 Good evening everyone. Good evening and welcome to this University of Texas celebration of the 50th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I'm Douglas Dempster, Dean of the College of Fine Arts. On behalf of Randy Diehl, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and of all our many other sponsoring organizations, I want to thank the endowments for making this visit of the chairman possible. A visit from either one of the chairs during this 50th anniversary year would have been a very special occasion for us. Having them intersect on the same day in Texas while school is still in session before this 50th anniversary year expired felt like a small touch of divine intervention, confirming something all good Texans believe anyway about our special place under heaven. So, welcome to Texas. We're grateful to the LBJ Library and Museum for hosting this semi-sentennial celebration, bringing the endowments back symbolically to where they began at the end of President Johnson's pen in that miraculous great society year of 1965. I want to thank Mark's up-to-growth staff, especially they are an amazing group who are experts at wrangling cats and deans. I want to thank all of our partnering organizations in addition to the College of Fine and Liberal Arts, the Harry Ransom Center, the LBJ School of Public Affairs, the Blant Museum, the Briscoe Center, the Humanities Institute, the Texas Cultural Trust, Humanities Texas, the Texas Commission on the Arts and the Bullock Museum, those are all the cats. And we're all enjoying this partnership. Many others were eager to commemorate the enormous good influence of the endowments on Texas and we thank all of you for coming. Thanks to all of our friends for pitching in to make this visit of the Chairman to the Lone Star State a memorable one. I hope after the formal conversation with the Chairman that you'll join us for a brief reception in the Great Hall downstairs and you'll have a chance to welcome them personally to Texas. And you'll also get to hear from our very own student Longhorn singers who were good enough to take some time off from finals week, which is this week, to entertain us. Earlier this fall, Mark and the LBJ Library organized a performance at the White House commemorating the 50th year of the endowments. President Fenves and his wife, Carmel, attended that event. It was a star studded evening, I gather, and it began with remarks by President Obama himself about the endowments. And we wanna play a bit of that for you right now. Well, good evening everybody. Welcome to the White House. You all look very sharp. Tonight we honor the 50th anniversary of the national endowment for the arts and the humanities with a celebration of one of our most precious gifts, American creativity. I wanna begin by thanking tonight's performers. We have an unbelievable lineup. There's Carol Burnett, Buddy Guy, Queen Latifah, MC Light, Audra McDonald, Ryan Stokes Mitchell, Kev Moe, Smoky Robinson, and Trombone Shorty, Esperanto Spalding, James Taylor Usher, this is an eclectic bunch. But that's what tonight is all about. In 1965, a year that President Lyndon Johnson signed into law some of America's most important achievements, Medicare and Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration Act. He also signed a law creating the national endowment of the arts and the humanities. And he did this because he believed in a great society that in his words serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. Creativity, it's always played a central role in the life of our nation. It's our artists who hold up a mirror to our society, reminding us of our common purpose and our collective obligations. But that quintessentially American creative spirit sowed in our own soil defined by our own experience flavored by each new wave of immigrants that reaches our shores. That may be our greatest export, the American soundtrack. To believe that you've just gotta watch the way that people around the world who weren't born in the USA fall in love with it, it gives you a sense of the chords we touch through our music, through our art, through our creativity. We've gotta support our artists and celebrate their work and do our part to ensure that the American creative spirit that has defined us from the very beginning will thrive for generations to come. It was tougher to get a ticket to that event than to Hamilton, I've heard. You can see the entirety of the president's remarks by Googling performance at the White House, the celebration of American creativity. And you'll be able to watch the whole evening's performance, which I don't wanna miss, on PBS on January 8th next year. So you can check your local public television listings to find out how to see that. And now I'd like to invite Dr. Greg Fenves, whom we're thrilled to have as the 29th president of the University of Texas at Austin to come up and introduce this evening's speakers. Well, thank you, Doug, and good evening. Welcome to the University of Texas at Austin for our visitors, and I'm glad we have so many students and members of our faculty here. We are delighted to host the conversation tonight. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities have been not only important to the country as President Obama spoke about, it's been enormously important to our great university since the establishment of the endowments in 1965. Could go through a long list of our faculty who have received grants or fellowships from the NEA or NEH, disciplines that cover the spectrum of human creativity and thought and humanities and the arts, everything from music to Germanic studies to the classics. So I don't want to go through all of those, but let me just identify a couple to just demonstrate and exemplify the impact that the endowments have had on UT. In 2012, Professor Francie Ostroer in the College of Fine Arts and here at the LBJ School of Public Affairs was awarded an NEA grant to study diversity on governing boards of American cultural organizations. And her research focuses on access to cultural opportunities in our increasingly diverse society. As we think about all the issues that are facing the country, that are facing American campuses today related to diversity, this is the kind of fundamental and creative thinking that's so important that's taking place in our university thanks to the NEA. The NEH has enabled our faculty to serve and strengthen society by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons to Americans, everything from school children to the general public. For example, in our great history department, Bill Brands, HW Brands has led multiple workshops throughout the state to explore the US Constitution and American history with school teachers. And there's no better way to leverage the great ideas and thoughts and insight that comes in the humanities than through educating our school teachers and the children that they educate themselves. This and numerous other public programs in Texas are supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and our own Humanities, Texas. Our community has been made better by the legislation that was signed half a century ago by this school's namesake and this building's namesake, President Lyndon B. Johnson. We are very pleased to have Lucy Johnson and her husband Ian Turpin here with us today to celebrate this. We were just talking about the White House performance that you just got a glimpse of that we were at a little over a month ago and it was truly an honor for me to represent the University of Texas at the White House and celebrating the arts and humanities with President Obama. Now he listed the performers who performed at that event and you'll be able to see on January 8th but I have to admit he lost me after Carol Burnett. But it was a great show. Now to introduce tonight's headliner, tonight's panel. Jane Chu is the 11th chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and is also an accomplished artist and musician herself. In her time as chairman, the NEA has awarded nearly $220 million in grants related to the arts. Our second panelist is NEH Chairman William Bro Adams who served the nation in Vietnam and is currently the 10th chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also a veteran of higher education having served as president of Bucknell University and Colgate College and he was just giving me a few tips from his long experience as a university president. And our moderator tonight is known to many of you, the director of the LBJ Presidential Library, Mark Optigrove. Please welcome our panelists up to the stage. Thank you and good evening. Thanks Greg. Well welcome. Glad to be here. Thank you and to all of you. We heard Doug Dempster talk about the momentous year that was 1965 and we see back of me here, LBJ signing the Arts and Humanities Act into law in September of that same year. Take us back 50 years and talk about why these agencies were needed. Look across the cultural landscape if you will. Why did LBJ feel these agencies were needed in American life? Well when you look at and I've gone back and read not only every annual report of the National Endowment for the Arts but all of the writings related to this from President Johnson and those words that he wrote in the enacting legislation which say, nurture, elevate and sustain American creativity. And that is at the heart of the establishment of the National Council on the Arts and the Humanities leading to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. And when you think about it, that innovation and creativity, that has made America great. And so I think he really understood what seeds we could plant that would spark something far larger. Right. One of the things he said at that occasion is we in America have not always been kind to the artists and scholars who are the creators and the keepers of our vision. Somehow the scientists always seem to get the penthouse while the arts and humanities get the basement. So talk about it. Have we done a good job in the last half a century bridging that disparity of giving artists and scholars a better place in society? Oh, certainly the endowments have made a huge difference in that regard. One wonders sort of what level they occupy now. I mean, I know there are still people in the country and in Washington certainly who would like to see more support for the arts and humanities from the federal government. But going back to that time, the NSF, the National Science Foundation was about 10 years old at this point in time. And certainly one of the things that was going on in the humanities community was a strong desire to see the federal government make a statement about research in the humanities and fundamental knowledge in the humanities similar to the statement that had been made for the sciences. And that was very much on the minds of the founders. And that might have been the most important thing. I don't know if it was on Johnson's mind, but it was certainly on the minds of the people who were involved in the hard work of getting this legislation created. But very soon after, and actually during the legislative process, something else started to happen. And that was the insistence that these funds make a difference in public life and in public spaces, not just in the academy, not just in places like the University of Texas where it's made a huge difference. And so gradually, particularly in the first decade, a lot of pressure coming principally from the Congress, from Claiborne Pell, among others, pushed our endowment certainly out into public spaces in new and powerful ways. And I really think that the legacy of the endowments and particularly the humanities endowment and the good that they have done the country has occurred as much in these public spaces as it has because of the work that we've done in the university community and the research community. So museums and libraries and cultural organizations, historical societies of all kinds all over the country, these institutions have flourished because of this infusion of capital over that period of time. So I think in ways that not even the founders could understand, these have become deeply ingrained in public life in America. And it's hard to imagine the arts community and the humanities communities without these two endowments, I think. Talk about, if you would, Jane, the most significant contributions the NEA has made to American life. In a couple of ways, if you look at just the numbers alone, over the past 50 years, the National Endowment for the Arts has given $5 billion in grants. It's awarded slightly more than 147,000 grants all across the nation. So when you start analyzing some of the grants or all of the grants and what it has the ability in terms of leverage for every dollar award that a National Endowment awards for any arts project, there's a match that's required and usually is a dollar to a dollar match from other outside funding. But the reality is $7 to $9 of additional outside funding from other sources have come in for the same arts project. So the ability to leverage and spark more giving for that project is a very strong ability than the National Endowment and I know the National Endowment for the Humanities does as well. But when you start looking at all the grants across the nation, all 50 states, every congressional district, 60% of our grants are going to small organizations as well as the large. So we love dispelling the perception that the arts are off by themselves or the humanities too, often a corner that they only belong to some people but not others when the arts and the humanities have infused life in communities as well as individuals on so many different levels, health and well-being, the beauty of the arts themselves, economic vitality, transformational opportunities for military service members who've been affected by combat induced stress. We've seen transformational changes. So they infuse our lives every day and I think that that's another way to talk about the impact these two agencies have made. Bro, brag about the NEH. What was it done in the last half a century that you can point to as a manifestation of its value? It certainly had a huge impact on the research community and the humanities. So a lot of deep fundamental research has been enabled by the fellowship grants particularly that we've given and we've given a lot to the University of Texas. I'm pleased to say including 19 Pulitzer Prizes and 18 Bancroft Prizes. The Bancroft Prize is given for the best work in American history every year. So there's been a deep impact on scholarship in the United States because of the endowments but we've also done a huge amount of work in public institutions, museums of all kinds. I was over at the Ransom Center today and non-university museums, art museums all over the United States, history museums, cultural organizations of all kinds. So there's a deep impact on the institutional infrastructure which is the value of which is very difficult to estimate. We also do a great deal of work in fundamental preservation of cultural resources. Again at the Ransom Center today, I saw the outcome of a challenge grant we'd given to help build compact shelving and do other kinds of fundamental preservation work in the Ransom Center where all those incredible documents are. So we've had a huge impact on the ability of institutions to preserve rare cultural materials and fragile cultural materials, painting documents of all kinds. And sort of last but not least, I think we've helped preserve the American cultural and historical legacy through the work we've done in history, through the work we've done in constitutional and democratic theory, through the help we've given to teachers and faculty across the country developing their resources and skills within critical fields of American cultural life and legacy. So those are the big places of impact, I think over that period of time. Looking at our country in the context of the global community, do our citizens place as much value or importance on the arts and humanities as the citizens of other nations do in their arts and humanities communities? Well, I like to look at our network and how we're shaping the arts in America together. That's a, I think America can be a model in this. A lot of times people say, especially when they look to the European countries and their value of the arts and how wonderful it is. And we want that celebration in America too of the value many of those countries have placed. But in here, we also have another model that I think can be celebrated as well. We don't have cultural ministers in these positions. This is not about somebody telling you what art is and what art is not or what humanities is. We have a wonderful network of our state arts agencies, our regional arts organizations. And I think it's really important to have this network. I know the National Endowment for the Arts gives 40% of its budget every year to these networks. And coming just from the field myself, I think we can celebrate that because when you've seen one community, and we've gone traveled a lot, when you've seen one community, you've only seen one community because everyone, no, there's not a cookie cutter approach in America. Not everybody has a template that has to look like, one community has to look like the next. And that's a good thing. You get to make it your own. So with our state arts agencies, our regional arts organizations, how we work together in partnership because you're out in the field and a nuance is in one community is a big deal and it may define that community from another one. So together, the arts and humanities are really able to be in that, sometimes it's ambiguity, but sometimes it helps define what a community is like. It helps put the personality on that community. And so to be able to do that in so many different ways, that's a really neat model. I know that's how we handle the reading of our grants. The first folks who read the National Endowment for the Arts grant applications that come in are the experts in the fields, the citizens that we bring in to tell us, make your recommendations on whether you think, and we evaluate on excellence and merit. Do you think this is excellent? Do you think it's meritorious? And so together we shape it. This is more grassroots in nature. It can be. We're shaping the arts and America together and I think we can celebrate that. Yeah. Bro, you recently said in a speech, the story of American democracy is deeply intertwined with the changing cultural landscape of the country over time. And in the present time, we are seeing again how cultural diversity and evolution are giving a particular form to political life and we hope to democracy. What is the evidence of that? People, pay attention to your speeches and our speeches. That's a little scary. Well, the evidence, I think, is abundant and I think it's everywhere in front of us. I mean, we turn on the evening news and we're watching people react to the changing cultural landscape of the country and it's been changing in recent years, principally because of patterns of immigration. Of course, the country has a long history of immigration. This part of the world, I don't need to tell you that. And the American democratic experiment and the American democratic system has evolved significantly. One of the most important legacies of Johnson is the Immigration Act of 1965, where for the first time we stopped developing quotas for certain kinds of groups. That was a huge step in realizing that aspiration to justice that Johnson talks so much about. But here we are now with another set of challenges with respect to patterns of immigration and the ways in which it's changing the country. And it's one of the reasons that humanities are so vital to this democratic system and culture. All of this is about culture and it's about understanding culture and our ability to adapt and engage cultures in new ways. And to do that, you have to study culture. You have to study people's histories and their traditions and their languages. And on the language side, frankly, the United States has been pretty frail, I think. You go to Europe, all of you are travelers, I know. You go to Europe and it's much more common there to meet people who speak multiple languages and have the ability to think in other languages. But setting language aside, there is a lot of work for us to do as a people, I think, in engaging these new cultural traditions and the challenges they present to the country. And without the humanities and without that kind of fundamental educational work in the cultural landscape, we're not gonna be able to realize either the promise of those changes or really understand the challenges that they also present. So I think the humanities are more fundamental and more critical now to American democratic political culture than ever. And so it's one of the reasons why I think this federal funding for these projects and initiatives that we're involved in are so important. We've seen with San Bernardino, perhaps a greater cultural divide. The president spoke about it last night in his speech. What could the NEH do to help heal the nation, to help bring us together? Well, it's gonna take a lot more than NEH around this. Sure. But NEH... My predecessor, Jim Leach, at the end of the day, I'm gonna hit a very important program called Bridging Cultures, in which we tried to present people with opportunities to both understand different cultural traditions, and particularly the Islamic tradition, and also to learn how to talk across those cultural boundaries. Still as a people, I don't think we're very well equipped to understand the challenges that are coming from that part of the world. Who knew, I mean, 15 years ago, how many of us could parse in any significant way the differences between Shia and Sunni forms of Islam? Of course, that part of the world is being torn apart now on just along that cultural divide. So to be a responsible, engaged citizen in this country, to think about these issues that the country is being forced to think about right now requires a kind of cultural literacy. And the deeply depressing thing to me is that we're less inclined in the educational system to engage in these cultural educational practices because of all kinds of things that are going on in the educational system. So we're losing touch with that commitment. I think it'll have terrible consequences unless we restore that commitment to educate people broadly for citizenship in this century. Jane, we listened to Bro's speeches, but we also listened to yours. One of the things you talk about very movingly is being the child of Chinese immigrants and how the arts helped you to bridge your home culture with the culture of your larger American community. What can the arts do to bring our increasingly diverse America together? Well, the arts and the humanities are some of the best ways to be able to stand in the middle of ambiguity and make sense of the different types of perspectives. Yes, my parents were from China. My father came over to go to school in 1948. In 1949, you'll recall, was the change of government. The Communist Revolution was very violent at the time. He actually came to go to school in Texas. And so Texas was his first place to be. My mother was a teenager during the unrest and her parents decided they would sneak her out to have a freer life. And so they did by herself. She never saw them again. Ultimately ended up coming to the United States to go to school. So they met in Texas. And I was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Arkansas. So I have had a bok choy corn dog life. My entire growing up years. And the beauty of that, that I've now come to realize has been such a gift to me is that I had to learn how to navigate through opposing perspectives that often were at each other completely different without force fitting everybody to be exactly alike. And now as we have quickening of demographics and always ever changing perspectives and sometimes it is now time, I believe, and an opportunity to move away from the it's either this or it's that. And to be able to celebrate this both and perspective without forcing everybody to be exactly alike. It is possible to do, you have to be comfortable to be able to stand in the middle of ambiguity and you have to be able to appreciate the process and find avenues that will allow us to look at the different cultures without feeling threatened or divisive or things like that. And the arts and the humanities are some of the best avenues to do that with respect to the different perspectives again without force fitting everybody. So I now think it's a gift that I was growing up in the, so when my father died when I was nine and he was a college professor and because my parents were speaking Mandarin and I spoke English because they wanted me to assimilate in the schools, I didn't have enough words through the use of linear everyday conversation to express my own grief as a child probably many nine year olds don't but I really didn't. And so piano was really the only avenue that allowed me to have some kind of soothing form of expression that I cannot even articulate why now but I know firsthand what the arts can do to provide something that evens the playing field gives us more of an opportunity to express ourselves and that's why I'm such a proponent of what the arts and the humanities does because we're in a world now that is met all the time with different perspectives and we can celebrate that as long as we have some avenues and channels to appreciate it and bring people together. Right. Please tell me we're serving corn dogs at the reception for- I love corn dogs. So Jane feels at home. Bro, last year the Pew Research Center reported that since 1978, the number of Americans who don't read has tripled to 23%. Is that a crisis in your view? Probably. I mean, when I think about it, I don't use that particular word but I think we're profoundly aware at the endowment of how quickly and profoundly people's habits are changing, how people engage texts in different ways, the influence of information technology. I think one of the great sort of wicked problems that we face as a society is how these new technologies are affecting our ways of thinking and communicating and of course the book has been one of the, what victims I guess, reading has been certainly diminished. And that is a deep concern of mine and I think everybody who works at the endowment because we're so oriented toward the written word. At the same time, we're trying to find ways of helping humanists and humanities organizations engage that new world. So we're doing a huge amount of work in digital humanities and there are no other faculty here who are doing that work. You're really doing the work. We're supporting it financially but that work, the digital world has huge implications for the way humanists do research and the access they can get to cultural materials. So it's a double-edged sword I think in certain ways and we're also working very hard to try to understand the phenomenon of how society is being influenced by these new technologies and I think that's a great topic for humanists. Some of you saw the New York Times article last week on distraction, addicted to distraction, I think it was called, very interesting piece. That's the tip of the iceberg I think. So we live in this new world, we've got to try to understand it. I think humanists have a lot to offer in terms of understanding it and I think they'll make a real contribution to it. So the pervasiveness of technology as Bro's alluding to almost overwhelmed the human condition. How has it changed the art world? It used to be that the National Endowment for the Arts would measure different ways that people participate in the arts and they were certainly the and still are traditional ways that we've seen going to performances and seeing museums and counting tickets and things like that but as the most recent research found that three quarters of all American adults, that's 167 million American adults, participate in the arts first through digital, through technology and that had a profound way for us to say the same thing that Chairman Adams is talking about is we said we were gonna be relevant, we can't just be off doing something that's not for the American people. So we had to make sure that for example in our on a practical basis on our grants in the media area while we have always supported for 50 years grants in television and grants in a radio, we have now grants for digital, grants for the creation of videos, grants for all kinds of new ways. So we're in a transition and a change and again we're shaping this together but yes it has had a profound impact. Yeah, has it changed the way that we, you've talked about community being important to both of your efforts of trying to establish a sense of community. Has it changed the way we act toward one another, technology? I think it has. I mean I'm not sure I could describe all the ways in which it's changed us but that article got me thinking about a lot of these things. I think it has changed us and I think it's the way it's changing politics, it's changing local communities, it's changing the way people interact in local communities and I think it's made things more abstract in our relationships more abstract and less concretely experienced and lived and I think that will have huge ramifications in politics and in other places having to do with community. Jane there have been several controversies particularly in the late 80s and the 90s that have been existential crises for NEA. Bill Ivy, one of your predecessors who was said recently of the maple-thorpe controversy of the late 1980s. One of the things that we learned is that the arts can be taken into a political conversation and used for political advantage. Frankly, we haven't had any real problems in the agency since 2001. What that means to me is that government support for cultural vitality has been taken off the table and I think it's going to stay there. Do you agree with Chairman Ivy's assessment? Well, it does seem like we have turned the corner in terms of using that one topic for justification for the National Endowment for the Arts. The more we are able to communicate what the arts has really done and we meet with members of Congress a lot. Just, can I have 10 minutes of your time? Can I just explain? And they really start seeing some of the results that we've talked about before, the transformational power when you've seen kids whose standardized scores in science have risen just because of an arts curriculum and things like that and even the playing field just saw a kindergarten class of 25 kids and 23 of them did not speak English and they used an arts curriculum to teach actually. It was another science and those 23, all the kids got it instantly. We see that we do a disservice when we start saying that the arts and the humanities are not part of our everyday lives when they are. So that's the message we wanna get across and when that happens to a person, we start seeing this, I didn't realize you were doing that, I didn't realize that was happening and so we're happy to say that in the complex budget conditions of today, we're holding steady and actually this is the first year in a number that no one has attempted to cut the budget, the NEA budget, so we're appreciative of that while we're. I'm not sure I'm quite as sanguine as Bill Ivy about this, though we never do controversial things, it's just the NEA. But what I do think is true, Mark, is that because these endowments have been in place for now 50 years and because the work is so extensive and because we've affected so many institutions across the United States, it's much harder to make the argument that these institutions don't matter, that they don't do good, that they don't have consequences that are important publicly. It's hard to make that argument now. There are people that wanna make that argument that it hasn't mattered, I think it's difficult. They also wanna make the argument, well that's very nice, but we don't need the federal government, this is much more likely argument now, we don't need the federal government involved in these things, they shouldn't be involved, this should be a private sector matter. And my response to that is that it's a pure fantasy to imagine that $10 billion, actually $11 billion of our combined giving would have been, that slack would have been taken up by private philanthropic institutions. It just wouldn't have happened. It's too much money and it was arrayed and displayed and committed across too many places. So I think the record is now becoming an ally of ours and the length of the history and the length of the endowments history and the effect of the giving is becoming in our favor now in a way that it probably wasn't in 1990. We see, I'll just add one more comment. We see happening of more like a three-legged stool happening when it comes to support of the arts, support of the humanities. The National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, while there are all kinds of other funders for sure, we're the only two agencies that think about all of the nation when it comes to the arts and the humanities. So there are certainly, and we celebrate together, private philanthropy that gives to specific arts projects. They may give across the whole nation too, but it's usually in their mission-driven area. It might be, yes, we give across the nation to arts education or a specific topic. Sometimes they say, yes, we give to all topics in the arts, but we only give in 14 states. So the National Endowment for the Arts, humanities are the only two agencies that have to think about all of America. That's the way the legislation went into play. So we see a three-legged stool where we can actually, we all leverage private funding, public funding, and the market, the commercial market together in different ways, and there are challenges to each area, and there are strengths to each. But instead of an either or, it should be this versus that, we actually see them leveraging each other pretty well. Right, what were the long-term effects of the controversies, the maple-thorpe controversy, which is, I think, the highest profile of the controversies that NEA faced? What did that do to the arts community long-term? There were all kinds of questions as to whether that would be stifling creativity. Would everybody be afraid that somebody else would get in trouble? There were all kinds of lingering perceptions and stereotypes about what the National Endowment for the Arts did when you see 147,000 grants going across the nation to affect other things that are mightily important and transformational for all kinds of communities. So it overshadowed for a while with its own stereotype and perception, and we didn't have enough communication strength to get out and say it's thriving out there and it's making a difference. So if there was anything that I wanted to do, and my role as chairman to amplify that, it would be to get the word out. The arts are thriving, they're making a difference. The humanities are there, they're making a difference to individuals, to communities in so many different ways, and we want to get that word out. So did it galvanize the community, ultimately the arts community, those controversies? Did it allow the community to rally around each other to protect? Some did, some did, but we actually have a very formidable strong network and I mean that in a positive way when we start talking again about our state arts agencies and all the ways we're together, we're not disassociated, we're not detached from each other, we're all together doing this work and so it probably strengthened in some ways that. I will ask, I know we have questions from the audience, we have mics on either side of the room here to ask our students in particular if you would line up and be prepared to ask your questions. I'll ask you though while they get prepared. Where do you see these agencies in 50 years? I know there's an impossible question to ask but we're celebrating the 50 year anniversary now. Where do you hope these agencies will be half a century from now? Well I'd hope we'd have bigger budgets for one thing. You know, before the Gingrich Congress in mid 1990s and the cuts that came, our adjusted budgets to inflation would be about $350 million apiece. Now we're $150 million now so that would have been a huge difference. And I would hope that over time as we get out of this malaise, this budget malaise we're in, as the economy recovers, I hope there could be some, and I think there could be, some effort in Congress to restore some of that funding. I doubt that we'll ever get back quite to that level but who knows. So I would hope that there would be a much deeper financial commitment of the country. But I think for the NEH particularly, I think we will continue to expand our imagination about what the humanities mean in the public spaces, in the public forms in which our work is now expressed. Even as we continue to be very, very serious in our support for the scholarly and academic worlds which we will be. But I think extending the reach, extending the impact, extending the consequence of humanities work in public spaces is where the foundation will logically, the endowment will logically go in the next 50 years. And from the National Endowment for the Arts, just with the numbers again and the budget, presently we're at about, with the budget about 46 cents a person in the nation. And if we could get to a dollar a person, it'd be that 300, $300 million budget because of the way we both leverage, our agency's leverage, put your return on investment hat when you're in business, one to seven return is a very good return on your investment. So to be able to get to a dollar gives us an ability to go farther, deeper, broader, at the same time. Now from the non-number's point of view, the idea that we could help change a paradigm that the arts are not and the humanities often a corner by themselves, but they really are part of our everyday lives in so many different ways. They help soothe, they help us express ourselves as our world continues to quicken its pace in terms of wildly different perspectives all at the same time, the shifting demographics, something like the arts and the humanities is a very affordable way to be able to make sense of all of it and bring people together. How has sequestration affected your agencies? It's a daily reality for you and government agencies. How has it affected your organization? Well, it froze our budgets at pre-sequestration, lower than pre-sequestration levels. This budget, this one that's coming out or the two year budget deal that was made was the first one in what, seven years, six years, where we were able to see beyond the sequestration levels for domestic spending. So it had something like a $15 million impact when it happened, a negative impact. Now we're back to close to where we were before the sequestration, and hopefully it will now start to drift up a little bit. Yeah, let's go to questions from the audience. We have any questions? I just thought we had some students out there with some, here's a question. While we're getting prepared for that, ask another question. I talked about the international community. Is there a model that you see in a foreign country that you would hope we would more closely emulate as it relates to the recognition, the protection, the bolstering of our arts in humanities communities? I've been asked by several people about the European model of cultural ministries. I've also been asked about the European model of research funding. In Germany, for example, the research funding is comprehensive. It doesn't discriminate between the sciences and the humanities and the arts. It's a comprehensive agency. I don't think either of those models are appropriate for us. Partly because I think it's a good thing that we are mixing public programs with research programs. I think that's probably an advantage to our cultural life in agencies, as opposed to separating it out, as they do in Europe. And I'm not sure, frankly, that ministries of culture would make sense here. You know, I'm still relatively new at this, but, and maybe I'll change my mind, but I'm not sure I see the advantage of sitting at the table in that way. By the way, that table really doesn't exist as far as I can tell. I mean, the cabinet comes together symbolically from time to time, but I don't know that really, it's true that the cabinet officers sit around and create a meta policy together. I don't think they do that. So I'm not sure there's a table to sit at. But I just don't know that that's right for the country. I would be happy if these two agencies were funded at a meaningful level. If the budgets were doubled, I think, and the important thing is, and you to remember, and you all know this, I think, is that these are independent agencies. That is to say, we don't get phone calls from the White House saying, this is your next, this is your next objective. Because we get money away, we're allowed to operate in a fairly autonomous way, and that's hugely important. Very important, and it sends out the message that we believe in in terms of the arts, the humanities, it's non-partisan. Arts and humanities are non-partisans. It's for everyone. I'm not a fan of a cultural minister position. Again, somebody telling you what art is and what it is and what you can and do, we're gonna miss something because we'll do to service to these wonderful topics, subjects by declaring something that is and is not. What I am a fan of, though, is when the European countries, they have at least a stereotype that they're so appreciative of the arts. It's infusing our lives every day. Our Native American friends tell us there's not even a word in their vocabulary for the arts because it's so much of their lives, it's just simply a part of everyday life. So the culture of understanding what the arts and the humanities can do can be elevated even more in the nation, but the model that we have can work. We might not have ministers of culture in this country, but you're essentially the de facto ministers, but by virtue of your positions. We heard President Obama talk about American creativity. It's far-reaching nature. What makes, I'll ask you both about your different areas, what makes the American artist distinct in your review, Jane? I'll have to think about that, but certainly there is, by nature, and I'm a trained artist, by those who are, by anybody who is an artist and professes to be any type of an artist, is this feeling of freedom and independence that they can create anything and that the world is at their fingertips. I really think that that goes back to what we talked about earlier when President Johnson had, in his words, nurture, elevate, and sustain American creativity. There are other forms of creativity besides the arts and the humanities, but these are huge avenues for people to really exercise and appreciate what creativity can do for America. So I think that they're given, artists are given that feeling of freedom to climb out of the box. Many of us didn't ever know where the box was in the first place, and so to climb out of it and see that there's either a blank canvas or sometimes creativity is rewarded when your hands are tied behind your back and you've got duct tape over your mouth and you're hanging upside down and you've got to figure out how to get yourself out of something or find a new way to solve an old, tired problem. That's when creativity comes in. And to have that freedom is, it feels like the world is at your fingertips. That's where I see the American artist. What would you say about the community of scholars? Well, something similar probably. The Walter Isaacson has famously made the argument that creativity and innovation is a single thing. It doesn't get divided out between science and technology and humanities and art. So a culture has a creative, innovative spirit and life to the degree that you reinforce creativity across the entire range of creative expression and I think that's true in the humanities as well. He talks about people like Steve Jobs, of course, and Einstein and other exemplars of these massively creative minds. Steve Jobs, of course. That don't, they're not dividing the world up into the humanities and the arts and the sciences and I think that's true. Early on, right at the time of the legislation, the head of ACLS, Jacob Burkhart, the American Council of Learned Societies, appeared before Congress and he made an argument about creativity and saying, it was a very contemporary argument in one way. He was saying that we have featured and favored in our federal policy, the sciences and technology at the expense of the arts and humanities. And the risk of doing that over a long period of time is that you freeze and diminish creativity and in the end you do poorer science and you have a less innovative spirit and technology as well. And I think that's a very contemporary argument and I think it's also true. And the thing I worry about most is the diminishing and the erosion of the arts and humanities in our educational institutions across the country because I fear that even as it erodes creativity and productivity in the arts and humanities, it will erode creativity across the entire spectrum of the things we... You know, Bill Laureates and the sciences were actively, 17 times more actively participating in the arts than other scientists. Exactly. There was a dimension in there that adds to other subjects. So this erosion, as I'm calling it, of commitment to the arts and humanities in educational institutions is hugely worrisome, I think, and as I speak to audiences like this when I say, you know, the thing we have to talk about first and foremost is the educational commitment to the whole person and to the life of the whole person and that if we lose the aspiration to do that in this country, we're gonna diminish the culture as a whole. You might have just answered this question, Robert. We talked about the great advancement in the arts and humanities communities since the signing of the Arts and Humanities Act in 1965. What has been the greatest missed opportunity in your view? I don't know if I see anything in the NEH portfolio or potential portfolio that I would say is a missed opportunity. We have not been able to do certain things that we should have done in a bigger way because of the funding issues that we face. The most important one in my mind is secondary education. This is a huge sector in the country. It's fraught, as you know, better than anyone with very complex political and cultural problems and challenges, but it's the place in which the minds of young people are really formed and without strengthening the arts and humanities in that setting, I can't imagine that we're gonna see them flourish at the higher education level. So I think the place where we have not been able to be active is in secondary education in a serious way because we just don't have the resources to affect that immense constellation of institutions. If we had a lot more money, I think that would be the first place with another $100 million that I think I would go. Jane, what do you think? Ours is, I think, arts education in general, starting from kindergarten all the way up. There have been a number of cuts in the arts education area in school districts and it's so ironic to me because of what Chairman Adams was talking about. What arts education can do, not only in the arts but for the whole child even related to other topics, science and math and all the other subjects, it is so profoundly different and we do now with the cutting of so many arts education programs in school districts offer a different type of grant while the National Endowment for the Arts has always supported grants for programs for the students and professional development grants to help the educators. We now provide a much larger set of grants, the collective impact grants where, for example, school districts can have longer and much larger grants in association with community organizations that provide such quality programs all together but if we had done it earlier and had the opportunity to really infuse the whole system where everybody really got it, that would have been the great opportunity and certainly with an increase in the budget we have to focus on that. So it all comes down to money? It comes to money but it comes down to people understanding why and that is we're better when we're focused holistically and how the arts and the humanities infuse our lives every day and we want to get that mindset out first and foremost because it's a disservice to all of us to think that we're off in a corner and it's just an extra arts freely project when it affects so much of us so profoundly. You know, if I put my organizational management hat on or my business hat on and you start looking at these organizations and some of them survive and some of them don't, this is any organization it's not just government, it could be commercial. Most of the time something has happened in the culture of that organization it's not done well or sometimes there's all kinds of challenges when you merge and half of it is merging the cultures together. So this culture thing is a really big deal and the arts and the humanities have an opportunity to help us all understand how a profound culture is in all that we do, whether it's in our workplace or in our everyday lives and our personal lives or for the nation. We're sitting here in the LBJ Library. LBJ was a master of getting things done and that might be a massive understatement. And clearly what it takes to get greater funding is lawmakers to subscribe to that notion. What can audience members, those who are interested in a thriving arts and humanities community do to best influence our lawmakers to ensure that they are supportive of these efforts and perhaps willing to give greater budget allocations to your organizations? I'd go back to the educational issue and say that as citizens I think we all have to weigh in on this question of what is the fundamental purpose of our educational institutions and what are we trying to do at every level with our educational process and programs. If we're really gonna insist on the education of the whole person, that argument then rolls out I think into lots of other places, including our places. And so to me, in school boards, in local conversations, in state conversations about education, I think that's the most important challenge that we face. Is that Michelle? She's waiting to ask a question, I think. I apologize, you guys, I didn't see anyone over there. Yes, sir. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, so my question is we're talking a lot about expanding the budget, but what would the concrete steps be that we would need to take with Congress to actually do that? We're not supposed to actually tell you what those steps are. But you're a smart person, you I'm sure will be able to talk with other people and figure it out. The other version of that conversation is we don't lobby or anything like that. We are federal agencies, but in terms of steps, there's the Appropriations Committee, there's Appropriations Committees, both on the Senate side and the House side, and depending on what committee it is that oversees the budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, those are out of, that's out of where our budgets form. There, thank you. That was good. Yes, sir. In terms of choosing grant recipients, what actions are the NEA and NEH taking to advocate for underrepresented groups in the arts and humanities? I asked another version of this question earlier at lunch with Chairman Chu, and an example is the 2% of female composers' works that are being performed by professional symphony orchestras in the U.S. today. That, if there's a crisis, that seems like one to me. 2% of these composers' works are out of females. So it seems, that's just one example, and there are many more analogous examples in the other arts. So I'm curious what actions are these organizations taking to correct that issue? We're mindful of that, and we're always paying attention to that as well because it matches up with the vision that all Americans should have the opportunity to be engaged in the arts and benefit from the arts, and so that includes all the challenges of when things are not diverse or when things are not spread out in a way that feels like there's equity. So we are mindful of that even as we choose panel members and council members and as everybody is reading those grants, they're mindful also as well. So because we make awards through the rec, there's a three-step process in the National Endowment for the Arts and the citizens, as you know, again, read the first applications that come in are mindful of that. So paying attention to those projects that are coming in and being proposed is one huge way to make sure that we're attention doing that, and above and beyond that, we have active conversations and we're all really mindful of that specific conversation, whether it is lack of female composers to a diversity of all kinds from racial, gender, income. Have we really represented what this vision was going to be all along? So we think about it often and we analyze our grants continuously to say, are we doing that? Or are we walking our talk or where can we get better? So the answer is it's a continuous conversation and we don't ever wanna forget that conversation because that's at the heart of the original mission. We're doing a couple of very specific things. We've created a new community college program to address some of the inequities in the higher education world. And I hope that more and more of the funding for the education sector will be directed toward community colleges which have been underrepresented in our work, but they are overrepresented in terms of underrepresented people, including new Americans, very interestingly. And the other, we're gonna redirect some of our challenge grant programs specifically to places, to regions of the country, and to different kinds of organizations that have been underrepresented in our funding activity. And most of those organizations in places are also places that represent diversity of the kind you're talking about. So we too are changing the way we make grants and we'll be doing more and more of that. As Lucy Johnson can tell you, a thriving arts and humanities community, communities were central to LBJ's vision for a great society. And I wanna thank you not only for being here tonight but for all you're doing to make a great society even greater in your efforts at the NEA and NEH. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you.