i wanted to ask you more particularly about the role you saw between the humanities and civility and how the humanities can be used to increase stability. why do you think it is that faculty politics are so noted for their nastiness? [laughter] first -- an aspect that i consider a minor aspect of the humanities as well as civility are things like etiquette. but the real aspect to civility is whether one is interested in the other person, the other society, the other circumstance. and so it is engagement. it is respect for engagement. hopefully, with a little bit of curiosity. i think curiosity is a great, underestimated concept. we all ought to be wondering --

why does your hair curl? what is it that is different about people? politics is always complicated in many different ways by what i call the a word. that word is ambition. almost every political circumstance has ambition between parties and very much within parties. you have ambition that is very personal at a time -- if you go back into philosophy, the conceptualization of the common good, the greatest good for the greatest number -- the larger concepts are not being thought through very much. people are thinking "can the republicans win next week?" what does that mean? that does not mean "can we do

something good for the country?" it is a very different conceptualization. the unstated aspects of politics are pretty heavily oriented with the i word. sometimes you pick it up with people's manner of speech or actions, but it is deeply invested. >> bob lynch, ceo of americans for the arts. i would like to start off by saying congratulations and complimenting the new chairman for his stellar voting record in congress in support of the arts and the humanities over 30 years -- just always there. my question is about the image and the value proposition of the humanities today. i think that sometimes the image and concept of the

humanities is not as well understood as the actual humanities' themselves and how they are used. in my work, i get to go to a different american city every week. as i go to the cities, i see people like the mayor in providence references cultural policy by using historical data about the industrial revolution in that city. i see the mayor of honolulu talk about religion and its basis for their cultures policies and city advancement. there are many other examples around the country. those things are the humanities, but very few people speak about the humanities. there is a disconnect with the citizenry in general. i think that is the case with the arts, t o zero, where people will talk about research -- the arts, too, where people will talk about in joining jazz or museums without realizing.

i wonder if there is something about the concept of the humanities from a visibility and value proposition that you would suggest. >> what i think you are trying to say is that there is this concept that the arts are artsy. that somehow has an implication both of elitism and of non- strength. actually, the arts are about culture and they are about bringing out the most imaginative in american society. the humanities are about depth. in a world which is muscular, sometimes people underestimate this. i cannot visualize the united states army being wisely used unless there was a great deal of cultural understanding of where it is going to be used.

i think people have to realize that they matter a lot. in our society, and frankly every society, there is an element of anti-intellectualism. sometimes, intellectuals are anti other intellectuals. >> never. >> and of course there are no rivalries in academia. the fact is, just as you say -- psychologically, there is something that is not presented in the right way. how you turn arts and humanities into a muscular set of terms is very intriguing.

that does not mean it should be exactly the same, but how you can have a strong society without strong arts in society i do not know. >> i am from the washington national opera. i think in addition to the concept of sort of high and low culture and relevancy, there is the issue of orders. i am constantly telling my staff that the whole public does not see the cultural borders between high and low or in our case opera or musical theater or even pop music, the way we have generally treated them.

in making a difference, we go to the actual experience. do you see any kind of initiatives, in terms of addressing this miscommunication or disconnect with the large percentage? i remember being asked about "la boheme" on broadway. she immediately said it was not an operatic experience. i thought "she did not just put down that person's development of their experience." >> the word borders has many implications -- certainly, borders between our disciplines are very interesting. the chinese have a multi

millennium tradition of painting with poetry. one of my favorite movements, post picasso, was a movement called "orfism," which was intended to involve music with painting, which is an interesting conceptualization. but there are lots of overlaps. i know as a young person i wondered other kinds of borders. i was a student of russian. a group of young kids act -- vowed to speak russian while traveling through russia. in a little town in georgia, in russia, one sunday there was this group of kids that were singing and elvis presley album.

i went up to them. i am speaking russian. i soon found they could not speak a word of english, but they could sing elvis. there was a former president of oberlin who wrote a book on the importance of jazz in the second russian revolution, the revolution that toppled communism, suggesting that jazz was the first emanation of real freedom of some russians and that it had a phenomenal ramification in movements towards political freedom. so you had the transmigration of music to politics. i think that these aspects of the creative mind working in hugely different ways, on different people in different times and different

environments -- all of which is fabulous. >> albert small. >> this is probably a little more basic than some of the other discussions, but i am concerned about the youth of our country. they are the ones who are going to decide whether the humanities and arts are going to thrive in the future. every newspaper in the country has a sports section every day. there is only one paper that has a cultural section every day, the new york times. there is a big disparity between sports all around the country and culture. every time i turn the television on icy sports. on the weekends you see sports. there is so much money involved in official sports that it

dominates a lot of things. i do not know the answer to that. i am posing the question. everybody who gets a newspaper every day, everyday the sports section is right here. i think the young people of the country, that is where their heads are. it is not us in this room. it is the young people who are going to carry the burden or thrive in the arts and humanities. >> i appreciate the perspective about the youth. my sense is i would not write it off too quickly. as was mentioned by shane, music is a pretty driving thing in american society. youths are getting into it in many different ways. the things that i am concerned about are a little bit more on

the humanities side, because history is no longer as fashionable as it once was. the discipline is not there. there are lots of things that are not being studied today. these indicators that we -- we all hate indicators. use not knowing when the civil war occurred -- youth not knowing when the civil war occurred. how do you have a sense of perspective? it is really worrisome. the other thing that is new, absolutely new -- i used to, as a member of congress, give lectures to seventh and eighth graders. i would start off by saying, " everybody has heard what every parent has ever said -- you have to learn from your own mistakes." but we are in a world where we

have to be smart enough to learn from the mistakes of others. for a kid, if you do not see what drugs do to someone else you are going to be vulnerable to trying them. you cannot afford to learn from your own mistakes. likewise, if you take society -- it is true we had an experiment with hiroshima and nagasaki. but we cannot afford to learn from another major nuclear exchange because there might not be anyone to learn from. so there are some things we have to be wise enough to know were a little different than any other generation. to me, that means it is more important to study the humanities and think through the arts and to participate in arts endeavors. and i worry a lot that school systems throughout the country are giving less attention to some of the subjects.

>> finley lewis. >> to follow up on that congressional report. [inaudible] that is a basic foot hold that the congress has in elementary and second grade -- and secondary school education. as a matter of public policy, if you were in congress, how would you use the reauthorization of that bill to deal with some of the problems you are discussing today? >> first, i would like to stress i am a little beyond the presumption of advising another member of congress. i do my best not to. all i can tell you is that i

think we have no choice but to put massive new attention at the youngest levels of education in america today. it is back to this question -- all the studies that have ever been done -- if you cannot read by the age of 10, you have a 10 or 15 times greater chance of ending up in jail. i think we really have to recognize that we have to start at the beginning. we also have to acknowledge there are some things our society has done better than we might suspect. community colleges are something no society ever had. we need them for a variety of reasons. one is for catch up. one is for cost. another is for organizing education built into a work environment. at the higher academic levels, i

just hope that people recognize that the most fun disciplines are the ones you can keep up forever. it seems to me english is a great major. but if you go to universities around the country the largest major is increasingly business administration, which has relevance. i do not deny that. at your more elite institutions, the biggest major is the department of economics. everyone is looking in a kind of direction that seems to be tied to a job. i respect that a great deal, but i think one is really missing the big picture if universities

do not recalculate what education is all about. >> forgive my enthusiasm. . it is all about education. a query about whether we are our best advocates in the arts and humanities. i had the privilege of being part of a one day american art museum directors junket to capitol hill and to the department of education. i was stunned by how little our colleagues and the professionals at the department of education in new about what, from my perspective as a museum professional over decades, has been a reinvention of what a museum is expected to do, as we have done the heavy lifting as our public school system as reined in its robustness.

i thought my goodness. we are obviously not doing a very good job of communicating the role that museums and libraries and other cultural institutions play, because they did not know all about the educational endeavors. i would welcome any thoughts that you would have about how we can be better advocates. >> there is no secret to advocacy. it is very straightforward and it is very educated. one of the things that everybody in the arts and humanities have in common is that they are rather educated people who know how to communicate. my sense is you work at that. then you look at some aspects of american history. as you may know, my wife did a small book on jacob lawrence for the phillips collection. one of the things that sticks out in my mind was a picture of

a young african american in harlem named jacob lawrence. he is pictured at a summer program that was part of a federal program. he is in a class. what stunned me was all of these kids in this class were wearing ties. my image of an artist does not wear a tie. and yet this was a matter of total pride. when you think of sports, you are thinking about, among other things, after-school activities. i think we have really missed the boat in the after-school activity issue on both the arts and humanities. what can be done to keep people enthused after school? and in the summers? i think those are the kinds of

the programs we would think about. for example, everybody knows there are summer programs for basketball in this country. that is terrific. i am all for it. why shouldn't there also be some summer school programs in sculpture? may be reading history? maybe that is a way of picking up on that our school year is shorter than some school years of other countries in the world. i think we are going to have to think about these things. >> sidney lawrence. >> i am sidney lawrence. i am an artist wearing a tie. [laughter] i actually am on your wall, i

think. i am also an art critic. my question has to do with -- first, i was going to ask what you thought about film in terms of the humanities and also the arts. thinking about it, i want to know how you find it -- how you might think -- one thing the kids do where they could be reached is through the brought screen culture we have now, all the things people hold in their hands and looked at at home as well as going to the movies and renting dvd is. do you have ideas about how that might help the humanities -- the muscle of humanity get into people's brains? also, are you finding any things like that? >> we do film. in fact, one of my surprises was just how many films we had done. i am looking at whether or not some of these films can be translated into other languages

that be sent abroad. these are films from the archives. i do think films are pretty fabulously creative. there are extremes, as you know. we just had a film that cost half a billion dollars. it's, by the way, in my view, a movie about bridging cultures in the future. but it might be cheaper to buy a book about the city's and the polynesian wars. you might get lessons of a similar kind. films are absolutely extraordinary in their power, in their reach, in their creativity. it is astonishing how young people are doing more. i mean grade school people are now making movies. where this goes is going to be

just sensational for the future and i am told we now have three the tv's -- 3d tvs. this is a film world. i wish we had more in resources, in some ways. i will tell you i was giving a speech about a month ago. i like to pride myself on writing my own speeches, but i asked my agency to come up with a paragraph for me on the numbers of what we have done in total in the past. the paragraph came back. it was adroitly written. i looked at it and refused to use the paragraph because i wanted to cry at how small the numbers were. do we do films? we do. do we make much of a mark? no.

we do the best we can with limited resources. >> we have time for one more question. jonathan katz? >> i am with the national assembly of state arts agencies. when you talk about the need for cultures to understand each other globally, i thought here is clearly an area of common interest between the state department and the neh. when you talked about the need to educate young people in a reflective capacity, i thought here is an opportunity for a partnership with the department of education. i have seen sometimes these kinds of partnerships institutionalized in the national endowment for the arts, like the arts education partnership that spanned administrations. i wonder where you see long-term strategic partnerships either within the federal government or

with public interest groups? >> we do work with other agencies. the three we have historically worked the most with, in terms of dollar interrelationships, or the library of congress, the museum of library services, and the national science foundation. we have also done projects with the department of education. we certainly work with the department of state. state is not a great reservoir for resources. they are pretty tightly run. but clearly how we interrelate with other institutions and work together is one way of using capacities of each in different ways. i think we are going to have to do more of that. it will be helpful. >> before we close, you are here

surrounded by some of the nation's leaders in the arts, culture, humanities, and education. there are more people on television and the internet. are there parting words you would like to make or any advice you might want to offer in this time of economic challenge and spiritual confusion? [laughter] >> let me say two things. everybody in this town knows that all presidents do not want to say "on the one hand on the other," but there are difficulties. the united states of america, by a quantitative measure, leads the world. there is no one close. in some ways, the real challenge is that we continue this. and there is real prospect that the competition out there is

going to make that very hard. one of the great circumstances is how do you not flop as a society. the national endowment for the humanities is one very small institution, but it is an emblematic one. i hope we are able to preserve it in the way it is. but the bigger issue always is where we are as a society itself. america is facing these challenges that are severe economic, severe international, and really testing to our people. this is a test we have to rise above. i will tell you i just visited one of the finest humanities programs we have ever helped fund, a small exhibit in new york at the new york historical

society on lincoln in new york. i had never really thought that lincoln had much of a presence in new york that mattered. it ends up it mattered in a great deal, in a whole host of ways. some of these pictorial circumstances -- a group called the copperheads, who were for slavery, against clinton being able to control the militia of the state of new york -- a group called the brooklyn soperistics -- groups in the north holding ideas you would think for 16th century. contrast it with an unbelievably enlightened leader and enlightened leadership around the country of a very different bill.

-- different ilk. lincoln helped lead this country but the country helped lead at lincoln. that is the way we are today. we have these challenges. the question is whether the great instincts of our country are going to come out. if they don't we are in trouble. if they do, watch out. this place is going to take off. >> thank you, chairman jim leach. [applause] h[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2010] >> coming up next, supreme court justice stephen breyer on foreign what and the united states constitution. after that, another chance to see the head of