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♪ >> up next, the head of the national endowment for the humanities discusses the importance of art and american history. then, supreme court's toast -- supreme court justice stephen briar. --breyer.

and then the radio and tv correspondents dinner. >> three former staffers of former senator bob dole look at like a step -- legislation he sponsored. that is tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. eastern on c-span3 then, at 12:15 p.m., a look at the future of american culture that is tomorrow on c-span. this weekend, john dean is our guest. the author of 10 books, including an upcoming addition, and we will take your phone calls sunday, at noon eastern. >> and now, former congressman and current head of the national endowment for the humanities

talks about understanding culture and the arts. he talks about his efforts to bring stability to public discourse this is moderated by the former head of the national endowment for the arts. the aspen institute is the host of this event. last about an hour -- it lasts about an hour. >> good afternoon. welcome to the aspen institute. i am the director of programs and the arts. it is my pleasure to welcome you to one of our cultural round tables. i would like to thank michelle smith for helping make this series possible. this series possible. it is my pleasure to do another of what we think of as a particular aspin kind of experience -- aspen kind of experience.

i am delighted to have my friend, jim leach, the ninth chairman for the national endowment for the humanities. i still think of him as congressman leach. he was one of the most supportive members of either house of congress in terms of the arts and humanities i know that i could not have been happier and i suspect that most of you share that emotion when it was announced that he had been appointed the ninth chairman of the neh. chairman leach has a unique background. i think he is the only chairman in history, in this case, it 15 term congressman, he was educated at princeton, johns

hopkins, and the school of economics. his background, from the beginning, was an international background. at hopkins, he did a master's degree in soviet politics and he went on in congress to found and co-chair the congressional humanities' caucus, and ultimately chaired the asia- pacific subcommittee. he then fled congress temporarily two years ago and taught at princeton and harvard before he was sucked back into the federal government to serve as the chair of the neh. his most interesting distinction is not his congressional service, his eight on reader agrees, but i think he must be the only neh chair in history to

be honored in the international wrestling hall of fame. it is certainly good training for congress. welcome to the aspen institute. >> i am honored to be i think that has been -- i am honored to be here. there are a lot of things that we could talk about. what i wanted to actually ask you -- it goes back to what i said in my introduction. you have an absolutely unique and invaluable training for a cultural chairman, which is that you were a member of congress. you understand the congressional process. that is something that is really fundamental to the success of

the cultural agencies. what is your perspective on that? is that something that you think will have value and hope you do a better job at the neh? >> not necessarily at all. cultural agencies are very different from how congress works and congress is an ever- changing institution. there are a lot of hills and valleys that are yet to be seen. i think that everybody knows that we are in difficult times and dealing with issues that are truly oppressive. this is the first generation that has the capacity to destroy the entire planet with nuclear weaponry then we have all of

these analogies about the [unintelligible] in which we are moving closer in which we are moving closer together and rubbing elbows i think we are having real issues with increase globalism. people are looking for solutions to almost everything. you have this tension and then you have new economic phenomenon where we have found that we have been able to advance economic activity around the world. we have found that they have been able to contract. we have contracted for two

years are having to learn to deal with it. >> coming out of a couple of years in higher education, where you were at two of the leading institutions of the united states, are you bringing specific goals to the nea right now? -- to the neh right now? are there particular goals you want to accomplish? >> a lot of people do not understand these two endowments, the arts and humanities. let me make a distinction. the arts are all about supporting the creative processes, particularly living arts. the humanities are all about perspective -- history, philosophy, literature, and related disciplines. each operates a uniquely with basically only to other institutions in america -- the

international institute of health in the national science foundation, where we allocate federal funds based on peer review. we believe -- we bring the best and brightest in various fields to assess projects or grants of one kind or another. so when you ask about goals one is to preserve the institution as it has come into being. it has developed a wonderful track record. beyond that, there are challenges of the time. i have made to initiatives that are not exactly goals, but there is a thin line between a goal and an initiative. one i call putting a greater emphasis on what it is that makes a people a people and what it is that makes people differentiated.

we are a society that has a wondrous national culture but we are also a mosaic of subcultures. so understanding ourselves is very important. we are looking at a world in which there are huge numbers of cultures, some widely disparate. most of these large cultures have many subcultures. so one of the great questions is -- can we understand better? one might say, does that matter? i sometimes suggest that it is always hard to put numbers on programs and their importance. but one can say almost definitively that there is a huge cost of not understanding other cultures. and by huge -- it is how you interrelate with the world commercially as well as whether you have a war or peace. you asked me about congress. i will tell you. one of the things i find absolutely astonishing is that

the united states of america was involved in the first gulf war under the first president bush, but as we have led up to the second war that we did not know was coming i do not think there were many members of congress that have the foggiest idea that there is a difference between sunni and shia. i do not think there were that many in the united states government that did. what that means is that we as a country have to think more. if you go internally, we have become, in many ways, a much richer culture, in terms of people from more and more lands who have come here, people that interrelate with their past experience. they do it differently in alabama than they do in new jersey or iowa. every year we see differentiation is of a different kind. this we can look at as

wonderful or we can say "people that are different, we do not like." there is that instinct in all of us, on both sides. you try to get people to think or positively about each other. i will tell you, as someone who has travelled this country, talking about this concept of civility -- it is astonishing what the new american rhetoric is. we have people that are saying to other people "you are communist. you are a fascist." or maybe both at the same time. [laughter] there are people using words we have not used in this century. the word secession is now in the mind of the united states of america. the word nullification is starting to be altered -- to be starting to be altered -- to be ut

guess we have got to understand our own history and our own philosophy and how that can join. if we do not, our society will have a very hard time hanging together. >> have you initiated any programs for broader, international exchange? anything that will help build the civility? >> we do have a number of things internationally. there are major programs in china. much of our research is esoteric. we have done work with museums in afghanistan and we have done work with aspects of chinese

culture. there are new fields of research. one did not exist 10 years ago. we have done a series of exploration with opportunities of what we call bridging disciplines, where we are having people apply for grants onemore discipline, from more university, from more than one country, as a mandate, together. we are working with the british equivalent of the neh as well as the national science foundation to do kinds of research of a very different nature. >> if you go to educational organizations, historical organizations, organizations in the humanities or the arts, and

you ask them what they want from the neh or the n e a i think unanimously they will say "more money." they want the money more than the ideas or the strategies or whatever. the u.s. government is entering an extremely tough. of budgetary demands -- an extremely tough period of budgetary demands and constraints. what do you think is the prospect for the cultural agencies right now, facing these new economic realities? >> let me say a comment about money, in the sense of -- money is something new transfer for a purpose. one of the fabulous aspect of the united states is that we transfer money for individuals to do things around the country. in other words, the national endowment of arts and the national endowment for the humanities are not institutions

which in and of themselves are producing great art and humanities projects. they are precipitating the great american citizens to do great art and great humanities research, and great humanities translation of research to the public themself. from a money perspective, there is a macro economic dilemma that faces every discipline of any kind in every community of any kind. that is that in the last few years we have seen, at a minimum, a 20% erosion in the real wealth of the united states of america, and of the average american family. and that is -- it could be a little higher than 20%. that means every governmental agency and every government unit, from a city to the federal government, has less to draw

upon, just as the american family has less to draw upon. we are looking at a federal government that has announced a freeze on domestic-level spending for a three-year period. that is something we in the humanities and arts will have to cope with. i must say my perspective -- the peak year for both of these endowments was the year 1979. we are at about 37% in inflation-adjusted terms to where we are -- to where we were then. there has been a slippage over time. congress has been committed to repaying these endowments. the president has been committed in the same way. where we go in the future is anybody's guess. having said that about the endowments -- we are a small part of the american art scene

and humanities scene. i was visited this week in what i considered to be a stunning circumstance. president sarkozy of france sent a representative to find out how america does its culture. the french were looking at how we do things. [laughter] i made it clear to him that in the united states how we operate, in levels of government and types of institutions -- which are principally, in the arts and humanities, a private citizen oriented circumstance. many european countries are much more governmental in their systems. that does not mean one system is better or worse than another. it is how these societies fit their traditions and cultures and whatever. but if you take the humanities -- at every level, there is

great restraint. state governments are now pulling back their support for higher education dramatically. the average state university use to get a third of its budget from the states. now, it is far less than 1/6. if you take, within the university communities, the humanities subjects, they are being dumped in favor of things considered more job-centric. when you serve the corporate leaders in america, they want more people educated in the arts and humanities. they also want them to study business, but they first want them to have a background in other cultures, other languages, and capacity to think. in terms of dealing with the world, the arts and humanities are unique in the sense of allowing people to learn some perspective and learn how to think imaginatively. this is a world of change, where imagination is going to be the key.

if you look at the issues that new corporations -- when the business company looks for new hires, their top complaints are "can't write, can't read," which are skills one hopes are learned in the humanities. >> if i can ask a question that comes out of what you just said -- if you are talking about the state universities, which are under absolute budget pressure, and then pressure within those universities to penalize the humanities budget disproportionately to other fields, does the neh have a public role in terms of articulating the rationale for the humanities? >> it is hard to say, with regard to a specific university -- one has to be careful. but in terms of the role of the humanities itself, absolutely. sometimes, in higher education

today, people look at what can lose the least amount of money or make money. but education is supposed to be education and there is supposed to be a cost to it. if you give incentives to go in one direction and you do not in another, it matters to where people are going to land. i am speaking very strongly to the humanities community that we have to stand up and make it clear that our particular disciplines matter. they matter a great deal. if the american university community wants to back off of teaching the humanities it is going to be a real cost to american society. a very unfortunate circumstance. >> when i was chairman of the national endowment for the arts, about two months after i took the job, i had to deal with the first of what became a recurring

issue, which was that a state was in the process of taking its arts council out of existence. i had the very fun task of talking to governors and lieutenant governors and majority and minority leaders about the fact that we would withhold federal funds if they got rid of their arts agency. do you see any similar trend happening in terms of state humanities? >> my background in the arts has the same phenomenon. there is a state humanities council in all 50 states, precipitated by national statute. there is a state's arts council in all 50 states, as well as in the territories that we control. the neh and neli are all -- and nea are organized like a mini state department. we have organizations in every state. in the state department,

washington sends it direct to you and the investor snaps to. when we suggest something, we are in danger of a yawn. you never know. but what i am saying is our state councils are independent institutions. i am joking about a yawn because it is astonishing what work the state humanities councils do. people in washington are unaware of it, but they do programs throughout their states that fit their states. people talk differently in south carolina than they do in iowa. programs are tailored differently. they are wonderful, what the state humanities councils do. for example, they will have programs in literature, programs in history in which they reach out to the smallest towns in the state. we have a program in oregon that is called "think and drink."

we have programs that are in barbershops. it is really a fabulous out reach under the assumption -- this is a bit of an exaggeration. it is not good enough to have a month commentating in a cave if no one can hear the thoughts. somehow, you have to get a public engaged in such a way that the great books of our time and the great thoughts of our time can be translated in a public venue. that is what the council's do and they do it extremely well. having said that, every state council i know of is looking at a smaller budget than last year. they also receive some private funds, as well as the received about half their resources from the national office.

so there is pressure out there. >> american museums have a very complicated relationship with the cultural agencies because the nba finds one type of program and the neh funds a type of program and all of them receive insurance from the federal council. the museums have gone through this enormous. of expansion. during the last 20 years, they have in many cases doubled their exhibition spaces. they have increased their staffs. many of them are undergoing a very drastic financial pressure right now. do you have any perspective, in terms of the damage to public museums and ideas from the neh? >> you have to find the dilemma. there is hardly a museum in america that is not under budget pressure, and many under very intense pressure. we have vastly more museums in

america than the american people think about. no one has ever exactly counted it. we are a state of 40,000 ponds. museums across this country are like pawns. they are everywhere. it is wonderful. but it is also, in difficult economic times, hard to keep up. it tells you, because of the variety of them -- people want to have something to do with their history, or in some cases there is a brand new museum in columbia, south carolina that is largely art from switzerland. if you like jock committee -- if you like giaccometti, it is right there.

i am very worried about the state of museums. if you just visualize a museum, right away you think of something hard to heat and air conditioned. and the cost of energy is driving them nuts. it is one of the reasons we have programs on not only preservation of paper but programs that relate to how people can go and find new ways to heat and air conditioned. >> chase lined, who runs the national building museum, which has the largest lobby in the world, was nodding his head. before we open the round table up for questions from our guests, i wanted to ask you one question. also, i know there is a person you want to honor or mention after that. you are wearing -- i do not think our cameras c