"The Fat Boy in the Canoe"

By Ellie McGrath

Watch that tilt, says the new Humanities Endowment head

In the fall of 1980, the conservative Heritage Foundation, at the request of incoming Reagan Administration officials, prepared a provocative critique. One target: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the agency created by Congress in 1965 to provide federal grants to humanities projects. Among other criticisms, the foundation's report excoriated the NEH for funding "grant proposals whose character is at best faddishly innovative," and warned against "federalizing" the nation's cultural programs and institutions. "The NEH," the policy study said, "must not become the fat boy in the canoe, likely by its bulk to upset the delicate balance between public and private support."

A major contributor to that report was William J. Bennett, then director of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. But since December, Bennett, who holds degrees in law and philosophy from Harvard and the University of Texas and has taught at both institutions, has had a different perspective: he is the Reagan Administration's new NEH chairman.

Very quickly, under Bennett, the "fat boy" appears to have been put on a crash diet. From a fiscal 1981 allotment of $151 million, the NEH has been trimmed down to a proposed $96 million for fiscal 1983.

Chairman Bennett is hardly complaining. "The budget proposed for '83," he says, "is a substantial amount of money. We can still do a large number of things." But in his four months in office, Bennett, 39, has aroused the suspicion of the arts and humanities constituencies around the country that the NEH will begin to reflect the partisan conservative attitudes of his political sponsors.

Last month Bennett provided worried onlookers with a crackling good controversy. He criticized the fact that an hour-long film, entitled From the Ashes... Nicaragua Today, had been partly funded by a routine grant of $45,623 from the NEH.*

Shown on national television by PBS, the film, says Bennett, was "unabashed socialist-realism propaganda" that should not have received public money. Bennett argued that the film presented a one-sided view of the Nicaragua story. One of the film's defenders, Wisconsin Humanities Chairman Morton Rothstein, says, "While I personally would have preferred a more 'balanced' presentation, I found it a stimulating presentation that shed light on a major public policy issue." But Bennett insists that the content and methods of Nicaragua Today "do not fall within the humanities."

More is at stake than the merits of one film. Since its inception, the NEH has been troubled by questions about what kinds of projects it ought to be funding. How should taxpayer money be used in promoting the humanities? And what, indeed, constitutes the humanities? Shakespearean Scholar Ronald Berman, NEH chairman under President Nixon, leaned toward funding urban cultural programs like the Treasures of Tutankhamun and esoteric endeavors like a dictionary of the Hittite language. To combat this allegedly "elitist" orientation, Jimmy Carter appointed Joseph Duffey, a sociologist and former campaign aide, who seemed to reflect Carter's populist commitments. Duffey sought to reach diverse ethnic and geographic groups with such projects as rural culture, women's studies and Hispanic history. While Duffey largely agrees with Bennett's criticism of Nicaragua Today (it hewed "a line close to advocacy," he says), he defends the NEH system of review committees, which generally ensures that grants are made in the broadest possible public interest by professionals in the appropriate fields. "I do not feel that the Endowment or its chairman has to defend every grant that is made," he says. "But you have to defend the process by which the judgment on the grant is made. That is the difference between acting as a ministry of culture and as a national public foundation."

The new chairman has made it-clear that he wants the NEH to contribute to research that will enhance the life of the mind, to fund humanities resources such as collections and books and to promote better public understanding of scholarship. Says Bennett: "In the next four years, I would like to reaffirm the centrality of teaching." Toward this goal, he plans to expand the annual NEH-funded summer seminars held on university campuses, so that elementary and secondary teachers as well as the usual college professors can review and discuss humanities texts. Says Bennett: "We have to make sure that the work we value is being presented to people at the level of the schools."

Bennett is clear about his priorities. He would like the NEH to cut funding of television programs--not just Nicaragua Today and other controversial PBS series like Middletown, but also video "classics" like Macbeth, which he maintains can be (and have been) funded by private sources such as Exxon and Mobil. Bennett would redirect the NEH to support traditional scholarly projects like the compilation of important bibliographies. "If the NEH doesn't pick up on a thing like that," he says, "it will go orphaned, and it's an essential resource for scholars." One project unlikely to be jettisoned: the Jefferson Lecturer, the highest humanities honor bestowed by the Government. It will be given this week to Harvard Professor Emily Townsend Vermeule, a distinguished Greek scholar and archaeologist.

Bennett's sense of direction may be admirably emphatic, but some humanists are fearful that if he defines the humanities too narrowly, important groups in the U.S. may be excluded. Says Predecessor Duffey: "Political pressures heave up against this agency all the time. But if you abandon the effort to maintain a credible peer review system, then you're turning the NEH into a kind of fiefdom." Bennett categorically rejects any implication that he has been asked to dismantle programs designed by and for traditionally liberal constituencies. He insists: "I have not had any suggestions from the White House, to say nothing of orders or directives, as to how best to run this agency." But Bennett admits that "it would have been inappropriate for me to take this job if I were not in general agreement with the President and his positions. And I am. " -- Ellie McGrath. Reported by Christopher Redman/Washington

*The Wisconsin humanities committee, a state agency, got the grant in 1980, more than a year before Bennett's appointment. It then awarded a grant to the Madison Campus Ministry group at the University of Wisconsin, which co-sponsored the film.

With reporting by Christopher Redman

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