The following is the text of an opinion about what is going to be happening= =20 with the National Endowment for the Humanities next Tuesday, January 24 -- The quiet sister agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Humanities Endowment, comes before Congress Tuesday, January 24, the afternoon before President Clinton's State of the Union Address. Four witnesses are scheduled to appear before Ohio Republican Ralph Regula's Interior Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. Among the nine Republicans is Louisiana's Robert Livingston, who chairs Appropriations. The five Democrats who will listen to former NEH Chairmen Lynne V. Cheney and William J. Bennett include Sid Yates of Illinois, Ranking Minority Member who is serving his sixteenth term in Congress. On the agenda is cutting the current NEH appropriation. The former NEH heads will be joined by former National Endowment for the Humanities Council members Edwin J. Delattre and Getrude Himmelfarb in calling for recission, perhaps even total abolishment of the agency formed by Congress in 1965 in legislation which declared that "The humanities belong to all the people of the United States."=7F Both Cheney and Bennett, now Senior Fellows of The American Enterprise Institute, once spoke eloquently for the NEH. Both often quoted philosopher Charles Frankel, who said of the 1965 authorizing legislation, "Nothing has happened of greater importance in the history of American humanities scholarship than the invitation of the government to scholars to think in a more public fashion . . . with the presence of their fellow citizens in= mind." Most of what the NEH supports is not the stuff of headlines. Few Americans know about saving 600,000 brittle books in 70 libraries over the last 15 years; about giving modest support to about 100 seminars and institutes for elementary and secondary teachers on such topics as the New England Renaissance, Classic Works of American Federal Democracy, Athenian Democracy and Its Legacy, and Charles Dickens and the 1840's in England; or about the microfilming of 52 million pages of newspapers in 47 states and two territories since 1982. In an average year, the 55 state affiliates of the NEH draw six million to humanities programs where scholars meet the public directly, another 10 million to exhibits, and an estimated 150 million to radio and television programs. The big three arguments against continuing the NEH will focus on spending even the modest seventy cents per American (annual budget of $177 million) at a time when all agree government must cut spending; on what detracters call the leftist, liberal politics and philosophy of the academic humanities community; and on what some have termed "welfare for the privileged" in the belief that the programs appeal to a limited, rather wealthy audience. Before the NEH "goes gentle into that good night," as poet Dylan Thomas said of death, there may be another hearing, equal time to remind Congress that the NEH is still very much about the activity that Cheney and Bennett found so essential to American democracy short years ago. What was only well begun, as Lynne Cheney so eloquently said in her 1988 _Humanities in American Life_, continues in much the same way it did during her tenure and that of Chairman Bennett. What current Chairman Sheldon Hackney has asked for is no more than using the best texts we can possibly find in the rich cultural humanities works as a means for "all of our people --= left, right, and center -- to examine and discuss what unites us as a country, what we share as common American values." Let the issue be clearer than it now is. The NEH supports programs for the public, for the millions who have enjoyed Ken Burns' _Civil War_ and _Baseball_; for the thousands who have read the treasured books in the Library of America which will become family heirlooms, the works of Jefferson and Melville and the dozens of others in definitive editions on acid-free paper; and for the tens of millions who have participated in= public projects in the smallest of communities in every state and territory. It is not, finally, a question of money. In comparison to what the poorest= of nations which have ever existed have taxed themselves for preservation, celebration and examination of cultural heritage, the NEH budget is miniscule. It is a question of value, of whether or not there will be= national recognition for the life of the mind and spirit by the most materially comfortable citizens who ever came together. NEH is in the tradition of the citizens of Florence taxing themselves to hear Boccaccio lecture on the works of Dante and the Athenians supporting their theater. Finally, if indeed university and college faculty have lost touch with core American values and ideals, the NEH is an antidote rather than a contributer to that which Bennett has called "the devaluing of America." Thomas Jefferson, was often quoted by former NEH Chairmen as well as the gentleman and scholar, current NEH Chairman Sheldon Hackney, who would have all American citizens have access to excellence in the humanities. Jefferson wrote, "Enlighten the people generally, and every form of tyranny, both of mind and body, will disappear." America is a democracy. We cannot afford to send our humanities scholars back to ivory towers. Chief among its many virtues, which include loyalty to the very best of American heritage, so praised by Bennett in his _Book of Virtues_, is NEH's unwavering insistence upon making the humanities available to every citizens of the United States. Let the future of the= quiet agency be decided by asking ourselves if we are ready to forsake all that can be done with so little, the price of a burger or half the cost of a= piece of American apple pie. [log in to unmask] Everett C. Albers ND Humanities Council 2900 Broadway E., Suite 3 PO Box 2191 Bismarck, ND 58502-2191 FAX: 701-223-8724 TELEPHONE: 701-255-3360 TOLL-FREE OUTSIDE BISMARCK: 1-800-338-6543