Where Are Arts and Humanities in the D.C. Money Chase?

“When I find myself in the company of scientists,” W.H. Auden wrote some 50 years ago, “I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.”

Auden might have written the same today. The scientists, for all their complaints of financial neglect and political bashing, continue to do relatively well in pay, facilities, and status, outdistanced only by the law faculty, medical-faculty superstars, and football coaches.

Lamenting the disparities between scientific and humanities-and-arts faculties, two seasoned academic observers wrote in The Chronicle (March 17, 2006) that “never before has there been such inequality among the disciplines and schools that make up a university. … Disciplines like history, sociology, philosophy, the visual arts, and literature were once seen as the heart of the university. … But over the last 10 years, faculty members in those disciplines have become the poor relations of the hard-science powerhouses.”

Some obvious factors partially explain the difference. Science requires expensive instruments and machines. Science is visibly useful for military, economic, and medical purposes. The arts and humanities get along with far less support, and their value to society is not easily documented in material terms. Reflecting those differences, the federal government provides $30-billion a year for science and engineering research in universities while the National Endowment for the Humanities is budgeted for $144-million a year, not all of it for universities.

But that’s not the whole story. With well-supported outposts in Washington, the sciences ceaselessly pursue government money, while the arts and humanities are virtually absent from the game. Money for medical research is the focus of the Association of American Medical Colleges, which represents the 126 allopathic medical schools in the U.S. Keyed to the interests of medical-school management, the AAMC keeps a close watch on the National Institutes of Health and its $29-billion budget, without which medical research and education would collapse. Meanwhile, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Research looks after the interests of the rank and file of scientists.

Under a tacit division of labor, the Association of American Universities, representing 62 major research institutions, keeps an eye on the National Science Foundation. The American Association for the Advancement of Science diligently monitors all federal spending for the sciences, and annually publishes a detailed accounting of the ups and downs. These organizations are well-staffed with experienced Washington hands who know their way around Capitol Hill and the research agencies. Other organizations concerned with particular scientific disciplines also maintain offices in Washington.

A sympathetic gathering place for their interests is the House Science and Technology Committee, which frequently holds hearings at which witnesses from the sciences hold forth on their needs and anxieties. The S&T Committee has no control over money, and ranks low in the pecking order of House committees, but the steady drip, drip, drip of lamentation from the science establishment helps reinforce the claim that Washington is failing the sciences, and, by extension, the American people.

The arts and humanities lack the faintest resemblance of this formidable enterprise for monitoring and expanding government support of science. The Modern Language Association, which embraces these fields, does not maintain a Washington office. If there’s an arts and humanities counterpart to the science operation, it is well concealed.

If Auden came back, he’d find that nothing has changed.