A Very Public Intellectual

O ne year to the day after the Baltimore Police Department arrested a man named Freddie Gray, William D. Adams, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is visiting the city. At a meeting with the board of Maryland Humanities, he listens as a member describes a University of Baltimore course on “divided Baltimore” that explored the history of the city and the tensions that led to protests over police brutality in the wake of Gray’s death. In one class, a student stood up and said, “Until now, I never understood my life.”

“That,” says Adams, “is humanities.”

At a time when the national conversation about the field revolves around what purpose it serves, Adams, who once taught at Stanford University before taking leadership two years ago of the NEH on the eve of its 50th anniversary, hopes to promote the humanities as resources for daily life.

The chairman, nicknamed “Bro” after a family friend who died in World War II, has taken a two-pronged approach to the task. First, he has explicitly discussed the need to promote projects that grapple with new concerns — such as cyber-surveillance — that both dominate the headlines and “share boundaries with science.” Second, he is spearheading initiatives that emphasize relevance and accessibility. The Public Scholar Program provides a total of $1.7 million in support for researchers who want to write books in a style other than the traditional academic monograph, while Humanities in the Public Square grants fund projects that directly shed light on contemporary issues.

“When I was deciding what sort of tone to set at the NEH, I decided it would be worth our while to talk about the humanities as being very closely connected to our values, our culture, our history, and our most important ideas,” says Adams. To him, it is in times of protest and turmoil, and in places like Baltimore, that the humanities are most sorely needed. It was, after all, similarly precarious circumstances that led him to philosophy.

Dressed when we met in a sharp navy suit and equipped with the jaunty bearing of a New England prep-school alum, Adams looks like the college administrator he became after leaving Stanford in 1988. He spent seven years at Wesleyan University before becoming president of Bucknell University and then Colby College, which he led until joining the NEH.

Colleagues from across his career emphasize his enduring engagement with research, notably a longstanding book project on French intellectual history and the relationship between the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the subject of Adams’s doctoral dissertation, and the painter Paul Cézanne. Paula Lunder, a Maine philanthropist who got to know Adams while he was at Colby, says that every time she goes to a museum she texts him photos of Cézanne paintings.

Adams may look like a college president, but he talks like a professor: A question about the logistical details of a course he taught decades ago elicits a mini-lecture on how to read the themes of social obligation in King Lear, and he still effuses about a “head-spinning” talk he once heard on Madame Bovary.

But to hear him speak, the humanities aren’t present only in great paintings, Shakespearean plays, or French novels. “The humanities are right here in Baltimore,” Adams says, and they were present in Atlanta a year ago when he toured an archive and spoke with leaders of the civil-rights movement about their experiences. When he returned to Washington, D.C., that night, he turned on the television and saw the Freddie Gray protests. “That showed me that, like Faulkner said, ‘the past isn’t even past,’” Adams says. “Things like what happened then, what’s happening now, open the window temporarily and give us an opportunity to bring back these old stories and engage with new knowledge to help us understand.”

Adams clearly believes that, yet his is also a strategically savvy point of view. The NEH has endured years of budget cuts, and lawmakers have attacked it for funding what they think are frivolous projects — studies of the genre of romance, for example, or explorations of “enduring questions” like “What is love?” and “Do we need God for the good life?” Adams’s emphasis on relevance may be crucial to the agency’s health.

His intellectual bent wasn’t always obvious. Adams dropped out of Colorado College after his freshman year, a decision he maintains was a good one because he “just wasn’t ready,” especially as his father had recently died. His next big decision, to enlist in the Army, led in a surprising way to his academic career.

He spent three years in the service, one of them in Vietnam. In May of 1969, 24 hours after returning home, he was caught in the crossfire of counterculture protests. Visiting the University of California at Berkeley with a friend who was in the process of transferring, he ended up on campus during “Bloody Thursday,” when a police crackdown on student protests led to the shooting of James Rector, an onlooker. Adams was teargassed. It was clear that “the world had changed enormously from just a few years ago,” he remembers, and so he re-enrolled at Colorado College that fall, “wanting to sort out some things I felt and thought about.”

Filled with questions about the meaning of violence and how turmoil can shape a country, Adams turned to philosophy for answers after taking a course with J. Glenn Gray, himself a World War II veteran who wrote about war and violence. Adams went on to complete a doctorate in the history-of-consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied existentialism and phenomenology. The French existentialists, in particular, were preoccupied with questions about life in the aftermath of World War II, issues that seemed “very alive and fresh” to someone newly returning to civilian life.

“I had wrestled with questions of meaning, and these questions and answers are dead center when it comes to the humanities,” says Adams.

Echoes of this personal history show in the NEH’s Standing Together initiative, which funds projects dealing with the experience of war. It recently awarded $300,000 to the filmmaker Ric Burns to support promotion of Debt of Honor, his 2015 documentary about the history of disabled veterans in America. “Civilians only have the most clichéd, bareboned ideas of what the military is like,” says Burns, “and the funding helped us promote the film to tear down that wall and connect to the public.”

Just as Adams believes it takes more than knowing political science, economic policy, or military strategy to understand war, he wants the public to understand that topics like biomedicine and genomics are also worth exploring in a humanistic way: The nature of science and how to apply it can never be derived from science itself.

Take the issue of cybersecurity and surveillance. As cameras and recognition algorithms become more sophisticated, fears of the erosion of privacy, profiling, and the intrusion of the state into private life have escalated. The NEH awarded a Public Scholar grant to Jennifer Tucker, an associate professor of history at Wesleyan University, to fund archival research abroad for a book about the history of facial-recognition technology. The algorithms may be new, but the privacy concerns harken back at least to the 19th century, when the camera was regularly used to track down criminals. Understanding this connection can make the uncertainty of the present feel less foreign. “It can be striking how impoverished our historical perspective is on so many contemporary problems,” says Tucker. “Just reading about a contemporary debate, it’s fun to be able to say, ‘looking at this reminds me of something else that happened in the past,’ and that kind of engagement is something that many academic historians don’t do.”

The humanities have a PR problem, and the so-called public humanities are hardly exempt. Boosters like Adams promise that public humanities act as a gateway to widespread appreciation, but they are not universally admired.

“Public humanities are sometimes seen as anti-theoretical, anti-research, and not always highlighting the difficult, obscure stuff that doesn’t get public audiences,” says Michael Bérubé, a professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University and onetime president of the Modern Language Association. That more obscure work is often in greater need of support, he says. The danger in connecting funding so closely with immediate relevance is inadvertently creating another hierarchy of what work is important and what is not, says Bérubé. “You don’t want it to wind up being the case that nobody was funding, say, medievalists,” he adds, though he says that there currently seems to be little danger of that scenario. “You want to be concerned with the entire range of research.”

This question — “what are the humanities, and what should be emphasized?” — has followed Adams throughout his career. As NEH chairman, he personally approves every grant, a task that raises some of the same questions of scope he had to consider decades ago as coordinator of Stanford’s Great Works in Western Culture program, when the canon wars were in full swing and students at the university made national headlines with their demands for a global, inclusive reading list.

Ultimately Adams came to believe that the selection of texts left out important voices and concerns. Though the university dropped its Western-civilization course, the debate continues: This April, Stanford’s student government voted down a referendum that would have reinstated a Western-civilization course very much like the one that was dropped.

The class is in the news again, but something important has changed: 20 years ago the value of the humanities was not up for debate, only its boundaries. “I think what’s happened since then is that people have sort of jettisoned that there should be any such requirement at all,” says Adams. “I’d rather be having arguments about what the humanities are than about the point of them.”

The NEH receives about 5,000 grant applications annually, from which the chairman selects recipients in three four-week cycles interspersed throughout the year. The applications land on his desk with scoring rubrics and comments from a panel review, and he is alerted to ones that need special scrutiny, such as borderline cases and projects whose merit elicit wildly diverging opinion. Objections include doubt that an institution has the ability to execute its proposal, the inclusion of controversial material that might cross the line into being partisan, and methodological questions. In rare cases, the chairman has gone back and approved projects that were not recommended by the panel. (He declines to give an example.)

Finding the balance of funding esoteric versus more public-facing work can be difficult but, Adams says, does not always have to be a zero-sum game. While his focus may be on making the humanities meaningful to the public, it is unlikely that the agency will ever stop supporting research that appeals mostly to specialists. It recently underwrote Ken Burns’s Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on the topic of race, and yet the institution’s collaborative research grants have supported archaeology projects that take place on ancient sites. “There’s a limited audience to those kinds of projects and we know it,” says Adams,” but they’re very important because they preserve our understanding of the cultural heritage of our global civilization.”

The structure of a government agency, staffed by both long-serving civil-service employees and political appointees, also presents challenges. Learning to “speak across the difference” is not something Adams has encountered before. “You’re new to the agency and your authority is a creature of the political process,” he says. “Your authority is not the creation of or does not belong to the continuous life of the agency over a very long period of time, and working with that can be complicated.”

Adams has also had to adjust to working for an institution at the mercy of Congress. A university’s finances may ebb and flow, but it always has certain streams of revenue that can be adjusted, depending on strategic priorities. Crucially, the president has control over the budget and the ability to change course as needed. At NEH, Adams has “no control over the levers.” In 1996, after nearly two decades of consistent funding, Congress cut financial support for the agency by 36 percent, to $110 million. Funding has remained around that level ever since. “You can plan what you want to do, but if you can’t get a budget that supports that, it’s impossible,” he says.

Back in Baltimore, it’s now the end of the day. Adams is wrapping up his visit to the offices of Wide Angle Youth Media, a nonprofit grantee that teaches journalism and multimedia skills to students so they can report on the local community.

Staff show the chairman photos taken by the students and play for him a video shot by a recent graduate of the Baltimore City public schools, Niajea Randolph, about her experience during the Freddie Gray protests. Interspersed with slam poetry (“the PD suppose to help us all keep the peace/but got my brothers and sisters six feet deep/this is genocide”) and footage of the city is Randolph’s narration: “Incidents of police brutality have been appearing more frequently and they’re starting to get out of control,” she says. “Every time things like this happen I get angrier than I was before. […] Why am I even in a position where I have to be protesting the death of an innocent man?”

Randolph, too, is struggling to make meaning out of violence, to understand justice, echoing the questions that Adams had so many years ago. And it is precisely because of the timeless nature of these questions that he thinks the humanities would help her.

In his own studies, Adams says, he found no concrete answers, only a framework for understanding. “Having access to what people have said and thought about violence and how they understood their own capacities for violence as well as others’ capacities for violence was very important to me,” he says. “You get an understanding of what happened to you. Otherwise these experiences are kind of mute, they’re kind of locked up inside you, undigested.”

Angela Chen is a journalist based in New York.

Corrections (9/8/2016, 7:23 p.m.): This article contained a number of errors when it was originally posted online. Congress cut the NEH’s budget in 1996 to $110 million, not $159 million. Jennifer Tucker received a Public Scholar grant, not a Humanities in the Public Square grant. The NEH receives about 5,000 grant applications annually, not 700. The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns discussed race in a single lecture underwritten by the NEH, the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, not a series of lectures. The article has been updated to reflect those corrections.