Date:  Thu, 22 Jun 1995 09:18:48 -0400

From:  Wayne Glowka <wglowka[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MAIL.GAC.PEACHNET.EDU>

Subject: Re: A Dumb Question about the NEH



>Wayne Glowka's comment (question) on possible transfer of NEH money to the

>states is not dumb at all. Here's the why not, as far as I can see:

>

>1) there would be 50 bureaucracies for people to deal with instead of

>one, requiring many times (though perhaps not 50 times) the support

>staff. From what I have seen of NEH, their staff and offices are now

>lean and mean, not bloated and ripe for hacking like the Dept. of

>Agriculture.

>

>2) state funding for individuals (fellowships) would be fine, but as

>Wayne suggested it would be very difficult for those of us with

>multi-state projects. Even larger projects within each state would have

>terrible problems: if each state had $3 million, of which $1 million

>went for overhead of different kinds, it would be hard to justify any

>large grants owing to the large number of state interests that need to be

>satisfied. The Ga Humanities programs dole out $1000 at a time.

>

>3) many of the projects that NEH was established to help---dictionaries,

>atlases, editions, translations---are in the national interest, not in

>the interest of any state. Dividing up money by state makes every local

>interest a player *against* the larger national interest, because state

>bureaucracies would want to keep the money at home and not fritter it

>away on things that were not of local interest. At best, there would be

>an interest in paying scholars and citizens within the state, even if

>their projects were national or global, and even that would make it hard

>to work collaborations across state lines (as I have attempted several

>times).

>

>4) Finally, block grants to states do not always get used for the

>purposes one expects them to. One can imagine the (possible) NEH block

>grant to Georgia being used to fund Gov. Miller's Country Music Hall of

>Fame, or paying for reduced-price movie tickets for urban residents at

>midnight (instead of crime-bill basketball), or funding the establishment

>of "humanities camps" for first-time offenders that the state didn't want

>to pay to put in high-security prison (like our current bootcamps).

>While these might be good ideas and even be popular in the state, they

>are hardly the kind of scholarly programs that our national NEH supports.

>

>Regards, Bill



Well said, Bill.





Wayne Glowka

Professor of English

Director of Research and Graduate Student Services

Georgia College

Milledgeville, GA 31061

912-453-4222

wglowka[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]mail.gac.peachnet.edu