If I were being cute I would say there is flagging interest at the National Endowment for the Humanities, but I’m not and in any even the real story, as reported in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education is that there is quite a bit of interest in flagging at NEH.
In the bad old days when Lynne Cheney was director, NEH and its cadre of right wing meanies flagged all the proposals that good and true, and rejected them. Now, some say, once again “proposals are being flagged and sometimes rejected because they are not ‘traditional’ enough.”
There is, of course, a dispute about whether this practice is really occurring, and even some of Ms. Cheney’s most vocal critics are still supportive of Bruce Cole and Lynne Munson, NEW’s chairman and deputy chairman.
I don’t know (and if truth be told, don’t even care enormously) who’s right about what’s happening. Political agencies tend to make political decisions (yes, right here in River City!), and it’s pretty clear, I think, that one of the risks of inviting government participation in scholarship and the arts is that you have government involvement in scholarship and the arts. Whether the risks outweigh the benefits is a matter of debate, but that’s not the debate I’m interested in.
What I do find interesting here, as usual, are the arguments of the critics. First, in this context and in this debate, these critics place a very high reliance on professional expertise as opposed to being publicly accountable to popular opinion.
The critics say the flagging signals a willingness at the endowment to again place more emphasis on the opinions of the politically appointed members of the council, and of the chairman’s office, than on the recommendations of the outside panels of experts and the agency’s professional staff.
As one disgruntled former NEH insider insists, “it is politics, not merit, that is now driving many decisions in the review process.”
I myself am sympathetic to this appeal to pure merit, but I would be more impressed with the argument if those who are making it here would make the same argument in other venues, such as college admissions and faculty hiring.
But they don’t. Confident that they control the relevant professions, they want decisions governing public funds to support the arts to be made according to objective professional standards. But since they do not control the setting of objective standards re admissions (the testing organizations), there they want a more political standard (racial/ethnic representation) to apply.
