National Humanities Alliance

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

I am Claire Gaudiani, president of Connecticut College, a coeducational, private, highly selective liberal arts college established in 1911 in New London, Connecticut.  I am a published scholar of 17th Century French literature and the history and philosophy of science of that time.  My career has also focused on the improvement of foreign language teaching.  As a recipient of NEH funds since 1979, I have been privileged to work with thousands of faculty in the humanities, including foreign languages and literatures to assure better curriculum and more extensive use of foreign languages in American life.  During my service at the University of Pennsylvania, I was part of a three-person team that designed the Joseph H.  Lauder Institute for Management of International Studies.  This dual degree program offered an MBA from the Wharton School and an MA in International Studies from the School of Arts and Sciences.  The humanities and foreign languages play a major role in this graduate program which prepares a new generation of American business leaders to address the challenge of international business.  Lauder students acquire the most advanced knowledge of finance and management combined with professional levels of proficiency in one of nine foreign languages.  The NEH project I was involved in prior to the 1983 launch of the Lauder Institute helped me to make the Lauder Institute the gold standard for international business and management education in the United States.

I speak to you today as the president of a liberal arts college who believes that the federal funding spent on the National Endowment for the Humanities and in particular in its Education Program Division is some of the best utilized funding expended in the federal budget.  I will focus my testimony on the centrally important role the NEH plays in strengthening humanities curricula and teaching in our schools and colleges.

I last appeared before you in May, 1983 during your stalwart fight to save the funding to the Endowments from President Reagan's attempt at sharp curtailment.  Your courage then remains memorable for faculty in the humanities who know how well NEH funds are spent.  It is a pleasure to testify before you again today to represent the National Humanities Alliance and its membership of more than seventy-five scholarly and professional associations, organizations of museums, libraries, historical societies, institutions of higher education, state humanities councils, university-based and independent humanities centers, and others concerned with the national policies affecting work in the humanities.

The NEH's flexible funding structures and strict emphasis on quality have repeatedly made it a leader in national education reform efforts like the development of national content and achievement standards for U.S.  and world history.  Twenty years ago, NEH funded the launch of writing-across-the-curriculum.  Today, few students in America's classrooms are untouched by that wholesale redesign of the method to improve writing by students of all ages.  Fifteen years ago, NEH funding launched the strengthening of foreign language and literature programs to help build a stronger international education for American citizens engaged in an increasingly global environment.  Today, those improvements touch the vast majority of faculty and students in American classrooms where foreign languages are being taught using oral proficiency methods and engaging in contemporary as well as historical study of cultures, literatures, arts, and languages themselves.  Fifteen years ago, the NEH funded programs to strengthen the humanities in our country's historically black colleges and universities.  Today, those institutions are taking a leadership role in preparing the next generation of African-American citizens who will help lead our country to the fulfillment of its promise for all citizens.

Repeatedly, we find that ideas developed for or out of NEH-supported seminars, institutes, and research projects have a multiplier effect in education at large.  One important example which also illustrates fruitful cooperation between two NEH divisions is the project Duke University -- in collaboration with a group of historically black colleges -- has undertaken to document the history of African Americans during the era of segregation including oral histories, documentary photographs, and film archives.  "Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South" is an NEH-supported series of projects that aims at drawing undergraduate students and teachers into both the subject and methodology of working with original materials.  From the latter will come a history course focusing on historiography and investigation in original sources that is aimed at attracting students to lifelong study in the humanities, including professional academic study, by taking advantage of the scholarly and community resources available at historically black colleges and other participating institutions and by involving students and faculty in the work of preservation, documentation, and interpretation of an important period in American history.  The collaborating institutions are: Duke University, and North Carolina Central University, Georgia State University, Clark University Atlanta, and Jackson State University.  During the present academic year, a pilot course is being implemented at all of the participating institutions.  The syllabus is based upon an NEH-supported institute at Duke in the summer of 1991.  With varying archival resources and other collections, the course is different at each institution but joined by common methodology.  The longer-term result be a flexible curriculum that is likely to be used for several years to come by both historically black colleges and other higher education institutions across the country.  At the same time, faculty and students involved in the development of the project are likely to remain engaged in study and preservation of materials from the era for years come.

In 1990, the NEH launched the five-year "Special Opportunity in Foreign Language Education" that not only focused much needed resources on foreign language education, but signaled a major change in the way the endowment was approaching language teaching.  Earlier, NEH policies on support of language projects required a direct tie to great books and, in practice, made most kinds of needed language projects ineligible for NEH support.  The "Special Opportunity," which for each of the five years has received a designated sum in the appropriation (and therefore is different from NEH's special initiatives, such as for the Bicentennial of the Constitution, which are agency-wide but do not have earmarked funds), has been the catalyst for the development of high quality summer institutes focused on language, literature, cultural studies for teachers -- primarily for middle and secondary school levels, but also some institutes for elementary, community college, and other levels -- undergraduate institutional projects, and special projects.  Each of these investments in strengthening foreign language and cultural studies reaches beyond the initial institute participants or campuses, but it is the special projects that have the multiplying effects across the nation.  NEH staff have expressed concern that the response to "Special Opportunity” has been so strong that they have been unable to fund even half of the highest rated proposals.  In practical terms that would suggest that this area of the Division of Education Programs appropriation could be doubled to $6 million and still leave top-rated proposals unfunded.

At my own institution, Connecticut College, we have just completed a four-year NEH funded national project that has provided more than 200 U.S.  foreign language teachers, grades K-12, with six-week fellowships that permitted in-country study.  The major goal of the in-country study was to provide teachers with opportunities to acquire linguistic competence, enrich curricular materials with authentic readings, and design language practice using cultural artifacts in the classroom.

The 200 faculty supported by NEH funds teach over 20,000 students per year.  Their refreshed contact with the foreign language they teach and their updated knowledge of the cultures where the language is spoken transform learning opportunities for students and for fellow faculty members.  In fact, according to a recent evaluation, the K-12 teachers who have received funding during the full period of this project have made almost 1,000 presentations to groups of teachers at the local, state, regional, and national level.  The investment of project funds have paid incalculable dividends in the classrooms of teachers who attended the presentations of the fellows.  In addition, these teachers have become leaders at the local, state, regional, and national level.  Since the beginning of the project the teachers who have held fellowships have also held more than 200 offices in various professional organizations related to improving the teaching of foreign languages and literatures.  Many of these teachers have gone on to prepare teaching materials for their colleagues.  For instance, Millie Mellgren prepared an annotated bibliography of children's literature of Spain, became president of the Minnesota Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, and has given many presentations on Spanish immersion classes for teachers in Minnesota.

Judy Rainger has published a videotape on French Cowboys: Guardians of the Camargue which is available in both French and English for levels 1 through 5, French Study.  Ms. Rainger has given many presentations to teachers in the Southwestern pan of the United States and enabled them to infuse their classrooms with new and engaging opportunities to improve spoken French.

Son- Mey Chiu has expanded her curriculum, using the theme Methodology Curriculum and the Arts.  As she teaches Chinese language, she infuses her course work with Chinese calligraphy and the study of dragon myths and dragon images on silk, sculpture, and architecture.  Students study three-dimensional objects like bronze vessels, jade, terracotta soldiers, and Buddhist images to learn about ancient Chinese history through heroes.  The opportunity that Ms.  Chiu had to study in China and Taiwan for six weeks enabled her to immerse herself in the language and the complex culture of both old and new China.

Students who study with these teachers will have a very different experience from the ones many of us had years ago in foreign language classes.  Thanks to the funding that NEH provided, these teachers bring new dimensions to the classroom and prepare students for active use of their foreign language and deeper knowledge of foreign cultures.

I believe that Division of Education Program of the NEH touches more faculty in the K-12, college and university level than any other single federal funding mechanism in the country.  In the last three years, nearly 15,000 teachers and faculty experienced direct benefits of Division of Education Program funds.  In 1993, residential summer institutes alone provided funds for over 1,500 school teachers and college faculty to participate in dynamic programs to improve the teaching of humanities disciplines.  The faculty engaged in these summer programs taught more than 170,000 students last year alone.  If we can estimate that the impact of these summer programs last about five years, we could assert that nearly a million students have been effected by one year's summer residential institutes alone.

The statistics on NEH funding to local faculty study projects are even more impressive.  As many as 3,000 faculty participate in locally based summer institutes who would, therefore, effect the lives of 340,000 students and over a five year period well over 1.7 million students.

The investment in humanities faculty is investment in hundreds of thousands of students of all ages each year for years and years.  These funds represent the most powerful intellectual venture capital money that the federal government spends on education each year.  Humanities faculty are most often faculty leaders and shapers of their institution's larger curricula guidelines.  Institution Program grants under the Division of Education Programs strengthen the connection between the arts and the humanities, and between the sciences and the humanities, as well as between general education and core curriculum and coherent majors.

The future demands of our citizens excellent knowledge of history, of ethics and philosophy, of other languages and cultures as well as the English language and American culture.  To meet this challenge, we need continuing and increasing support for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the principal instrument of the federal government to these areas of inquiry and education.  We are fortunate to have your leadership, Chairman Yates, in the continuing commitment that the federal government needs to make to the National Endowment for the Humanities.   Thank you very much.

© 2008 National Humanities Alliance (Washington, DC).  All rights reserved.
Last Update: 28 October, 2002 - 04:55 PM - EST