Brutal Sentence for Humanities : House move is afoot to execute the National Endowment for ‘crimes’

Few would make the nonsensical suggestion that because of the beating of Rodney G. King the Los Angeles Police Department should be abolished. Sadly, this is just the kind of illogic that is being applied to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Rather than improve it, some in the U.S. House would execute it for its alleged crimes.

“Kill My Old Agency, Please,” pleaded the headline over an article by Lynne V. Cheney, NEH director during the Bush Administration. In the commentary, published this week, she indicted the NEH for two supposed excesses: a television series that blamed too many of Africa’s problems on the West and a set of guidelines for teachers of American history that paid too much attention to the nation’s problems and not enough to its achievements.

For the sake of argument, let us grant that these were mistakes. But should the NEH die for them when there are other, unobjectionable NEH projects that more than counterbalance them? NEH defenders are right to mention Ken Burns’ deeply moving series “The Civil War,” but other praiseworthy NEH-backed efforts are easy to find too. The California Council for the Humanities, which receives 82% of its funding from the NEH, has as its current banner project Clay Jenkinson’s one-man show “Jefferson at Two Hundred Fifty.” Private funding would never have brought such a show to completion.

No doubt humanities funding could be privatized. So could science funding. So could the Marine Corps Band, whose annual budget exceeds the budget for the NEH. Who needs the Marine Corps Band? Does it make the country safer? Why should private funding not be found for it if we need it at all? Where is the constitutional authorization for a Marine Corps Band?

This newspaper, we hasten to add, warmly supports the Marine Corps Band. But we also support the NEH. If it is constitutional for Congress to spend money on a National Academy of Sciences or a National Science Foundation, it is constitutional for it to spend money on an equivalent agency serving history and the humanities. As a great orator once wrote, he who knows no history remains forever a child.