Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
A spokeswoman for Cheney, Maria Miller, said the vice president's wife was unavailable to comment for this article. An NEH spokesman, Erik Lokkesmoe, said Cole and Munson were traveling and similarly unavailable for comment, and that he could not pass Salon's request for comment on to Colgan, whose home phone number in Denver is unlisted, because no one at the NEH knew how to reach her. (How do they summon Colgan to Washington for quarterly meetings of the National Council? Smoke signals?)
Once left for dead, its budget slashed nearly 40 percent during the Newt Gingrich "Republican revolution" of the mid-1990s, the NEH has seen its funding nudged upward during the Bush administration to $137 million. That's still considerably less than the $177.5 million the agency received in 1994, pre-Gingrich. The problem now is not what projects are being funded, because many worthy scholarly or educational pursuits are receiving support, though only if they meet conservative approval. The issue, rather, is what's not being funded, which viewpoints are being excluded, and what critical-thinking tools for students are being suppressed at a time when it is more important than ever to understand (and thus counteract) the dangerous global rise in hostility toward America.
Instead, at an agency meant to foster intellectual exploration and knowledge, NEH staffers' phone lines are being monitored to catch -- and punish -- anyone who dares take a call from a reporter, according to Angela Iovino, a former program officer at the agency who keeps in touch with her anxious former colleagues. In an apparently punitive move, the NEH inspector general opened an investigation of a former assistant chairman of the agency, a professor of French and Italian at Indiana University named Julia Bondanella, after she was quoted in a Chronicle of Higher Education article that exposed the return of Cheney-era "flagging" of proposals for rejection that don't adhere to conservative orthodoxy. Meanwhile, President Clinton's appointees to the National Council on the Humanities, the oversight board that plays a critical role in approving grants, have been marginalized to the point where one -- Ira Berlin of the University of Maryland, a prominent historian of slavery -- quit in anger.
The absurdity is that it is now easier for reporters to ring up officials at the Central Intelligence Agency to chat about Osama bin Laden than ask a staffer at the endowment why a project on, say, ethnic Chinese in Cuba didn't get funded. Many scholars, apparently fearful of jeopardizing chances for future funding, responded either with silence or with a nervous, clammy stuttering when I asked to interview them. "People are scared and intimidated," explained Ferris. "What's happening there now is completely contrary to the values the endowment is meant to promote."
Cheney, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, is a prolific author of polemical tracts, children's history books and fiction, including a 1981 novel "Sisters," about a 19th century feminist. (Perhaps because of the novel's sympathetic treatment of lesbianism, Cheney has dropped mention of the inconvenient "Sisters" from her résumé, even though her daughter, Mary, is gay. She has also suppressed the book so that it is no longer in print.) In 1986, Cheney was appointed to head the NEH, replacing conservative moralizer (and furtive gambling addict) William Bennett, who had left to become Ronald Reagan's secretary of education. Hailed by conservatives for her back-to-basics approach to the humanities at a time when the academy was seized by postmodernism, deconstructionism and other intellectual trends, her tenure was turbulent. Research proposals dealing with race, ethnicity or gender -- scorned by Cheney as too negative or subversive to the Western canon -- were often summarily rejected, despite receiving high marks from peer review panels. Even Cheney's friends or fellow Republicans found that if political points could be scored, she wouldn't hesitate to twist their views into cartoon-like caricatures that played well with Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing press.
A raging controversy in the 1990s over proposed national teaching standards for history, for example, showed how "the Grandma of the United States" had no problem eating her own, if it meant helping her husband get to the White House. As NEH chairwoman, Cheney had selected a teaching center at the University of California-Los Angeles to develop the history standards for elementary and high schools; the choice was in large part because of her friendship with a professor there named Charlotte Crabtree. Bruce Robinson, who as a program officer for education at the NEH was nominally assigned to oversee the grant, said the project was actually administered out of Cheney's office. "And they gave that center renewals of grants without peer review, year in and year out," Robinson said.
Cheney kept folders about the history standards on her desk, Robinson said, while Crabtree, the UCLA professor in charge of developing the standards, lavished praise on Cheney in her grant proposals. "Lynne Cheney and Charlotte Crabtree were, for a few years, great buddies," Robinson told me. "Then the standards came out."
The year was 1995, and after overseeing the successful Persian Gulf War as secretary of defense, Dick Cheney was contemplating running for president. Suddenly, his wife turned on the history teaching standards she had nurtured, attacking them in television appearances, political forums and in opinion pieces as whacked-out, far-left anti-American propaganda. In this manner, Lynne helped whip up the right-wing base that Dick Cheney would need to mount a bid for the White House into a politically useful frenzy.
"She just bludgeoned the standards," Robinson said. "She said they emphasized things like the mafia and slavery. And she turned on Charlotte Crabtree. Lynne Cheney was basically writing checks for that thing. Then she just stuck a knife in it and turned it. It drives me crazy the storm she raised over the history standards. I still hear people repeat what she accused the standards of doing, which were not true. What a waste of money that was. What a step backwards. God, that makes me angry."
Gary Nash, a colleague of Crabtree's at UCLA who worked with her on the teaching standards, confirmed Robinson's account. "She was really crushed by the way Lynne Cheney turned on the standards, because she had been very friendly with her, almost like a sorority sister," Nash said. "Afterwards, she stepped down as national director of the schools center [at UCLA] and withdrew from all the commissions and councils she had sat on in Washington and California. It was really devastating for her."
Crabtree did not return a phone call seeking comment. But she co-authored, with Nash and Ross Dunn, a book on the experience, "History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past." It was one of several anguished accounts published by prominent academics who found themselves bloodied by Cheney.
Another book, "Leaving Town Alive," by Republican John Frohnmayer, described how a howling pack of conservatives led by Cheney ousted him as head of the NEH's sister organization, the National Endowment for the Arts, in 1992. Frohnmayer had the misfortune of taking over the NEA after his predecessor had funded the work of controversial artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Over at the NEH, meantime, Cheney was winning plaudits -- and budget increases from Congress -- for her funding of Ken Burns' popular documentary series on the Civil War. "I once proposed to her that we work together. The look of horror on her face was so absolute. They weren't going to touch us with a 10-foot pool. We were the bad children," Frohnmayer, now retired from law practice in Montana, told me.
Although the work of the avant-garde Mapplethorpe and Serrano, whose photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine sparked a conservative furor, weren't much to Frohnmayer's liking, he said he felt an obligation to the First Amendment not to interfere with the judgment of peer review panels and the National Council for the Humanities in supporting the art. "I used to wonder whether the First Amendment applied to what the hell we were doing there. The First Amendment always protects the speaker. But Lynne Cheney was much more interested in the conservative audience out there. And that does great damage to the First Amendment," Frohnmayer said.
Already floundering, Frohnmayer sealed his fate by declining to block other controversial grants selected by peer reviewers and the National Council. "I felt that the process was important to protect. That's maybe the main difference between Lynne Cheney and me. She didn't care what the process was; she was willing to circumvent it. I felt if the panel and National Council recommended it, that I as chair was not going to veto it unless I had a very good reason."
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