National Humanities Alliance

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

I am Roderick French, Professor of Philosophy and former Vice President for Academic Affairs at George Washington University, and immediate Past President of the National Humanities Alliance.

The National Humanities Alliance is a coalition of more than eighty scholarly and professional associations, organizations of museums, libraries, historical societies, higher education, and state humanities councils, university-based and independent humanities research centers and others concerned with national humanities policies.

It is a convention for witnesses to say how pleased they are to have the opportunity to testify before the Committee.  Today I can honestly say that the very fact that the NEH is still in business and these hearings are taking place is a source of delight for me and for the countless friends of the humanities throughout America.  You know quite as well as I do that the humanities community was frankly traumatized last year when it appeared for a time that federal support of our enterprise might be abruptly and totally terminated.

We recognize that the Endowment is still under sentence in the minds of some.  Nonetheless, I prefer to take these hearings to be happy evidence that such an extreme worry was an overreaction.  If true, that news will be very reassuring to tens of thousands of our fellow citizens in schools and colleges and universities and museums and libraries and historical societies and state humanities councils throughout the land.  They know full well that the remarkable state of vitality and creativity exhibited by the humanities in the l990s is due in some considerable degree to the sustained support disseminated through the National Endowment for the Humanities over the last three decades.  They also know that for all of their good stewardship manifested in scholarship and teaching and public programs -- stewardship clearly appreciated by students and scholars and public audiences everywhere, for all of that they know that the incentive funding from NEH could never be even remotely approximated by alternative funding sources in the private sector.

This last assertion was most recently documented in the study by Nina Cobb published by the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities under the title, "Looking Ahead: Private Sector Giving to the Arts and the Humanities." If you and other members of the Committee have had the opportunity to study this report you will have seen her very sobering empirical analysis of the circumstances of the humanities.

To the surprise of no one in this room, Ms.  Cobb found that the creation of the National Endowment opened a new era in which private and public funding reinforced one another with wonderful results.  But there are dark themes in this good story.  In the last decade, overall corporate giving has declined.  The size of donations by household has declined.  And, finally, all the foundations reported that they will not be able to increase their support for the humanities in the years ahead.  In short, not only has the humanities community already leveraged federal funds to exploit fully the resources available in the private sector, but the withdrawal of federal incentive funds would have the ironic effect of actually reducing private sector support for the humanities.  The formation of the Endowment was a wonderful intervention by the Congress; its withdrawal now would be frankly catastrophic.

In these hearings last year, the Alliance's vice president and hearing witness, Werner Gundersheimer, testified that we recognized that the Congress is seeking to bring federal deficit spending to a halt and that we did not expect to be exempted from the process.  He responded to a question from the Chairman by indicating that as long as the humanities were not singled out for a disproportionate cut we would accept our share of the pain with good grace.

As things played out, the National Endowment for the Humanities and its sister agencies were targeted for disproportionate reductions in FY 96.  Moreover, the implementation of downsizing at the NEH was guided by Congressional instructions to moderate the impact on two programs that we all value highly, preservation and state humanities councils.  Although certainly no one's intention, the consequence was a severe reduction in those programs that support education and research.  Unwelcome as this development was, none of us would suggest solving the problem by redistributing the reduced funds available.

The result is that today we find ourselves facing two stark realities: severely limited alternative funding sources in the private sector and deep cuts in core programs at the NEH.  We were delighted to learn via Sheldon Hackney's testimony yesterday before this subcommittee, that the President will propose a FY1997 budget for NEH of $136 million.  My colleagues and I in the NHA wish to express our support for the President's request.  If that proposal were enacted by the Congress, it would enable the NEH to at least partially recover functionality in some of its most valued programs.

The structure of the argument I wish to make today in favor of that request responds precisely to the national policy concerns that have animated the present Congress.  That is to say, we have recognized the need to justify every cent of funding for federal programs in terms of two standards: the civic value of the activity and the efficiency of the agency.  The Congress itself eloquently articulated the rationale for public support of the humanities in the original authorizing legislation for the Endowment.  That language is well known to you, and I won't reiterate the noble mandate in that legislation.  As for the effectiveness of the NEH as the instrument of the intentions of the Congress, my colleagues and I believe that the health of the humanities today represents an overwhelming vindication of the agency.

It is worth emphasizing the vigor of the humanities today because some otherwise clever commentators have drawn quite the wrong conclusions from the lively, sometimes noisy disputes that are going on in every discipline.  These commentators misunderstand the nature of the humanities, taking them to have been fixed definitively at some point in the past, not seeing them as the fluid endeavors that they are.  A great American philosopher of an earlier generation, Max Black, got it right when he asked us to remember that there was never any Golden Age of the humanities which we should seek to restore.  Instead, he told us, our "task is not so much to 'save' the humanities as to create them.

Thus it is that all of the ferment on our campuses and in our scholarly journals is not to be taken as an occasion for distress but as confirmation of the fact that the humanities are flourishing.  There are more well-trained minds working harder for this perpetual re-creation of the humanities in this generation than ever in our history.  Please allow me to illustrate this vitality with examples from three arenas with which I am somewhat familiar.

First in the field of American philosophy.  There is in this decade a virtual renaissance of studies of the great philosopher of American democracy, John Dewey.  I can say with little fear of contradiction that the two best book-length interpretations of Dewey ever written have been published in the last five years.  Not only are those authors individually the beneficiaries of NEH support, but the flowering of Dewey scholarship of which they are a part was seeded by widely dispersed federal funding to libraries, documentation centers and scholarly societies.

There is added reason to dwell on this example.  The motivations for this rediscovery of Dewey in the present time are of course complex.  They include the apparent exhaustion of certain other lines of philosophical inquiry.  But I am persuaded that a much more important reason is that a large number of philosophers are increasingly concerned to find the intellectual resources with which to help our country face the incredibly tough social and political challenges confronting our democracy.  They want to help the great American experiment in democracy to continue to work in these very new circumstances of the close of the 20th century.  This has led them to turn intuitively to the one American philosopher whose long career was dedicated to the examination of problems faced by all the basic institutions of a democracy.

In short, even in what many would characterize as the abstract and esoteric workings of philosophy, we can trace a clear return to civic practicality from the modest investment of public funds in the scholarly work of our universities.  

In the second place, I wish to turn to higher education.  As it happens, my own career as faculty member and administrator at George Washington University parallels exactly the years of the Endowment's existence.  As one who has held various levels of responsibility for the well-being of the humanities in my institution, including eleven years as academic vice president, I know at first hand the irreplaceable role the NEH has played in expanding and deepening the role of the humanities in the life of my campus.  I will briefly and selectively recapitulate this story only because I am confident that it is representative of the story of the humanities on hundreds and hundreds of American campuses.

My institution was the recipient of a substantial institutional development grant right at the heart of the period of maximum turmoil on American campuses.  As a clear result, the humanities departments not only survived the curricular revolutions of that era but emerged with a wider role than before.  A few years later, I submitted a successful Challenge Grant proposal which of course had to meet the three-for-one matching requirement of that program.  We used those funds to enhance our library's humanities holdings by nearly a million dollars in acquisitions and to create endowments for three distinguished professorships.  I draw two lessons from that experience.  One, thanks to the Endowment, the growing influence of the humanities in my university continues.  Two, knowing the budgetary politics of my institution, this investment would never have been made absent the incentive of the Challenge Grant.

Finally, I wish to say a brief word based on my experience as the one who wrote the proposal that resulted in the creation of the D.C.  Humanities Council.  On the basis of watching that organization over the years, I can testify that the modest federal matching funds coming into the District of Columbia each year have triggered a reciprocal local investment that has produced a marvelous array of inventive public programs.  The result has been an enrichment of community life unprecedented in the history of the federal city.  I also can certify that this story would never have been written without the stimulus of federal funding through NEH.

The D.C.  Council has also demonstrated in very concrete terms the interdependence of the academic and public spheres of the humanities.  Through the programs of that Council literally scores of humanities scholars have been drawn into the life of the larger community as key players in imaginative public programs.  More than that, for many of these academic humanists their research and teaching have been enriched in content and modified in focus by virtue of their experience in a public setting.  This is intellectual reciprocity of the best sort.  It also is a parable for the balance that must be maintained in the funding profile of the national Endowment itself.

In sum, Mr. Chairman, Congress has fashioned something both precious and efficient in the NEH.  This combination of value and utility is the American tradition at its best.  A relatively modest investment of federal funds has unleashed a multiplication of matching investments that has been felt as a force for good in thousands of American communities large and small.  NEH is a monument to the wisdom of its founders and of those who have sustained it.  But by virtue of the nature of the humanities this cannot be a monument that is installed in a museum and left to be venerated by future generations.  The humanities are living fields of human endeavor.  They require continuous nourishment and care.  Every increment of reduced support will entail measurable diminution of some facet of teaching or research or public programs.  With all due respect, the funding of the Endowment has now reached the boundary below which its very viability is at stake.  Thank you.

© 2008 National Humanities Alliance (Washington, DC).  All rights reserved.
Last Update: 28 October, 2002 - 04:36 PM - EST