Harvard Prepares for Humanities Cuts

This is the last of a two-part series examining the effects of President Reagan's proposed cutbacks in the arts and humanities.

About a week after President Reagan presented Congress in February with his new economic plan. Rodney G. Dennis, curator of manuscripts in the Harvard College Library, went to Washington to look for funding of the largest project he has ever undertaken: microfilming Harvard's entire manuscript collection. The project's cost was around $6 million, and Dennis hoped the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) would help foot the bill.

"I had to change my thoughts entirely," Dennis said yesterday. "I'm still rethinking the whole idea. I may have to take this project piece by piece instead of going right through the collection."

Dennis is one of a slew of Harvard officials and professors who may have to seek private funding if Congress approves Reagan's proposal to cut the NEH's $169 million 1982 budget by about half, with equally sharp cutbacks to come.

"Everything that we fund at Harvard is going to be affected to some degree," a NEH spokesman said yesterday, adding that NEH will meet its current obligations.

The NEH research division, which funds several Harvard projects, will be among the least severely cut of the endowment's 30 divisions, the official said. He added, "even that's likely to be cut by about 30 per cent."

He said the NEH's challenge grant program, through which the endowment grants one dollar for every three dollars raised privately will be eliminated completely. Several Harvard libraries have been recipients of NEH challenge grants; the Schlesinger Library recently finished raising private money to match a $400.000 NEH grant.

Unlike the National Endowment for the Arts--which Reagan has also proposed to reduce funds by half and whose support at Harvard goes almost entirely to institutions, like the Fogg Art Museum and the American Repertory Theater--NEH primarily funds individual projects; 30 Harvard faculty and staff members currently have $2.3 million in grants from the endowment.

These recipients of NEH funding yesterday praised the endowment's past work and expressed concern about the effects at Harvard--and around the country--if Reagan's cutbacks pass.

"We're in a new era now." Orlando Patterson, professor of Sociology, said yesterday. "We're back to the elitist view that the humanities should be supported by the rich."

Patterson, one of eight Harvard professors, whom the NEH has granted about $50,000 to lead this summer's seminars for the faculty of smaller institutions, called the NEH cutbacks "symbolic." The amount of money is chicken-feed," he said. "In a budget of billions of dollars, when you start fooling around with this kind of money, you're doing it for other reasons."

Calling the endowment "enormously helpful to the humanities," the recipient of the largest NEH grant at Harvard, Ernest R. May, professor of History, said yesterday that private grants are often too small to support major projects.

"A $20,000 grant is quite a large private gift," he said, adding, "To piece together these sorts of gifts could be very difficult."

May cited his own project--a $500,000 development of history courses for schools that offer Instruction in management--as one that probably could not have been supported privately.

Patricia M. King, '59, director of the Schlesinger Library, which currently has a grant of $99,945 to process their archives, said yesterday. "In the next year or two, these cutbacks will have a very adverse effect on us.." She added, "The sort of things the NEH funded were not very glamorous. There are not a lot of individuals willing to support things like archival processing."

The University Library "must have national subsidies," Richard G. Leahy, '54, associate dean for research, said last week. "We can no longer support, them," he added. "Without federal support, we won't be able to make our collections available on an absolutely free basis. One could easily contemplate charging admission for their use."

John Nordell '49, special assistant to the director of the University Library, said last week the library had asked the NEH for a challenge grant to fund the automation of the Union Catalogue, which she called "the library's most important technological development in years." "The library received an NEH challenge grant in 1977, and while the endowment generally does not give any institution a second challenge grant, it had announced last fall that research libraries would be eligible to re-apply.

But last March, after Reagan proposed his budget, the endowment notified the library that challenge grants would not be available next year. "It's going to be devastating," Nordoil said. "We're just going to have to look to the private sector."

Jane A. Scott, executive director of the Fogg's archaeological exploration of Sardis, which currently has $59,366 from the NEH for publications, noted yesterday that private corporations often follow the NEH in choosing projects to fund.

"I'm about to put in for another publication grant," she said. "An archaelogical expedition's nothing without publications. But I'm worried about this feeling that the NEH has come to be depended on as a screening agency," She added. "For a government agency, it works extremely well.