Classics v. Comics

Does a course in the lyrics of Bob Dylan and the Beatles deserve a subsidy from the Federal Government? The question is typical of the debate that has been taking place within the National Endowment for the Humanities--a debate that will help to shape the direction of federal spending on scholarship for years to come.

Since it was founded in 1965 to promote U.S. achievements "in the realm of ideas and of the spirit," the Endowment for the Humanities has quietly granted almost $70 million, mostly for noncontroversial projects: preparing definitive editions of the works of Twain, Melville and Thoreau, editing the private papers of George Washington, filming biographies of prominent Americans for educational television. The endowment has rarely attracted public attention, though its budget grew from $2.5 million in 1966 to $38 million this year (almost one-third of it for education).

Despite its lack of trumpeting, however, the agency's Democratic-appointed leaders--notably Education Director Herbert McArthur, former associate dean of arts and sciences at the University of Vermont--tried to make the endowment a "risk-taking agency." They warmly supported such projects as a study of 19th century comic strips and an archaeological dig by elementary students in New York's Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto. Says McArthur: "The endowment must be committed to promoting change and experimentation. It must demonstrate that the liberal arts are important to urban people."

Then, last December, President Nixon appointed Ronald S. Berman, 41, a Harvard-and Yale-trained Shakespeare scholar from the University of California, San Diego, to head the endowment. Berman had complained in his 1968 book America in the Sixties: An Intellectual History of the "disastrous vulgarization of intellectual life"; he once described Bertrand Russell and Herbert Marcuse as "the Abbott and Costello of political philosophy." Dissatisfied with McArthur's projects, he set out to change the endowment's direction.

Discord. His goal, he said, was to bring the best of the humanities to ordinary Americans. High on his agenda, for example, were proposals to finance a television series on Shakespeare's plays and novels by Charles Dickens and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In this, he took what critics have called a "strict constructionist" view of the humanities, saying the endowment should refuse to finance "Classic Comics--culture simplified and castrated." Declared Berman: "I'm a professional scholar and naturally want to preserve the best in our humanist traditions."

The discord became public this month after Berman tried unsuccessfully to veto three grants that had been endorsed by McArthur and approved by the endowment's 26-member governing council.

One, for $350,000, was to enable Case Western Reserve to develop a new curriculum that will include, among other things, a study of popular song lyrics, science fiction and books such as The Greening of America and The Harrad Experiment; $232,622 was earmarked for Alice Lloyd College, a small institution in Kentucky, for new courses including one that would use drama to teach students their Appalachian culture; and $650,000 was for Fisk University for a new program that would incorporate teaching techniques like "guerrilla theater." Berman said these elements of the three projects failed to meet the endowment's standards of quality. "We owe people the best of education," he explained. "It's a disservice to any kind of student to submit him to a low-grade curriculum because we don't think he's good enough to cope with a better one."

After a protracted controversy, McArthur and his assistant, Louis Norris, agreed to resign at Berman's request. Berman declared the debate "a closed issue," but he also proposed new policy guidelines that emphasize "serious, intellectual, disciplined study." The guidelines declare that the endowment "is not interested in random speculation about contemporary events but only in the application of rigorous humanistic thinking."

Exactly how "rigorous humanistic thinking" is to be applied remains to be discussed at a meeting of the governing council in October, when McArthur's supporters expect, as one of them said, "the various viewpoints to be laid bare."

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