1. The Defunding of Academia

The first steps toward the destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts have been taken. The plans for a 40% budget cut this year, and elimination by the turn of the century, are already in place, and the NEH and NEA have begun laying off large numbers of employees and restructuring their agencies from the rubble that remains of what used to thriving cultural institutions.

For the first time in history, we have a national political movement which is successfully aiming to defund artists and scholars for explicitly ideological purposes. This threat to academic freedom is done in the name of curing political correctness, the bitter medicine that academia must take to purge its sick body of this evil.

The irony is that the right is plotting the death of fundamentally conservative institutions. The NEA, NEH, PBS, and similar government-funded agencies are not in any way controlled by the fringe left. Rather, they have deeply traditional goals, in some cases shaped by previous ideological threats by the right to their budgets. The NEA is devoted to supporting established artistic institutions and programs that bring culture to the masses. The NEH focuses on academic projects that offend no one, mostly preservation and publication of historical works. PBS offers nature programs, news shows and documentaries, and a large number of right-wing opinion shows.

The same politicians who condemn Hollywood and commercial television for its lack of values are eager to discard the government agencies that offer an antidote. The key value here is not a consistent commitment to education, but political opportunism of the lowest sort.

The NEA and the NEH are in the center of an ideological battleground. The endowments' defenders, who support it as a neutral way to increase public access to the arts and humanities, have been unable to compete with the critics who depict the NEA and NEH as handouts for porno queens, black gay men, and left-wing deconstructionists.

Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.) admitted that the cuts are ideologically motivated: "the activities of the NEA and the NEH run against the sensitivities of many American taxpayers who are opposed to seeing their dollars fund projects that they find objectionable."

Not only has the Republican-controlled Congress proposed a 40% cut in the NEH and the NEA, down to $99.5 million, but it acquiesced to the demands of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) to impose censorship over the arts that the Justice Department says are blatantly unconstitutional. The NEA will be banned from supporting projects that "depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual or excretory activities or organs" or that "denigrate the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion." Will any sexual imagery (such as Renaissance paintings) be banned? Will Satan worshippers (who form a "particular religion") be able to sue the NEA for any art that denigrates the devil? Content restrictions of any kind are an unacceptable limit on the freedom of artists, galleries, museums, and other institutions.

Sen. Slade Gorton (R-WA) attempted to make the bill constitutional by adding a provision that "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect in any way the freedom of any artist or performer to create any material or performance using funds which have not been made available under this act to the National Endowment for the Arts." Not only does this dismiss the freedom of artists and institutions who receive NEA grants, but it is also an obvious lie. Almost all NEA money goes to support art that is funded primarily from other sources. Any artist, gallery, or museum that receives even a small amount of money from the NEA must censor all of their art. Gorton also inserted a clause asserting that the endowment funds are a "scarce resource" and thus subject to the same regulations as radio and television airwaves.(Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/17/95)

The attacks on the NEA are well-known and predictable. Art offends and shocks in a way that no scholarly treatise can equal. But the assault on the NEH is something new. The NEH was once the darling of the conservatives under William Bennett and Lynne Cheney. George Will, who only a few years ago was praising the NEH as the best part of government and Cheney's role as "secretary of domestic defense," facing enemies more "dangerous" than her husband did as Secretary of Defense, suddenly started condemning the NEH and new chairman Sheldon Hackney as the embodiment of evil in America. Cheney herself told Congress earlier this year that the NEH should be eliminated. Sen. Abraham noted that "the NEH's projects may well be more insidious than the NEA's, because they directly affect American education" -- citing as an example the National History Standards, which were "so horrendous and anti-American that 99 senators voted to denounce them." When a well-designed set of history standards produced by a broad consensus can be smeared as leftist indoctrination, no intellectual work is safe from attack. The fact that the entire Senate opposed a set of standards that none of them had ever read is a disturbing indication of the future direction of intellectual debate.

No one can seriously imagine that the plans to eliminate the NEA and the NEH are prompted merely by the budget cutting bonanza sweeping over Washington (or at least the parts of it dealing with education and human welfare). Instead, conservatives like Lynne Cheney, secure in their right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, are now convinced that defunding universities and similar cultural institutions is the best way to attack the Left.

It scarcely matters to them that many excellent projects -- supporting artists and scholars from a wide range of perspectives -- will be lost by the destruction of the NEH and the NEA. To the critics of the Left, it doesn’t matter whether students would learn better history, whether people would be exposed to fine art and intellectual discussions, whether libraries and galleries would be improved, whether scholarship would flourish, or whether better television would be available to all Americans. So long as the Left is punished and marginalized, the harm done to the rest of America is an acceptable casualty in the culture wars. Cheney and her allies believe that their views can be adequately financed by the Olin Foundation and similar entities. In their view, the less intellectual competition the better.

The conservatives in Congress are adamantly opposed to debating ideas. Senator John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) declared, "When we get into the area of challenging some of the fundamental values of American culture, we get ourselves in real trouble. If the definition of art means that it has to challenge and be offensive, then I think we are in a situation where, regardless of how minimal the endowment might be in regard to the Federal budget, its position is in serious jeopardy."(New York Times, 1/27/95)

The Right views the abolition of the NEH and the NEA as a first step toward the suppressing of dissenting views in academia. At a Senate hearing, Walter Burns urged the elimination of the NEH: "It might be improper for the Senate of the United States to attempt to reform what's going on in the academy today. But you can do one thing: You can refuse to fund it."(Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/17/95) Once deprived of funding, the theory goes, the Left will wither on the vine.

The National Association of Scholars declared that the NEH deserved heavy cuts because "the benefits of government support for the humanities are severely limited by the current state of scholarship."(NAS Update, Spring 1995) This "cutting-edge" scholarship allegedly "denies that there is common intellectual ground, rejects the notion of excellence, and disparages the achievements of the past."

But it is the NAS, not cutting-edge scholarship, that rejects the idea of excellence, since the NAS wants to eliminate grants for excellent scholarship if it is critical of the past or dissents from the intellectual ground presupposed by the NAS. Scholarly editions, museum collections, libraries, archival cataloguing, and preservation are all important projects which have been heavily supported by the NEH, but to say that these should mark the limits of the humanities is false. It is the refusal to fund controversial or challenging ideas that reflects the true "anti-intellectual" bias.

No government agency should be immune from oversight or budget cuts. But the attacks on the NEA and NEH have never been about efficiency, waste, or serving the common good. Instead, these agencies are being destroyed for explicitly ideological reasons, because the entire artistic community and all of academia are perceived as too liberal. When budget cuts are aimed at increasing ideological sway over scholars and artists, it is nothing but an attempt at thought control.

The History Wars

In the past two years, perhaps no public issue regarding the humanities has been as contentious as the disputes over historical interpretation involving the Smithsonian Institution's Enola Gay exhibit and the National History Standards for schools. Together, these two events inspired some of the harshest attacks on academia by politicians and conservative groups in Washington, and the intimidation of dissenting views by condemnation and Congressional denunciation presents a serious threat to the public debate of ideas.  The Curtain Falls on "The Last Act"

The Smithsonian's exhibit on the dropping of the atomic bomb, "The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II," was scheduled to open at the National Air and Space Museum in May, 1994. Almost immediately, veterans and more than 200 members of Congress objected to the content of the script drafted to accompany the show. The main objection centered around how many Americans would have died in an invasion of Japan.

The exact number of American soldiers who would have died had the bomb not been dropped is a matter of serious dispute and speculation. Legend had put the figure at a million casualties, but few historians take this as a realistic number. The American Legion felt betrayed when museum director Martin Harwit negotiated with them for an estimate of 225,000 casualties, but lowered the figure to 63,000 after speaking with a historian.

But the truth of history is not a matter for negotiation. The idea that a museum should ever negotiate with powerful interest groups in order to avoid criticism should be disturbing to all scholars. Moreover, the Smithsonian script also neglected the views of historians who argue that no Americans would have died because a Japanese surrender in the faced of Soviet and American troops was likely without an invasion or the dropping of the atomic bomb.

Although it is easy to challenge the 63,000 estimate, and to criticize the exhibit for failing to offer alternative estimates, the attacks on the Smithsonian went far beyond mere dissent. Instead, they were a political drive to manipulate the depiction of history.

Members of Congress threatened to cut the Smithsonian's $480 million budget, 77% of which comes from the federal government. A bipartisan letter from 81 representatives demanded museum director Martin Harwit's firing. In January, 1994, when members of Congress began calling for hearings on the exhibit, the Smithsonian board decided to get rid of the controversial aspects: the revised exhibit showed only the Enola Gay fuselage; a videotape of the crew describing the dropping of the bomb, and a plaque describing the Enola Gay, with no mention of the controversy over the number of casualties, and nothing about the devastating effects of the bomb.

MIT historian John W. Dower noted, "The chill is on. You can't touch anything controversial. That's self-censorship, and that's scary. That's not what a democracy does....instead of museum exhibits with pluses and minuses you have a celebration--a kind of Fourth-of-July historiography. And anyone who's critical is called an America-hater."(Boston Globe, 7/25/95)

Smithsonian head Michael Heyman noted that they made "a basic error" in trying to give a historical analysis of the dropping of the bomb while commemorating the end of the war, since "veterans and their families were expecting -- and rightly so -- that the nation would honor and commemorate their valor and sacrifice."

Edward T. Linenthal, author of "Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum," observed: "When we move from legitimate, articulate intellectual debate about an exhibit to ugly, slanderous attacks upon curators who are described in the newspapers as pro-Japanese, when we move to that kind of neo-McCarthyite discourse....I think we are moving into a very, very dangerous period, not just for museums, but for the doing of public history in America."

The Enola Gay episode was shocking for its political intrusion into an academic discussion, and the fact that there was so little criticism of the efforts to intimidate the Smithsonian; on the contrary, many commentators praised the censorship of the museum exhibit. Intellectual debate is not decided by democratic rule. When the majority (or a powerful interest group influencing Congress) gets to determine what will be shown in museums, it will inevitably harm the open discussion of controversial issues.

The National History Standards

The endless attacks on the National History Standards continue long after they have been denounced by Congress. What could -- and should -- have been an intellectual debate about the teaching of history instead served as mere fodder in a particularly lowly form of politics.

For too many politicians, it was easier to take a stand against "anti-Americanism" than to consider the National History Standards seriously. Every single member of the U.S. Senate denounced them, and they even became fodder for political campaigns. In September 1995, nearly a year after Lynne Cheney's first attack on them, Bob Dole condemned the National History Standards for their un-Americanism. Even Education Secretary Richard Riley told the National Press Club, "the history standards... were not our standards. " Riley claimed, "they portray American history in a bad light, and that is a mistake... this is the greatest country on the face of the earth, that ever has been. "

Whenever the legislature intrudes into an academic debate about which members of Congress know nothing, there is reason for serious concern. The National Standards are purely voluntary: there was no reason for Congress to make its opinions known in a resolution, except demagoguery.

The belief that a history of America must be positive and patriotic has overwhelmed those who have always put truth above sanitized history. The work of improving history teaching was discarded by conservatives who preferred to make an attack on historians rather than help children learn about the true history of their country.

The Istook Gag Rules

Congressional attempts at censorship are not limited to the NEA and the NEH. Rep. Istook (R-NY) has been seeking to ban federal grants to any nonprofit group (but not any corporations) which uses more than 5% of their own funds for "political advocacy." According to Istook, it doesn't matter if the grants are used for completely legitimate purposes: "each federal dollar received by a grantee frees up more private dollars for political advocacy, thereby leading to a growing amount of indirect government support for political advocacy." Political advocacy includes not only lobbying, but any stands taken on a public issue as well as public interest litigation against government agencies. (However, Istook does not spend all of his time trying to silence liberal opponents. An Istook amendment used $5 million of the NEH cuts to increase funding for the Department of Energy oil technology research and development program).

Earlier in 1995, Istook lost in his attempt to impose a Campus Gag Rule which would cut off all federal funds to any college that allowed money from student fees to support "any organization or group that is engaged in lobbying or seeking to influence public policy or political activity." The fact that an imposition on academic freedom of this degree was contemplated by Congress shows how extreme the attacks on academia are. To blackmail all colleges into banning funding for any group involved in discussing a "political" issue is an extraordinary level of censorship in higher education.

Istook's reasoning behind his Nonprofit Gag Rule mirrors the attacks on the NEA and NEH. Since these agencies are hopelessly politicized by an academic and artistic elite, any money used to support their activities (even if legitimate) amounts to a subsidy for their left-wing political agenda.

The Threat of State Legislatures

Efforts by state legislators to intimidate public universities with the threat of budget cuts are a particularly effective form of censorship. These attempts to limit academic freedom are almost always directed at silencing leftist faculty, and even if not immediately successful, administrators often become wary of controversial ideas for fear of retaliation. In 1995, Cuban-American state legislators in Florida threatened to cut off funding to the University of Florida after two professors from the University of Havana were invited to a symposium on Caribbean economics. (St. Petersburg Times, 7/2/95) In December 1995, the University of Oklahoma Regents provided matching funds for a $500,000 endowed law chair in honor of Anita Hill for the study of sexual harassment and other women's issues. In response, conservative state legislators threatened retaliation, comparing the chair to a "Jeffrey Dahmer Chair in the School of Cooking" and an "Adolph Hitler Chair for Creative Population Control." Political activist E.Z. Million declared, "We're going to do everything we can to punish the University of Oklahoma for this heinous act. We want the law school shut down." Dean David Swank was forced out in 1993 for supporting Hill, and Oklahoma president Richard Van Horn resigned in 1993, reportedly because his defense of the fund drive for the professorship offended important donors. (USA Today, 12/8/95)  California Legislators Demand Dismissal of Angela Davis

In July 1995, California state senator Don Rogers, joined by several other politicians, demanded the firing of University of California at Santa Cruz chancellor Karl Pister because he appointed Angela Davis to a presidential chair: "The appointment of such a person to this position -- of the highest honor that the university can bestow -- clearly shows a lack of judgment and sensitivity that calls into question Pister's continuing as head of the Santa Cruz campus." Rogers declared, "I am appalled that Davis is a tenured professor at Santa Cruz." The conservative California Republican Assembly Board passed a resolution to fire Pister and any others responsible for "this seditious act against the law-abiding taxpayers of California."

In fact, the presidential chair is not the highest honor bestowed by the University of California. Indeed, it is not really an honor, but a competition held to develop new programs, and Davis' application was deemed best out of eight applicants at Santa Cruz. State senator Bill Leonard (author of the Leonard Law used to strike down Stanford's never-enforced "speech code") condemned Davis as an "extremist" with a "reputation for racism, violence and communism" and demanded her removal from the presidential chair on the grounds that she is "the leftist equivalent of "a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan." Leonard also attacked "the insensitivity of the administration of UC." Another state senator told the university to let "decency" prevail by rescinding the award to a "counter culture castoff."

University of California chancellor Jack Peltason was interrogated by legislators who hinted that the university might suffer for its decision, as one representative noted: "We're going to be appropriating money to you and [this] does raise questions about where you decide to put that money." Peltason expressed disagreement with Davis' views, but noted that the $75,000 grant over three years would be used to develop new ethnic studies courses for students, not to personally enrich Davis. As Peltason put it, "a university cannot avoid making academic judgments because they are controversial."

Davis, who was fired by the University of California regents in 1969 for being a member of the Communist Party, said the new attacks are part of a "concerted assault against multicultural education." One Republican state representative acknowledged, "If we get into fooling around with academic freedom, we put the whole system in jeopardy because we turn into dictators ourselves." (Los Angeles Times, 2/20/95, 3/29/95, 7/21/95; Sacramento Bee, 3/8/95; San Francisco Examiner, 2/26/95)  Intellectual Freedom Up In Smoke

When the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention held a federally-funded two-week summer institute in 1995, bringing together health workers to discuss education about tobacco, several state legislators were offended at the affront to corporate "good citizens" like the tobacco companies. State Rep. Leo Daughtry, House majority leader and tobacco farm owner, explicitly threatened the university's funding if it permitted this federal grant to be accepted: "This will affect the budget process." Democrat Charlie Rose called the university's president, asking him to rescind an invitation to FDA director David Kessler. Although the university stood up strongly for academic freedom and the controversy died down after Kessler could not attend the summer institute, the chilling effect on those who would challenge powerful corporations is clear. (Greensboro News & Record, 6/20/95; Durham Herald-Sun, 6/25/95)

This was not the only case of tobacco's political power over academic studies. In August 1995, the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee eliminated funds for a National Cancer Institute study of how campaign contributions from the tobacco industry influence public policy. Tobacco lobbyists objected to the study, and influenced Republican lawmakers to halt it. (Chronicle of Higher Education, 8/4/95)