WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 1996. NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES WITNESSES SHELDON HACKNEY, CHAIRMAN, NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES STEPHEN CHERRINGTON, DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF PLANNING AND BUDGET DONALD GIBSON, SENIOR HUMANITIES ADVISOR ANN YOUNG ORR, DIRECTOR OF CONGRESSIONAL LIAISON GEORGE FARR, DIRECTOR, DIVISION OF PRESERVATION AND ACCESS JAMES HERBERT, DIRECTOR, DIVISION OF RESEARCH AND EDUCATION PROGRAMS OPENING REMARKS Mr. REGULA [presiding]. I call the meeting of the Interior Subcommittee. We have today Mr. Sheldon Hackney, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities and Mr. CHERRINGTON. Steve Cherrington, Director, Office of Planning and Budget. Mr. REGULA [continuing]. Steve Cherrington. Thank you for coming. We will try to keep it fairly brief. I have a tough schedule and visitors all over the place. So, if you would, Mr. Hackney, summarize your statement. It will obviously be made a part of the record. And we'll go from there. Mr. HACKNEY. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I will try to be relatively brief. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today and speak on behalf of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mr. Chairman, I know that the Fiscal Year 1996 budget choices that you had to make were not easy, and I recognize as well that the 36 percent budget cut from the Fiscal Year 1995 conference level imposed on us was a signal that we had not only to make do with less, but also that we had to be very entrepreneurial and to find new ways to pursue our goals. We are doing just that. But I must also caution that this reduction has not been purchased without an important cost to the Nation. And I wanted to say a word or two this morning about both our transformation of the Endowment and also the cultural losses that will inevitably result from our lower level of funding. This past year was and extraordinary time in the Endowment's history. As early as last summer, faced with the high probability of receiving a significant funding reduction for Fiscal Year 1996, we began preparing for an orderly transition to a much smaller and restructured NEH. This exercise continues a practice that we have been following for the past two years of streamlining whenever possible in our programming and in our core administrative processes. Our guiding tenant during all of this was to try to keep alive to the greatest extent possible the Endowment's historic mission of advancing education and research and preservation and public programming in the humanities throughout the Nation. Before I go further, let me point out that through all of this, all the budget cut backs and the organizational restructuring, the staff of the NEH has continued to do the agency's business at what I think is a superior level of dedication and real professionalism-the sort of professionalism that it has shown even in the best of times, and these are not the best of times for the staff. So, I am quite proud to represent this agency to the public as it continues, in spite of everything, to honor the commitments that we have made to scholars, teachers, and citizens throughout the country. Now, having gone through our painful reorganization and layoffs, we have emerged, eager, I think, for the future, but much smaller. We have shrunk from 276 positions to 170 positions as part of our effort to make the NEH as streamlined and as efficient as possible. We have consolidated from six divisions down to three. We have had to make some very tough priority choices about programs as we went from 31 programs to 9. Let me give you a couple of examples of what these reductions mean in real terms, in programmatic terms. NEH SEMINARS AND INSTITUTES One of the programs that we have had to reduce is also one of our flagship programs. I'm thinking here of the summer seminars and institutes for college and high school teachers. In the summer of 1995, this program supported seminars and institutes that were attended by 2,600 high school and college teachers around the country Mr. REGULA. What was the topic of the seminars? Mr. HACKNEY. These were on all sorts of subjects: Shakespeare, literature, history. Here is one big brochure, in fact, that lists the whole setup. Quite varied, it covers a lot of ground. Now, those 2,600 teachers who attended a seminar- Mr. HACKNEY. We give a grant to the leader of the seminar, the scholar who is doing it. The scholar then gets applications from teachers and selects those who will attend the seminars. So, it's a competitive process, and I think a good one. We monitor it, but that is basically the way it works. Those experiences are really quite transforming for the teachers, and they go back and teach as many as 425,000 students in the first year after having attended one of those seminars. That's close to a half of a million students across the country. Mr. REGULA. Is the cost of the teacher coming from, say, a university or college, paid by the college or university? Mr. HACKNEY. Yes. Mr. REGULA. So, the involvement of the NEH would be to give the grant for the organization of the seminar. Mr. HACKNEY. No, we provide the money for the teachers, the participants to attend. Mr. REGULA. Oh, so, total cost of the seminar, including housing, and transportation for the participants is funded by NEH? Mr. HACKNEY. Right, in a stipend. Mr. REGULA. As the university or college that's going to benefit from that teacher's knowledge share in the cost? Mr. HACKNEY. These are chiefly school teachers, so their districts are squeezed for funding Mr. REGULA. Oh, you're talking about K through 12? Mr. HACKNEY. K through 12 as well as college teachers, but the bulk of participants in our institutes and seminars are school teachers. Mr. REGULA. Okay. Mr. HACKNEY. The point that I was trying to make is that the real beneficiaries are not the teachers themselves, but the students that they teach. And they will touch about 425,000 in the first year after those summer experiences and that ripple effect, of course, continues beyond the first year to subsequent years as well. So, we're trying to protect this program. I think it is not only one of our flagship programs, but also something that we can be very proud of. Mr. REGULA. So, in downsizing this had a high priority. Mr. HACKNEY. This had a very high priority. And it still will be cut about 30 percent even with that. Now that means that we will be supporting only about 1,400 teachers in 1997, and those teachers will reach only 220,000 students in the first year rather than 425,000. So the real losers of this cutback are the 200,000 who won't be taught by a teacher who has had his or her professional and intellectual life renewed by that summer seminar experience. PRESERVING OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE A second example is in our reference works and other research tools that are critical to scholars and to students. As this committee is well aware, the NEH has been the acknowledged leader in the national effort to preserve historical materials that are an important part of our cultural heritage. Next year, 20,000 fragile books, and 230,000 disintegrating pages of historically important U.S. newspapers will not be microfilmed and preserved as they would have been had we stayed at the 1995 budget level. Mr. REGULA. Are these done by agencies or institutions. You give them a grant to do it, but they have the materials? Mr. HACKNEY. Exactly, they have the materials, those materials Mr. REGULA. I assume that you're saying that they don't have the funding on their own to do it? Mr. HACKNEY. That's right. This falls in the area of that sort of unglamorous but necessary work that private donors are not likely to find attractive but is very critical to the long term preservation of our cultural heritage. In addition to those books and newspapers that won't be microfilmed, there are more than 130,000 objects of archeological, ethnographic, and historical importance that will not be preserved or conserved because of the lower levels of funding that we have now. A third example would be the challenge grant program, which leverages funding from the private sector. Here the budget cuts have also limited our ability to stimulate private donations. In fact, we will be unable to leverage as much as $20 million in new or in creased gifts to humanities organizations and institutions around the country because we have fewer challenge grant dollars. I believe you will be interested to know, Mr. Chairman, that one of our challenge grants was to Kenyon College, and it is making a real impact on the life of the farming communities in that part of Ohio. The NEH challenge grant was matched and made possible an endowed professorship at Kenyon College. This is a rotating professorship. It rotates every three years. The first incumbent is Professor Howard Sacks who was selected because his project was so attractive, and it is a project on the family farm and community life. The project has given students at Kenyon an understanding of the history of family farms through field work and oral histories with farming families. It has also produced a radio series on the area's family farms and the issues that are important in the lives of farmers. I have a letter here and a brochure from one of the participants, one of the farm families. It may be just a tractor road down from your farm in Navarre. But, Art and Joan Cassell write: "The Kenyon Family Farm Project has been valuable for fostering a real sense of community between the Kenyon students and the Mt. Vernon agricultural sector. Our family received many favorable comments about the radio program from friends and neighbors in Knox County. Perhaps just as important, we learned more about our fellow farmers in Knox County as each operation is unlike another." So, you see, one never knows where the humanities may have an impact. We really don't have the cumulative data on the impact of all the Fiscal Year 1996 cuts. So much of what we fund has an impact that goes beyond the short term to over a much longer period of time due to the "ripple effect" of our grants. What begins as a lonely piece of scholarship, perhaps read only by a few highly specialized researchers and scholars, is occasionally used by a film maker and suddenly 250 million Americans have a much richer understanding of our history because of that. Or, at the same time, text book writers will pick up that bit of scholarship and incorporate it into a textbook that is used by schools nationwide. So, you see, we will not know the full effect, the full use of the work that we are not able to fund for the next 20 to 40 years as the "ripple effect" will not be there. Yet, without your support, the constant, sort of cumulative effort to understand our past will be impoverished. PUBLIC IDENTITY OF NEH As we were going through the furloughs this winter, I looked sometimes with great envy at the National Park Service because when the Winnebagos start lining up at the entrance to the national parks and can't get in, the public notices and it reacts. So, in a perverse way, I envy that because the pain and suffering there is visible. Mr. REGULA. You've got to figure out a program for Winnebagos. [Laughter.] Mr. HACKNEY. We have one in truck stops all over America. [Laughter.] Mr. REGULA. Okay. Mr. HACKNEY. We will be doing discussion groups. [Laughter.] Mr. REGULA. I didn't think that you'd have to encourage that. They are pretty good at it without any, I'd say. Mr. HACKNEY. We don't want to have the focus on "Baywatch" but on something more substantive. Unfortunately, we don't house collections like the Smithsonian. We don't operate a network of television stations like PBS or provide programming for them. We don't have collections like a central library like the Library of Congress. Our funding really has a sort of different and more indirect identity. People know us, if they know us at all, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or WETA, or the Chippewa Valley Museum in Wisconsin, or Kenyon College in Ohio. They don't know us as NEH. They know us as the programs that our grantees produce for them. So, when the government shuts down, there is no dramatic demonstration of the loss of NEH funds like there was at the National Gallery when people do not have access to the Vermeer exhibit. But the loss is the same. EDITIONS PROJECTS The closest that I think that we come, perhaps, to the "We'll have to close the Washington Monument" syndrome are the collected editions of the papers of the Nation's Presidents and other historical and literary figures that we support every year in a continuing way. Currently, we have a number of projects going, but included therein would be the George Washington papers, the legal papers of Abraham Lincoln, the papers of the first Federal Congress. Mr. REGULA. Where do you collect these? Where do you put them? Mr. HACKNEY. These are collections that are in libraries and in archives all over Mr. REGULA. So you assist them? Mr. HACKNEY. We assist them. This is like the book preservation and newspaper preservation. Mr. REGULA. So, you might give them a grant to acquire these for their own collection? Mr. HACKNEY. They already have them. We give them a grant to edit them and publish them and make them much more available. Mr. REGULA. All right. Mr. HACKNEY. These are such things as the Washington papers, the Eisenhower papers, the legal papers of Abraham Lincoln, the Frederick Douglass correspondence, the Jackson papers, the Jefferson papers and on and on. Unfortunately all of these are not going to be able to continue at the current levels of funding. We expect that as much as 30 percent of the presidential papers and editions projects that we are presently supporting will not receive continued funding. And I think that that is going to be a tremendous loss for the country. PUBLIC PROGRAMS In our public programs area, which is possibly the only high profile area that we have, we will be giving fewer and smaller grants for media projects and for museum exhibits. It means that we may not discover, therefore, the next Ken Burns or the next Henry |