policy and advocacy
Issue Brief: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
Enriching America's Cultural and Intellectual Life
ACTION NEEDED
We urge Congress to provide an additional $36 million for the NEH in the FY08 Interior Appropriations bill, for a total funding level of $177 million. This increase represents an important step forward in restoring funding for NEH to its historic levels.
Table: NEH Annual Appropriations, FY94 to Present (in millions of dollars) Note: Figures above are not adjusted for inflation. Source: NEH
TALKING POINTS
- The humanities are essential to democracy. A government that supports and funds the humanities fosters a better understanding of our history, culture and the world we live in. This enables a well-prepared citizenry to make informed decisions when faced with social, political, and technological issues.
- A small investment through NEH goes a long way. NEH provides seed money for high-quality projects and programs that reach millions of Americans each year. This money, and NEH's reputation, leverage millions of dollars in private support for humanities projects.
- The endowment’s competitive peer review process encourages excellence. NEH-supported works have earned nearly 600 awards, including nine Pulitzer Prizes, eight Bancroft Prizes, and six National Book Awards.
- NEH is critical to addressing the nation's future needs in education. More than two-thirds of our nation's K-12 curriculum is dedicated to the humanities; 2 million new teachers will be needed in our classrooms over the next decade, and four out of five teachers feel inadequately prepared in their subject area.
- NEH provides critical leadership in preserving our historical and cultural heritage, from a 20-year effort to film crumbling books ("brittle books"), to programs that assist museums with the stabilization of material culture collections. At-risk objects include books, journals, newspapers, manuscripts, archival collections, maps, photographs, films, sound recordings, oral histories, archaeological and ethnographic objects, decorative and fine art, and textiles.
- NEH provides critical support for humanities scholarship and facilitates the flow of scholarly research to the public through books, articles, educational television and radio programs, and other media.
- NEH engages Americans at all levels of learning through public programs in the humanities, including exhibits in museums, libraries, and historical organizations; through the programs of the state humanities councils; and a variety of other activities, such as radio, film, and television productions.
BACKGROUND
The NEH, an independent federal agency, is the largest single funder of humanities programs in the United States, providing grants for high-quality humanities projects in four primary funding areas: preservation, education, research, and public programs. Grants typically go to cultural institutions such as museums, archives, libraries, colleges, universities, state humanities councils, public television and radio stations, film producers, and to individual scholars. NEH extends its reach through annual grants to its partner institutions, the state humanities councils, located in every state and U.S. territory. Dr. Bruce Cole, the Chairman of NEH, is a distinguished professor of art history, specializing in the Renaissance.
NEH is funded at an estimated $140.949 million in FY07. For fiscal year 2008, the President has requested $141.355 million for the agency, approximately level funding over the previous year. A small increase of $400,000 is provided, including $230,000 for administrative costs and $170,000 for program funds. Unfortunately, the President’s proposal would cut competitive grant funds within NEH core programs by approximately $1.1 million (includes Education, Preservation & Access, Public Programs, Research and Challenge Grants). $1.4 million is provided for the NEH’s new Digital Humanities Initiative.
What are the humanities?
According to the NEH’s founding legislation, “The term ‘humanities’ includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; and those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods.”
Digital Humanities Initiative
NEH launched a new initiative in 2006, aimed at supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. Digital technologies offer students and educators new methods of conducting research, conceptualizing relationships, and presenting scholarship. The NEH initiative is intended to foster the growth of digital humanities resources by supporting projects that: use digital technologies and methods to enhance understanding of a topic or issue; study the impact of digital technology on the humanities; or that digitize important humanities materials to increase the public's ability to search and access information.
NEH and the Arts
The NEH plays an important role in promoting knowledge of and appreciation for the arts in America. NEH provides critical support for scholarly research in the history, theory, and criticism of the arts. NEH professional development seminars for K-12 and college teachers help improve the teaching and learning of art history in classrooms across the United States. NEH-supported film and radio programs reach millions of viewers, helping to advance the public understanding of and appreciation for the arts. NEH provides critical resources to the nation's art museums in the form of grants to support exhibitions, exhibition catalogs, facilities improvements, collections enhancement, and preservation training. NEH-supported preservation projects have helped save literally millions of culturally and historically significant objects at risk due to their composition or storage conditions.
NEH makes grants to promote the documentation, understanding, and preservation of the arts in a broad range of areas, such as: visual art, art history, theater, literature, dance, music, and world cultures. To demonstrate the depth of NEH support for the arts, here are just a few examples of grants made within the last few years, dealing with the theme, "theater":
Film Production - a $550,000 grant to “City Lore: NY Center for Urban Folk Culture” for a two-hour film exploring the life and work of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill directed by Ric Burns (2005)
Exhibits - a $40,000 grant to the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, GA to support planning for a permanent exhibition and web site using puppetry as a lens through which to view commonalities and differences in world cultures from ancient times to present (2006)
Endowment Building - a $500,000 challenge grant to the Washington Drama Society/Arena Stage for an endowment to enhance humanities-related audience enrichment and education programming (2005)
Preservation and Access - a $5,000 grant to the Vermont Museum & Gallery Alliance for a consultant’s analysis of historic painted theater curtains and the development of a plan for their conservation (2005)
Scholarly Research - a $24,000 fellowship to a scholar at Harvard University in Massachusetts to research “Leonard Bernstein and the Theater” (2004)
Teacher Training - a $69,507 grant to the University of Redlands to support two three-day workshops for twenty-five undergraduate faculty in Asian theater, focusing on Japanese, Indonesian, and Indian dramatic traditions (2005)