Hackney: NEH decision today

Senate approval could be tough President Sheldon Hackney will likely be named chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities today, Hackney said yesterday. "Something should be coming from [the White House]," he said, adding that he expected the announcement of his nomination to come sometime today. Hackney, who has been mentioned as the top contender to head the NEH since February, was in Washington on Friday to meet with members of the White House personnel office. If selected as Clinton's choice to head the $177.5 million agency, Hackney could face opposition during Senate confirmation in light of his outspoken liberal stance against any government censorship and speech regulation. Two months after reportedly submitting his own name as a candidate, Hackney was invited to Washington Friday for what he termed "very interesting conversations with some people on the White House staff." Hackney said he spoke with Clinton administration officials about NEH issues, time frames of the nomination announcement and confirmation process and the Senate confirmation process itself. After returning to Philadelphia Friday afternoon, however, Hackney said that regardless of any impending Washington decision, he will still be at the University for commencement on May 17. During Hackney's 12 years at the University, he has often acted as the institution's champion of free speech. Beginning with a 1989 national debate, Hackney defended the decision of the University's Institute of Contemporary Art to exhibit Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial photographs. Throughout the country in speeches and articles, the University's president specifically attacked Sen. Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.) and other conservative politicians who favored withdrawing the federal funds which Mapplethorpe's "obscene" exhibit received from the National Endowment for the Arts. "[T]he best protection we have found for democracy is an unregulated market in expression," Hackney said in a 1990 speech at a conference on academic freedom and artistic expression. In addition to his position against NEA censorship, the liberal-minded Hackney has been the president of a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and of "a reform-minded local political club known by the county Democratic committee as the Princeton Crazies," as he called it. Hackney has also said he is proud that during his tenures at Tulane University and the University, he has allowed controversial speakers such as King Hussein of Jordan and Louis Farrakhan to come to campus. Although The New York Times reported last week that Hackney has the support of Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), chairperson of the Labor and Human Resources Committee's Education, Arts and Humanities Subcommittee, and other influential senators, the NEH confirmation subcommittee includes conservative senators like Orrin Hatch (R-Ut.) and Strom Thurmond (D-S.C.). Hackney said that he has not yet thought about how he will answer questions regarding his past liberal undertakings which Hatch and Thurmond could ask him during confirmation hearings.

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