Washington, D.C. -- Lynne V. Cheney announced last week that she would step down as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, cutting short her second four-year term.
Mrs. Cheney, who was first nominated by President Reagan in 1986, has been the longest-serving chairman in the agency’s history. She said she would leave the endowment on January 20, the day Bill Clinton will become President and 16 months before her term would have expired.
Advocates of a traditional curriculum said they would be sad to see her leave. But liberal scholars, who support newer scholarly fields and approaches, said they were relieved to see Mrs. Cheney go.
The news surprised many scholars and NEH staff members, since Mrs. Cheney had repeatedly said before the election that she would serve out her term. Legislation authorizing the NEH does not allow an incoming President to remove the endowment’s chairman.
Mrs. Cheney will be replaced by Celeste Colgan, the NEH deputy chairman, until Mr. Clinton nominates a new agency head.
In a letter to NEH staff members, Mrs. Cheney said she felt “that this period of transition seems a fitting time for me to move on to other things I want to do: read widely, reflect, write at length.”
Mrs. Cheney said in an interview last week that she planned to write a book on “the impact of American intellectual life on society,” and lecture at colleges across the country. In addition, she said she was in the process of “closing in on a deal” with a political think tank. There, she is expected to continue her crusade against “political correctness.”
Mrs. Cheney said that with the election of Mr. Clinton, she “sensed it was time” for her to move on. Others have said that it would be politically awkward for Mrs. Cheney to serve in a Clinton Administration when she has been such a visible figure in the Bush Administration. Her husband, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, has expressed interest in running against Mr. Clinton in 1996.
John Hammer, director of the National Humanities Alliance, speculated that Mrs. Cheney would have been uncomfortable staying on. Continuing as NEH chairman, he said, would have meant “defending a Clinton Administration budget, pursuing a Clinton Administration reauthorization strategy, and, perhaps running NEH without key trusted aides.” While the President would not have been able to remove the chairman of the agency, he could have dropped other political appointees at the agency who had been chosen by President Bush.
During her six years in office, Mrs. Cheney was a powerful combatant in the debates over humanities scholarship and teaching. Her public comments repeatedly echoed the concerns of conservative scholars -- that American students, predominantly under the tutelage of liberal scholars, are less prepared and less knowledgeable in the humanities than they should be. To remedy this, she called on colleges to return to a more traditional core curriculum and hold students to higher academic standards.
In her latest report, Telling the Truth, she accused liberal scholars of using their classrooms to indoctrinate students with their viewpoints.
Mrs. Cheney said her greatest accomplishment as chairman was “expanding the mandate” of the endowment to be more than just an agency supporting individual scholars’ research. “I have tried as chairman to be faithful to our legislation, which begins by saying, `The humanities belong to all the American people,”’ she wrote in her letter to her staff.
During her chairmanship, she created and expanded existing programs aimed at rewarding scholars for excellent teaching. She also expanded programs designed to give elementary- and secondary-school teachers the opportunity to participate in seminars focusing on significant texts in the humanities.
She said she had also especially emphasized programs designed to teach the general public more about the humanities. She said in her letter that the NEH-supported documentary “The Civil War” demonstrated the ability of public programs in the humanities “at reaching people and teaching people -- and helping them understand how fascinating learning can be.”
Supporters and critics of Mrs. Cheney give her high marks for her skill in building good relationships with key lawmakers. They noted that the NEH had emerged unscathed from the controversies over the National Endowment for the Arts. Under Mrs. Cheney’s leadership, the NEH’s budget in TX creased substantially, surpassing that of the NEA for the first time in the agencies’ history.
But that is where all agreement ends.
Mrs. Cheney’s supporters say she has been an excellent leader whose main concern was protecting the integrity of the humanities.
“I think that the NEH has done very well on her watch. Things have run smoothly, fairly, equitably, and proposals have been judged on their merits,” said John Shelton Reed, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former NEH advisory-council member.
Mrs. Cheney’s critics disagree. They say her politically partisan views determined the way she ran the endowment. Mrs. Cheney politicized the endowment’s grant system, they say, in a way that applications from controversial scholars and from those who use non-traditional approaches were routinely rejected.
They also charge that the NEH chairman packed her advisory council with critics of multiculturalism and women’s studies. They add that she tried to do the same with the peer panels who judge the grant applications.
“Mrs. Cheney has a problem listening to others,” says Stanley Katz, president of the American Council of Learned Societies. “As chairman, she has surrounded herself with an increasingly narrow group of people representing her point of view. She has selected council members and staff members on the grounds that they agree with her ideologically. She has excluded those who do not agree with her. And she has used her position to polarize public opinion for her views.
“While she prides herself on being a great communicator,” he continued, “she is, in fact, just a great propagandist.”
Mr. Katz also questions Mrs. Cheney’s priorities in running the endowment. Mrs. Cheney has, he says, primarily used the endowment to promote herself and President Bush’s education agenda.
Mrs. Cheney’s supporters deny these charges. Politics, they say, did not enter into the endowment’s grant-making process. Michael J. Malbin, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Albany and a current member of the NEH’s advisory council, says, “Lynne Cheney has always had the kind of scholarly integrity to recognize a work of quality even if she may disagree with it.”
In last week’s interview, Mrs. Cheney did not express concern about the future of the agency in her absence. But she said the endowment could only “prosper” if future chairmen continued to heed the concerns she had raised.
Future chairmen must support the notion, she said, that “colleges and universities should be bastions of free expression.” They must not forget, she said, the importance of “emphasizing traditional scholarship, and traditional approaches to traditional scholarship.”
She said in her letter to her staff: “There is strong support for this idea on our campuses, though it tends not to be vocal; and certainly this is how the Congress and the country as a whole conceive our role. It can be hard to remember the quiet support we have for this position when there are voices loudly urging us to look only to the cutting edge, but the NEH must meet that challenge if it is to continue to be an agency widely thought to have a worthy mission.”