national endowment for the humanities

national endowment for the humanities

The Impact and Importance of the National Endowment for the Humanities

1. Introduction to the National Endowment for the Humanities

The US federal government has a substantial role in funding cultural programs through a variety of mechanisms. For example, the Smithsonian is the nation’s primary museum, being nationally federally funded and operated. A lesser-known institution that is also federally funded and operated is the National Endowment for the Humanities, even though it doesn’t have its own museum. The mission of the NEH is to support research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. You may know about the NEH because you receive NEH-funded newsletters, you support organizations (including CLIR) that receive NEH funding, you or someone you know has chaired or been a member of an NEH review committee, you work at an office or institution that has been the recipient of NEH funds, or you are an NEH grantee. There are a number of federal programs that support humanities activities, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the production organization for public broadcasting. Among these, the NEH is designed to support and inspire new thought and better understanding of ourselves and others.

2. Historical Evolution and Mission of the NEH

While allocations for private museum projects from the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities are roughly equal, the emphasis of the private funding process is not the same. It is likely, given the trajectory of the three cultures defined last year before the Watkins Subcommittee and expanded in the Addis lectures, that Congress will give greater priority to certain institutions as well as certain types of grants. The Senate will look after the arts, including the performing arts and to a lesser extent the arts programs of the States, the House of Representatives will generally look at the usefulness of the humanities, including those of the States and State colleges and universities, and the Executive will maintain some control over the approach taken by the two independent agencies. There are always other agendas at play, but the historical evolution of public attitudes and the development of cultural policy can be discerned more clearly today than in the past.

The establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1965 was historically very significant. Throughout this country’s history, individual citizens and private institutions have established and/or endowed a variety of important cultural and educational nonprofit institutions such as museums, orchestras, and libraries. Rarely has the federal government so directly linked itself to the support and financing of the nonprofit, nongovernmental cultural-educational sector. The United States came late to this role. Taking a cue from the example of European countries which, through their ministries of culture, had long supported such institutions with public money, the United States in the twentieth century established the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the various presidential historical sites and grounds, and the National Archives. Today, as a result of the endowment movement begun by the federal government in 1965, nongovernmental private institutions, including many historical societies, archives, scholarly associations, and humanities departments of colleges and universities, live with endowment help from the public.

3. Significant Contributions to Education and Research

For the most part, the Endowment’s work in this program area is entirely directed to providing temporary financial assistance to colleges so that they can upgrade their undergraduate instructional programs primarily through faculty development and curriculum improvement. More than 80% of the funds appropriated for Title Three go to approximately 50% of the American institutions of higher education that are listed in the official index to the U.S. Government’s Publication, which classifies them as two-year or four-year undergraduate colleges with fewer than 5,000 FTF students. The great majority of the Title Three FICO grants will increase the numbers and broaden the experiences of a rapidly rising population of undergraduates.

For 17 years, the Endowment has had a direct role in strengthening the laudable efforts of college teachers to improve the quality of undergraduate humanities programs. For 17 years, it has played a pivotal role in college-level humanities as one of the so-called Title Three federal agencies created under the Higher Education Act of 1965.

Since 1965, the Endowment has been a significant contributor to the improvement of education and research, particularly, but by no means exclusively, in humanities disciplines. Though humanities instruction has many purposes, no serious definition of college-level work could fail to include the fundamental mission of teaching the cultural history of the nations of the West and the civilizations of the East.

4. Challenges and Future Prospects

To survive the travails of Reagan, who greatly embarrassed himself over NEH, NEH leaders in and out of government would need supportive coalition-building leadership along with high visibility, determination, and strategic, purposeful choices. Reagan, rather naively, picked poor fights with the humanities, tried to gut NEH, and was both thwarted and embarrassed. Yet, this leader was a popular President, and no program as “obscure” as NEH has ever been attacked by a popular President and survived, with increased funds and programmatic impact as its reward. The challenge for his successors at and away from the Endowment was how to channel the many modes of support they received into the political and policy system so as to best suit the Endowment’s purposes. Several PBSs and Sesame Streets, perhaps with a Robinson Crusoe and a few “lone rangers” thrown in, would have to shine a great deal of light on, and openly debate, who would carry this method to the Endowment and challenge inherited beliefs and institutional attitudes, and proffer a compass for NEH’s new direction. This was the call: to construct a potent, coherent, respected national organization to claim and reshape the mantle at this point of great crisis and opportunity.

Although naysayers are numerous, NEH has already weathered some serious storms and has thrived for over two decades. In the face of the Lyndon Johnson administration’s long-established animosity towards NEH, this little agency not only survived but prospered: from six million in 1965 to over one hundred million by 1980. That there were heroes from the Republican side is beyond argument, for it was Senators Jacob Javits and Hugh Scott and Representatives William Minshall and Frank Thompson, among others, who not only saved NEH from disaster but redirected it to fresh support and vision in federal support for the arts and the humanities.

5. Conclusion: Ensuring the Continued Vitality of the NEH

If we continue to cut funds, what will the U.S. look like in 100 years? A culture in which we are able to read Cuneiform script on a tablet written by a Sumerian boy to his father? In which we can no longer listen to the music and sounds that shaped American history? This is not an idle threat. The National Endowment for the Humanities must work to guarantee that we do not merely learn the value of the past, but ensure its survival. We must not fail our culture or our history.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has been a beacon of humanistic aid to the world for more than fifty years. It is imperative that we ensure the continued vitality of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Since its inception in 1965, NEH has awarded more than $5.6 billion for humanities projects through more than 64,000 grants. That’s an average of $103,000 per award. But we need to ensure that those funds don’t erode any more than they already have in recent years. For the first time in its history, the endowment is subsidized solely by the government, and the challenges our nation faces are big enough that NEH funding levels cannot increase without cutting funding to other critical national programs.