method of judging proposals is less prone to supporting radical or innovative projects than other methods of review. But, on the whole, I think the benefits of peer review far outweigh its limitations. Indeed, I imagine we do take fewer risks than a private foundation might, but that’s totally appropriate when you’re spending the taxpayers’ money. You must be sure, be as sure as you can be, that the projects you’re funding are going to be successfully completed and that they’re going to be significant. There is an important place for venture capital, you might call it, in the humanities, but I think it’s not a place that NEH should try to fill.
Q: Much of the public money spent by the NEH supports advanced research in the humanities. Because few taxpayers will read the results of this research, why should they pay for it?
A: It seems to me that everyone profits from advanced research in humanities. We all benefit when the life of the mind is encouraged, and advanced research does that. We all benefit when our culture is healthy and vibrant, and advanced research contributes to that, too.
Sometimes, the benefit is easily recognized, as in the case of the translation of the Popol Vuh, which NEH funded. Although some people might think of this work as esoteric, what this one scholar has done is raising the consciousness of the general public to the importance of Maya culture. The book itself has achieved relatively wide distribution because of its excellence and because of its having won an important prize—the PEN Faulkner Award. The ideas in it have inspired a film-maker who is producing an animated film we’re funding through the Division of General Programs.
Q: The NEH has seemed to be a bicoastal agency, funding projects and institutions mostly on the East and West Coasts. Do you have a plan to make NEH grants more geographically diverse?
A: I think this question overstates the problem. I think if you marked a map with flags where NEH projects are, you wouldn’t see them all nestled on the East or West Coast. But it is true that there is a clustering around urban areas in which there are large research institutions, and I think it’s important that we work constantly to try to get greater geographical distribution, that we work to inform everyone about NEH goals and funding opportunities and to help people who may not be as well acquainted with the grant-making process.
We now have a full-time staff member coordinating a program called “Access to Excellence” and making precisely these efforts. He travels around the country making sure that people in areas where there aren’t research institutions are also aware of NEH and the kinds of proposals we’re looking for.
The state councils play an important role in getting the word out across the country. For example, we received applications from every state for the $500 matching grants we offered to libraries to buy works on the Constitution—a Bicentennial Bookshelf. The state councils have been very good about making sure that tiny libraries in somewhat iso lated areas understand that this program is available.
I received a letter from the Carlsbad Library in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The librarian writes that the library is “relatively isolated here in the desert” and explains that the Bicentennial Bookshelf will be the only source of such research materials for miles around. He then describes the overwhelming and touching community support from a small group of retirees who pledged $500 in donations within twenty-four hours of hearing about the grant. This is very heartening. The state councils are an important mechanism for getting this kind of thing to happen.
Q: The NEH frequently makes grants to institutions that have a broad public base of support and healthy endowments of their own. Shouldn’t federal money go to struggling, developing institutions rather than those that can succeed on their own?
A: We have never been a needs-based agency. Excellence has always been our goal. However, I hear the question asked in panels, I hear the question asked in the National Council, and I ask the question myself when I’m looking at specific applications: Would this project happen without us? And if it would happen without us, I think there is an inclination on everyone’s part to say, “Fine, let it happen without us and let us find another excellent project to fund.”
Large institutions with healthy endowments do submit excellent projects that won’t happen unless we’re involved, and we fund such proposals. I’ve noticed, though, as I’ve watched grants go through the process, that an excellent proposal from a struggling institution will go right to the top of the list. There’s something in human nature that responds very positively to that conjunction of circumstances, and I think it’s good that happens. An excel lent proposal from a struggling institution will always be funded.
Q: To what do you attribute the fact that nationwide students seem to find most of the humanities less attractive than other courses, and what can the National Endowment do to encourage young people to study the humanities?
A: I think that many students have focused on learning vocational skills that have an immediate payoff in terms of starting salaries when they leave college. And they are justified because college education is so expensive. There’s a very important and persuasive argument to be made, however, that the liberal arts provide training for a lifetime. An important point to be made to these students when they’re selecting college majors is that their college educations should prepare them for more than their starting salaries—for more than their first few years in the job market. They should keep in mind that they’re going to have nine jobs in a lifetime, according to the most recent statistics. That means they need general knowledge and an awareness of how to learn—exactly what the liberal arts, and what the humanities, in particular, provide.
It’s also very easy to make the case that liberal arts training has historically been what leaders have pursued as young people and adults, that there’s something about liberal arts training that gives one good judgment, that gives one critical understanding, that encourages creative thinking, and probably most important of all, that gives one perspective, an ability to look beyond the immediate moment into a larger context. As biographies of great men and women show, vision, the ability to see beyond the demands of the present, always accompanies greatness. One of my favorite examples is a wonderful story about Winston Churchill in World War II. He was waiting to hear from Africa about the Battle of Alamein. The results of this battle were absolutely of overwhelming importance for Britain. If they won the battle, then they had a hope in this war; if they lost the battle, Egypt was lost, the whole route to the East was lost.
Churchill, while waiting to hear about the outcome of this crucial battle, distributed a fourteen-page document to his cabinet on the future of Europe, which essentially described a Europe economically united. He was not only looking beyond the battle, he was looking beyond the war. I think that this kind of perspective—and that’s probably the best word for this trait of Churchill—is something that liberal arts training encourages and something that young people need to be taught.
I think that we at NEH should be trying to make, not just young people, but people in corporations and general public at large, aware of the importance of reading and studying in the humanities.
Q: You’ve told a story about the importance of your Latin teacher to your career in the humanities. Can the NEH help teachers be examples for their students of the value of learning?
A: I can’t think of a more important mission we have than the fostering of excellent teaching. People who lead active cultural lives almost always have somewhere in their background a teacher who made a difference. Miss Shidler’s gift to me was convincing me that one had to choose between hard work and humiliation. You could not show up in Miss Shidler’s class and hope to get by without having worked hard. Of course, she not only did that, she opened the door to Virgil for me. So I think of her with great fondness. I like to think of a world in which there are thousands of teachers like her.
Q: What do you hope to accomplish as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and for what would you like to be remembered?
A: That may be the toughest question of all. My most general concern in the six months that I’ve been here has been with our being a society unaware of our history and our heritage. I’ve cited Leszek Kolakowski’s lecture in which he talked about the erosion of historical consciousness; I’ve talked about Arthur Schlesinger, jr.’s, new book in which he talks about Americans as a history-less people. If, during the four years I am here, this agency is able to make progress toward restoring a sense of historical consciousness in this country, then I think my time at the NEH will have been a success.
