In the coming year the National Endowment for the Humanities will mark its 50th anniversary, and the SCS joins the American Council of Learned Societies and other humanities associations in celebrating this milestone. During the last five decades the NEH has stood as a beacon of our nation’s strong support for sustaining and advancing the humanities through education, research, and public outreach. Many of our own organization’s most important accomplishments over that half-century were made possible through support from the NEH.
The birth of the NEH took place in a period of great cultural change in our country. In the early 1960s the United States was responding to cold war tensions by investing heavily in science and mathematics education in order to improve our technological capacities and maintain leadership in the space race. In 1963 the ACLS, the Council of Graduate Schools, and Phi Beta Kappa jointly sponsored a Commission on the Humanities, which recommended the foundation of a national humanities agency to redress the emphasis on science at all educational levels from elementary schools through graduate programs. In September of 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation to create both the NEH and the NEA (see "How the NEH Got Its Start"). Since that time, the NEH has consistently offered testament to our communal belief in the public and private value of the humanities for all citizens.
NEH support has been instrumental in major APA/SCS projects for more than three decades. In 1980 we received a challenge grant from the NEH of just $60,000 that allowed us to build our General Fund (now worth over $3 million) and supported our subsequent publications and professional matters programs. For years the NEH provided core financing for the DCB (Database of Classical Bibliography), which became the basis of the on-line version of L’année philologique, and then provided continuing support for the American Office of L’année. The decision to fix an endpoint for that support led to the Gateway Campaign, to which a second challenge grant contributed key matching funds. As a result, our organization now fully funds the English-language office through a substantial endowment, which also supports educational grants and the new public face of the SCS. The magnificent Barrington Atlas is another APA-sponsored research tool that owes much to the NEH, and that agency also offers ongoing support for the Fellow we send each year to Munich to work on the TLL. Earlier, in the 1970s and 1980s, the NEH supported a number of smaller APA educational projects: a Conference on Educational Innovation and the Smaller Classics Departments, various programs concerning Classical Humanities in the American Republic, and the publication of Mary Ann T. Burns and Joseph F. O’Connor’s The Classics in American Schools: Teaching the Ancient World. Major NEH grants have gone to Aquila Theatre Company to bring classical drama to underserved and military populations, with the assistance of the APA in recruiting experts to lead pre- and post-show discussions.
Many members of the SCS have also benefited from individual and project grants for scholarly research and education. The names of these members are strewn throughout our old Newsletters, and there are undoubtedly others who escaped recognition for their honor. Since the details of these are mostly unknown to me, I will just comment on my own NEH Fellowship in 2004-2005, which allowed me to make significant progress on a long-term project, examine manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, lecture at various institutions in Europe, and serve as an invited professor at L’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. That NEH Fellowship has also paved the way for other grants that continued sponsorship of my research. I’m sure stories like this can be read between the lines of the curricula vitae of many of our members.
From all of us, let me say thank you, NEH, and Happy Anniversary!
Kathryn Gutzwiller