Clinton Nominee Hits Slander ‘by Slogan’ : Congress: Sheldon Hackney, picked to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, tells senators that critics have distorted his statements.

Sheldon Hackney, President Clinton’s controversial choice to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, on Friday defended his record as a university president from attacks by critics who have described him as the “pope of political correctness.”

Acknowledging that he could have handled some campus race issues better, the University of Pennsylvania president nevertheless accused critics of taking his remarks out of context and distorting his role in two controversial incidents.

“I resent bitterly being slandered by slogan. . . . I am not just a cardboard figure. I am someone who has spent years defending free speech, and I will do that at NEH as well,” Hackney told the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee during his confirmation hearing.

He said he would not use his position at the agency, which hands out federal grants to scholars, museums and libraries, to advance a social agenda and would seek to make sure that “all voices” are heard.

Although his nomination is expected to meet with opposition from some Senate conservatives, he received a generally sympathetic hearing from the six committee members--three Democrats and three Republicans--who took part in the hearing.

Chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) called Hackney a “superb candidate” and predicted that he will be confirmed by a “strong bipartisan majority” in the Senate.

Hackney’s nomination also received a boost when one of the committee’s most conservative members, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), announced that he would support him.

“I don’t think you deserve all of the criticism you got,” Hatch told Hackney. “You’ve been honest today in saying you wish you could have done things a little differently and to me that’s most redeeming. . . . I intend to support you on the floor and in this committee.”

The other two Republican senators at Friday’s hearing, Nancy Landon Kassebaum of Kansas and Dan Coats of Indiana, did not say what their positions would be when the committee meets to vote on the nomination next week.

Hackney, 59, has been the target of criticism from some commentators and professors for his handling of two high-profile incidents at the University of Pennsylvania this year.

The first occurred in January, when an Israeli-born student was called before a student-faculty court for violating university “speech codes” by telling several black female students who had been shouting outside his dormitory to: “Shut up, you water buffalo.” The student maintained that the term has a much less pejorative connotation in Hebrew than in English.

Although Hackney refused to intervene to stop the campus trial, the women eventually withdrew their complaint. The episode drew national attention to university “speech codes” and led critics to charge that such codes were being used by liberal advocates of political correctness to intimidate others.

In another incident in April, black students, angered by the writings of a conservative student columnist, confiscated all 14,000 copies of the campus newspaper and threw them in the trash.

Hackney’s response--a statement lamenting that “two important university values, diversity and open expression, appear to be in conflict”--was criticized for appearing to equivocate and to condone the action.

Hackney conceded that his denunciation of the latter incident could have been stronger, but he noted that his critics ignored the fact that his statement also said that “freedom of expression must take precedence over diversity.”

He also acknowledged political correctness could be “a serious problem” on campuses, adding that experience has taught him speech codes are “counterproductive . . . (and) not the way to go.”