Education: The Fat Boy in the Canoe

Watch that tilt, says the new Humanities Endowment head

In the fall of 1980, the conservative Heritage Foundation, at the request of incoming Reagan Administration officials, prepared a provocative critique. One target: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the agency created by Congress in 1965 to provide federal grants to humanities projects. Among other criticisms, the foundation's report excoriated the NEH for funding "grant proposals whose character is at best faddishly innovative," and warned against "federalizing" the nation's cultural programs and institutions. "The NEH," the policy study said, "must not become the fat boy in the canoe, likely by its bulk to upset the delicate balance between public and private support."

A major contributor to that report was William J. Bennett, then director of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. But since December, Bennett, who holds degrees in law and philosophy from Harvard and the University of Texas and has taught at both institutions, has had a different perspective: he is the Reagan Administration's new NEH chairman.

Very quickly, under Bennett, the "fat boy" appears to have been put on a crash diet. From a fiscal 1981 allotment of $151 million, the NEH has been trimmed down to a proposed $96 million for fiscal 1983.

Chairman Bennett is hardly complaining. "The budget proposed for '83," he says, "is a substantial amount of money. We can still do a large number of things." But in his four months in office, Bennett, 39, has aroused the suspicion of the arts and humanities constituencies around the country that the NEH will begin to reflect the partisan conservative attitudes of his political sponsors.

Last month Bennett provided worried onlookers with a crackling good controversy. He criticized the fact that an hour-long film, entitled From the Ashes... Nicaragua Today, had been partly funded by a routine grant of $45,623 from the NEH.*

Shown on national television by PBS, the film, says Bennett, was "unabashed socialist-realism propaganda" that should not have received public money. Bennett argued that the film presented a one-sided view of the Nicaragua story. One of the film's defenders, Wisconsin Humanities Chairman Morton Rothstein, says, "While I personally would have preferred a more 'balanced' presentation, I found it a stimulating presentation that shed light on a major public policy issue." But Bennett insists that the content and methods of Nicaragua Today "do not fall within the humanities."