evidence was provided by a call on February 12 from Jackie Trescott, the reporter on the culture beat for the Washington Post, who was pursuing a list of seven possible nominees for the chairmanship of the NEH. I could only tell her that the White House had not been in touch with me. Shortly afterward, someone from Bruce Lindsey’s office called my office and asked that my c.v. be sent to them, yet another paper missile fired into the dark void of Washington. David Morse guessed that they were delaying a choice for the NEH hoping to be able to announce the NEH and NEA together. If there were a woman for the NEA, and all the rumored candidates were women, that would provide some camouflage if the NEH went to a white male. I understood that.
On March 3, the Washington Post reported that I was the leading candidate for chairmanship of the NEH. This was news to me, albeit good news. It also began to make my situation mildly uncomfortable. Rumors were swirling about. The Chronicle of Higher Education sent a photographer to take my picture, saying they would save it for an appropriate occasion. Stan Katz at the American Council of Learned Societies, my friend and later my close ally, was telling people that I was about to be nominated. Harris Wofford called to say that he had talked to Hillary about me and that she was enthusiastic. Charley Pizzi at the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce told me that he had heard it was to be announced that week. The Daily Pennsylvanian called me for a reaction because they had it from an unimpeachable source in the White House that I was to have been announced the preceding Friday. I could not react to something that had not been announced, nor could I explain why it had not been announced. Neither could the reporter. This state of suspended animation had its amusing aspects. Students would fall into step with me on Locust Walk and ask brightly, “Have you gotten the job yet?” Others would just say, “Good luck,” as they passed. Worry about being a publicly rejected suitor was the major discomfort at this point.
Lucy and I went to Montgomery, Alabama the weekend of April 2-4 where I gave the annual Durr Lecture at Auburn University in Montgomery, an event that celebrated the life and work of Lucy’s father, Clifford J. Durr. My talk began by examining an apparent paradox, one of my favorite devices because I believe paradoxes expose the problem areas of cultures, and thus they can yield very interesting insights into the culture. I have been thinking about paradoxes and using them analytically for a long time, and I continue to be fascinated with them. In this case, I observed that the new globalism was begetting tribalism. It is a curious fact that the shrinking of the world under the influence of modern transportation, information technology, and the integration of economies was accompanied by an epidemic of sectarian violence. The closer we get to each other, the more we fight one another. This phenomenon, I argued, should make Americans think more carefully about what values and commitments were strong enough to hold our racially, ethnically, religiously, linguistically, culturally diverse society together. This was a theme I had pursued before, used for my remarks at Commencement in May 1993, and one that I would return to later at the NEH.
The next day, Friday, April 2, when Lucy and I were staying with my brother, Morris, and his wife, Brenda, in Birmingham, I was run to earth by Bill Gilcher, who was phoning on behalf of the Office of Presidential Personnel. Could I come talk to them next week? I said that I thought that I might be able to work that into my schedule.
Actually, it was not easy because Cokie Roberts and her mother, Lindy Boggs, were going to be on campus as Pappas Fellows that week. They were personal friends of ours and I wanted to be there during their visit. So, I could not visit Washington until Friday, April 9. I rode down on the train in high spirits the evening before. Cokie and Lindy had been a wonderful team. Cokie was brash and irreverent; her mother as usual was so sweet that you had to listen very closely to get the wisdom that she was dispensing about public life in Washington. They are so different, yet they are clearly devoted to each other. Large student audiences loved them.
In addition to that reason for feeling good, I thought that I was at last going to learn where the search for a NEH chair was. Silly me! I had spent many late night hours during that week filling out personal information forms sent by the White House, covering finances, jobs, organizational affiliations, club memberships, and residences over an impossibly long period of time. I thought that they probably would not require me to do such an onerous chore if they were not serious about me, but I was not sure.
After checking into the Hay-Adams, across the park from the White House, I met Martha Chowning in the lobby. She was the lone Clinton political appointee at the NEH, so she was to brief me on the current state of the agency. It was then functioning under Lynne Cheney’s choice as acting chair, Jerry Martin, a former political appointee who had “burrowed” into a senior civil service position at the NEH.
Martin eventually left the NEH and became the first president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), an organization started by Lynne Cheney, with a founding board full of high-profile public figures, including Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman (of whom, more later). The ostensible purpose of ACTA is to hold universities accountable for protecting free speech on campus, and for teaching students the fundamental values of Western Civilization. That is the way that it describes itself, but it rests more specifically upon a consistent right-wing critique of higher education that has been developed and elaborated over the past fifteen years.[6] I became the symbol of the “liberal elite” that is alleged by the right wing to be running American universities, and that is at work undermining the traditional values on which our culture depends. If this sounds to you like a conspiracy theory, you have been paying attention.
A quick flash forward can reveal this critique at work in the report released in December 2001 by ACTA, “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.”[7] The report begins by noting that the country responded with admirable patriotism to the terrorism of September 11, 2001. “Not so in academe. . . . professors across the country sponsored teach-ins that typically ranged from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America.” The report’s evidence consists of 115 brief quotations from speakers on college campuses, ripped out of context, that say such things as “revenge is not justifiable”; “stop the violence, stop the hate”; “an eye for an eye makes the world blind”; as well as such dangerous truisms as that we need to understand how America is viewed by the rest of the world. The report concludes that colleges are “short on patriotism.” “The message of much of academe was clear: blame America first.” The technique here is quite familiar. Point to a few outlandish examples that suit your purpose, and then act as if they are typical of the whole rather than marginal. The thing to note, I believe, is that the report does not engage the dissenting ideas themselves. It simply implies that all of higher education is unpatriotic.
Why would an organization dedicated to free speech on campus attack higher education for permitting free speech? It is enough to make one suspect that the authors of the report don’t want free speech; they want their speech. This is only one of a number of curiosities. Why, with President George Bush’s approval ratings hovering around 92 percent, was it thought important to coerce the last 8 percent into line? Indeed, in an era of Republican hegemony, when political scientists who measure such things report that the political spectrum has shifted markedly to the right and is increasingly polarized between centrists and the right wing, do culture warriors speak in such apocalyptic terms about a liberal conspiracy to subvert the republic? The solution to these curiosities is that the ACTA report is not about rallying support in the current crisis; it is about furthering its long-term project of de-legitimizing higher education in the public mind, and advancing the world view of movement conservatives.
Meanwhile, back on April 8, 1993, I was still innocent of the covert actions and dirty tricks of the people who saw me as a convenient representative of their conspiracy theory. Martha Chowning, however, gave me an astute analysis of the internal politics of the NEH, and also handed over to me a load of NEH publications and a briefing book that told me everything anyone could want to know about the NEH and its programs. Things were beginning to look serious.
I got over to the
