My Last Lecture: The Good Book(s)
Sidnie White Crawford
When I was a child, I read books. That is the title of a book of essays by the novelist Marilynne Robinson, but it also is a shorthand answer to a question I have often been asked throughout my career: "Why do you do this?" "This," of course, is the study of the Bible, more specifically the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, and even more specifically those ancient Jewish documents called the Dead Sea Scrolls. Why would anyone spend her career puzzling out the thoughts and beliefs of a people who lived thousands of years ago and, even more quixotically, trying to convince generations of students that doing this was worthwhile, even fascinating?
It is usually difficult for any of us to explain why we love what we do. A mathematician would find it difficult to describe the beauty and symmetry he or she finds in an elegant equation to someone like me, who merely sees a sequence of incomprehensible figures and numbers. But being invited to give this lecture has forced me to think about why I do what I do, and why I think it continues to have relevance in today's anti-historical, even anti-intellectual world. And at least a piece of that answer lies in the fact that when I was a child I read books.
I don't remember a time when books were not a part of my life. When I was small my parents read to me, my grandparents read to me, and my aunts and uncle read to me. They read the usual gamut of children's books available in the 1960s, but I also had a children's Bible, and I liked that too. It was illustrated, of course, and I particularly remember the picture of the plague of the frogs from the book of Exodus. The frogs were everywhere, just like the story said, in people's beds, in their bowls, and all over their floors and tables. It was both fascinating and repulsive. So I learned at an early age that the Bible wasn't just a book about how to be good; there was really some interesting stuff in there!
I learned to read to myself at a pretty young age, and then I really took off. "I can read it myself!" became my mantra. I helped keep the Stamford Public Library in business for years. I remember one incident from my childhood that is probably illustrative of my obsession: I got the measles when I was six, and that was in the days when they quarantined kids to prevent it from spreading. I was over the measles long before I was out of quarantine, but I was supposed to stay in bed and not watch television, so my mother had to keep me entertained. She went to the library and came home with an armload of books recommended by the children's librarian. I jumped right in and was soon bellowing from the bedroom, "I'm finished!" This went on until my mother in desperation went to the children's section of the library, started at "A," and simply brought home every book on the shelf until I was mercifully released from quarantine. That was how I was introduced to Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain and all of the books of Louisa May Alcott (she wrote a lot more than Little Women).
Thus I became the kid with her nose stuck in a book. I did do other things; I played the piano, I sang in the choir, and I was a girl scout, although I was not athletic, much to my father's chagrin. But I read widely and I read well long before I entered high school. Another illustration: my grandparents, who were not themselves readers, had obtained, through one of those grocery store coupon programs, a complete set of the novels of Charles Dickens. Every home needs one, right? There they sat in their living room, ignored by everyone, until I came along. I started with The Pickwick Papers, went on to A Tale of Two Cities and A Child's History of England (I nearly wore the covers off those two), and eventually tackled the longer ones like David Copperfield and Great Expectations. That set of Dickens now sits on the shelves in my living room here, and will make the trip back to Pennsylvania.
So reading was fundamental to who I was, and shaped who I eventually became in profound ways. But there was another formative influence on me that would prove equally important to my career choice, and that was the church. I was raised an Episcopalian, and most Sundays my family attended St. John's Episcopal Church in Stamford, CT. I loved church. I loved the pageantry, the vestments, the choirs, the candles, and the processions. I loved participating. I sang hymns with gusto, I repeated the responses long before I knew what the words meant, and I longed for the day when I would be old enough to sing in the girls’ choir. So the language of the Episcopal Church was in my ears and forming my mind from the time I was a baby. And when I say "language" I mean that literally; the language of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer borrowed its cadences from the King James Bible, the Bible lessons we heard every Sunday morning were read from the King James Bible, the Psalms were from the translation of Miles Coverdale, and the 1940 Hymnal relied heavily on English poetry, including famous poems by John Donne and William Blake. So, willy-nilly, simply by attending church I was receiving an education in English literature.
I was not, however, a star Sunday School student. Sunday School was not very challenging; we did a lot of art projects (something that I was not very good at) and heard lessons about how to be good. The nadir came when my very kind teacher, Miss Bogardus, told us we were to make a shoebox diorama using any scene from the Bible we liked. I chose Judas Iscariot hanging himself in the garden. When poor Miss Bogardus discovered the subject of my artistic endeavours, she went and reported to my father, who was a big wheel in the church. My father sat me down and asked me if I had meant to upset Miss Bogardus. Well, now I was beginning to feel bad, but I answered that yes, I had. Why? was the next question. "Because Sunday School is boring!" came the cry from the heart. My father, bless him, got it, and took me out of Sunday School, although first I had to apologize to Miss Bogardus.
Now, another thing that I think was important to my eventual career choice was that because I read the Bible stories like any other literature, I never drew a hard and fast line that said that the Bible had to be true in every word even though other books were fiction. I don't think that I ever thought about it much, but it seemed fairly clear to me that some things in the Bible were true, but other things were made up. Jesus was a real person, as was Moses or David, but Jonah was never swallowed by a whale, any more than Pinocchio was. So when I was later introduced to the academic study of the Bible it segued pretty seamlessly from my religious upbringing. I never experienced either a crisis of faith over the Bible or a fundamentalist phase in my religious life. I credit the intellectual liberalism of the Episcopal Church for that.
But why the Hebrew Bible? Why not the New Testament? After all, I was a Christian. Here I believe another facet of my childhood played an important role. Stamford, CT had a sizable, well-established, and influential Jewish community, and so I grew up around Jewish people. Jewish kids had religious holidays in the fall and the spring when they didn't come to school, the public school cafeteria offered matzah during Passover, and my Jewish friends didn't celebrate Christmas or Easter. This was all not only okay but normal, and I simply accepted it as part of life. When I was older I attended Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, went to Seders where I heard Hebrew for the first time, and learned cheesy Hanukkah songs alongside kitschy Christmas songs in the school choir. My Jewish education went even further; my grandfather, whose parents were from Germany, worked for a Jewish company and understood and even spoke some Yiddish. So for me, being Jewish was simply an alternative to being Christian, and certainly a more attractive alternative to some other forms of Christianity that I encountered.
So this very bookish, religious, nerdy child went through the Stamford public school system, where like most kids I had my share of good and bad teachers, although mine were mostly good. Again, two incidents are illustrative. My teacher in the sixth grade, Miss Machiaowsky, recognized that I was reading at a level far above my classmates, and so during part of the school day she sent me to the library just to sit and read on my own. Such bliss! In seventh grade, my English teacher Miss Magee handed me a paperback with a white cover and said, "Here, I think you'll like this." It was The Hobbit. I will always be grateful to Miss Magee for introducing me to Tolkien.
I attended Stamford High School, where I studied good, long-form literature in both my English and History classes. I read Shakespeare- Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello. I read English novels like Alice in Wonderland and Pride and Prejudice. I read American classics such as Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick. Along with reading, I learned to write. Seventh grade English emphasized grammar: I learned the parts of speech and diagrammed sentences. But after that, reading and writing went together; I learned to write well by reading good writing.
Now, you may be wondering why I am telling you all this. I want to emphasize that I went through the public school system, and that these books were part of a public high school curriculum. So my first main point in this afternoon's lecture is this: the support and funding of K-12 public schools is the most important thing we as citizens can do with our tax dollars. The creation of an educated and informed nation begins in the public schools. Of course one's family environment is profoundly important, and mine clearly had a considerable effect on me. But it was my education in the Stamford public schools that began the process of forming my intellect and introducing me to the life of the mind. Unfortunately, my experience as a university professor teaching kids who for the most part come out of the public schools makes me terribly concerned about the state of our public schools. All too often my students are completely unprepared for a college education. They have not been taught to write clearly and coherently, a necessary skill in college and indeed in any profession. They have difficulty reading for comprehension. Their vocabulary is often poor. Now, my students are no less intelligent than students in the past, so why are they so ill-prepared? Because the public schools have failed them. Why has this happened? I think there are three reasons. First, teacher certification puts too much emphasis on classroom skills and not enough on subject mastery. I would propose that every student who wishes to become a teacher should have a major in the subject which he or she wants to teach- English, history, Latin, math, etc. Second, the emphasis on testing has been a dismal failure, forcing teachers to "teach to the test." It has raised a generation of students who are very good at memorizing material and spewing it back, but not very good at thinking independently. Third, and most important, the incessant drumbeat of tax reduction over the last forty years at the state and local level has starved the public schools of funding and driven the best and brightest young people away from teaching as a profession. To add insult to injury, those who have had their taxes reduced the most turn around and send their children to exclusive and expensive private schools, thus escaping the consequences of their own greed. We are rapidly devolving into a society where a good education is available only to the well-off, and if we continue down that path our civic life will further deteriorate. So the first lesson I hope you take away this afternoon is "Support your public schools!"
After high school I attended a small liberal arts college in Connecticut, Trinity College. When I began college I didn't really know what I wanted to major in, although I thought maybe history. Every student at Trinity had to take a freshman seminar, and over the summer we selected our top three choices. I don't remember what my first two choices were, but my third was called "The Book of Job and the Problem of Evil," taught by a wonderful professor named John Gettier. That's where I was placed. We did read the book of Job, slowly and in great detail, but we also read other literature dealing with the problem of evil. I don't remember them all, but some have stuck with me all these years: Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, King Lear, Kafka's The Trial, and Camus' The Plague. The most important, however, for my intellectual and moral formation was Elie Wiesel's Night. I remember I was taking the train home for a visit and I took the book with me. I got on the train in Hartford, started reading, and got off the train in Stamford shaking like a leaf, having read the entire book along the way. That book profoundly altered my view of humanity and its capacity to create evil, and also cemented my already nascent love of Judaism and the Jewish people.
Trinity was a liberal arts college, and it was the end of the seventies, so students were encouraged to try out many things. There was no emphasis on careers, and costs, even at a private college, were much lower than they are now, so student debt was not a looming problem. The only requirement was that by the end of your sophomore year you had to declare a major. This was both good and bad- I took all kinds of courses my first two years, in English, History, Music, Art History, Sociology, Psychology, and Religion. I did not take any science or math, which made me happy at the time but which I regret now. I took private lessons on the organ for college credit and declared a music major. The influence of music in my life is the subject of a whole 'nother lecture. Under the gentle influence of John Gettier I became a Religion major. I remember that he suggested I take Hebrew (which he taught) and I thought, "Why would I want to do that?" But I did, and so the foundation for my scholarly career was laid.
My time at Trinity College made me a pretty broadly educated person, which is the purpose of a liberal arts education. The term "liberal arts" is badly misunderstood in our culture; it has nothing to do with politics and only partly to do with the fine arts. The purpose of the liberal arts is to create through education a virtuous human being, a person of moral excellence. That sounds rather old-fashioned, but don't we really want all of our citizens to be persons of moral excellence, people who are acquainted with the classical virtues of temperance, prudence, courage, and justice, along with truthfulness, industry, and charity? That to me is the real purpose of education, to help students realize the Socratic ideal of the examined life, the good life, as our state slogan has it, and then to go out and live it.
That brings me to my second big point this afternoon. I believe that every person who seeks a higher degree in the United States should receive at least the foundation of a liberal arts education, and that includes students at public land-grant universities like the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The United States became the world leader in higher education in the last century through our great public universities, which made higher education affordable and accessible to everyone, regardless of their family background or social status. The goal of the 1862 Morrill Act, which established the University of Nebraska, was "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life." Notice the inclusion of the word "liberal" in that goal- the liberal arts. The liberal arts are to be promoted by the land-grant universities for the non-elites; a broad education should be accessible to all.
How are we doing at this goal in the United States today? I have to say not very well. The dominant political philosophy of tax cuts at any cost, and especially tax cuts for the wealthy, has succeeded in gutting what used to be the best system of public higher education in the world. What's more, the anti-intellectual streak that has always been a part of the American psyche has strengthened in recent years until higher education institutions are being caricatured as the enemies of American values. According to this caricature, universities are full of "useless" courses (anything not immediately applicable to a job), they stifle free speech (on the contrary, they are bastions of protected speech), and they create liberal (in the political sense) robots who can't think for themselves (if that's the case, why does Nebraska, where the majority of the citizens actually went to the university, continue to be a conservative state?). The result of this two-pronged attack, financial and philosophical, are public universities that are rapidly losing ground as intellectual and economic leaders in our country.
Up until now the University of Nebraska has been fortunate enough to escape the worst of this anti-intellectual, anti-tax rhetoric, but the signs are not good. This last year has seen what to me appeared to be a deliberated and concerted attack on the university by the governor and some of our legislators, attempting to slash the university's budget in the service of tax cuts and attempting to insinuate politics into the governance of the university. There is no reason to think that these attacks will stop. But even among those who support the university, and among our own administrators, questions are being raised about the value of the liberal arts piece of the university education. Why, they ask, should students "waste" their tuition dollars and go into debt to be forced to take courses whose immediate vocational value is not apparent? Shouldn't that kind of thing be left to private colleges and universities? The answer to that is only if we want to make permanent the two-tier education system that has been coming into being in the last twenty years or so, in which the wealthy pay extraordinary sums of money to buy their children an elite liberal arts education, and the not-wealthy are forced into vocational courses in which job skills are emphasized. There is a place for vocational education in our society, and that kind of education should be available to anyone that wants it (after they receive their good foundational K-12 education). But the not-wealthy should not be shut out of a liberal arts education by the gutting of the land-grant public universities in the name of the doctrine of tax cuts. Tax dollars that go to the university support low tuition and good quality, and are an investment in the future of our state and our nation. So the second point I hope you come away with this afternoon is this: "Support liberal arts education at the University of Nebraska!"
So by now you may be wondering how the Dead Sea Scrolls fit into a lifetime spent reading books. As I mentioned, I was a Religion major at Trinity College, and my main interest was biblical studies. I loved, and still love, the historical aspect of biblical studies: situating the text in its historical context and figuring out what it meant to the people who first heard it and read it. One of the aspects of that is to learn what else they were reading- in other words, what other books were available that didn't make it into the later canon of scripture. In my junior year, therefore, I took a course in apocalyptic literature, in which we read the books of Daniel and Revelation, but also 1 Enoch, the Testament of Abraham, and some selections from a little thin volume called The Dead Sea Scrolls in English. I was hooked. This was what I wanted to study. Ancient Jewish texts, unknown until they were found in caves near the Dead Sea, and offering all kinds of new knowledge! How exciting! Little did I know.
I didn't decide finally to go to graduate school until after I had graduated from college, after first trying out and deciding against a career as a church organist. When I think back on it, I am amazed at how haphazard my application process was, but I ended up in the Master of Theological Studies program at Harvard Divinity School, concentrating in Biblical Studies.
During the first week we all had to meet with our advisors to plot our course of study. Comparing notes with the other biblical studies students, I discovered that I was the only one assigned to Frank Moore Cross, the Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) at Harvard University. He only took one advisee per year, and I was it. I was pretty naive at that time about the field of Hebrew Bible, but I knew enough to be nervous- in fact I was downright scared! I tottered off to the Semitic Museum for my appointment and entered the great man's office. There I met the man who became the most important mentor of my career, the one who did the most to shape my intellectual life. He was pretty formidable, a formal southern gentleman who always wore a jacket and bowtie and smoked a pipe. His command of the field was awe-inspiring: he was a linguist, a text critic, an archaeologist and a comparative Semitist. He directed close to one hundred doctoral dissertations over the course of his career, and he and his students dominated biblical studies in North America for over a generation. I was the youngest of that group. He was my role model, although I don't even come close to him.
I have been very fortunate over the course of my career to have good mentors all along the way. In college I had John Gettier and my organ teacher John Rose. In graduate school I had Frank Moore Cross and my other Dead Sea Scrolls professor John Strugnell. In my postgraduate career other senior scholars took an interest in me and smoothed my path. These are debts that I cannot repay to them, but I have tried to pay it forward by being a mentor to younger scholars. I have never had graduate students of my own, but I have "adopted" several, and I hope I have been able to help them as I was helped. I'm especially proud of the women who have come up in the field in the last twenty years.
Anyway, back to the Dead Sea Scrolls. At that first meeting Cross asked me what I was interested in studying, and I managed to squeak out that I was interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls. "Hmm," he replied, "you know that that is one of my areas." Well, even I knew that; Cross and John Strugnell were two of the seven original members of the editorial team appointed in the 1950s to edit and publish the Qumran scrolls, and I had landed in the right place at the right time to work with them.
On that first afternoon Cross laid out an ambitious series of courses that involved a lot of language study as well as history. He always pushed me beyond what I thought was my capacity; in my second year of the master's degree he was teaching a seminar on the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, and he suggested that I should take it. The requirements included Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Aramaic, and Latin. At that time I had had only two years of Hebrew and was just starting elementary Greek that semester. So I pointed out that I didn't meet the requirements, but he overrode that, declaring that I would be fine. I spent the first month of the class convinced I was going to fail and that my doctoral career was over before it began, but he was right, I was fine, and in fact I was admitted to the doctoral program that same semester.
The doctoral program in Hebrew Bible at Harvard was like boot camp; we had to study languages, historical grammar and comparative Semitics, textual criticism, epigraphy, and whatever else we were particularly interested in. At times I took six courses a semester. All the doctoral students developed stress ailments; mine was chronic migraines, and after I got those under control I developed severe back pain. However, most of us persevered, and the friends I made during that time have remained close colleagues over the years.
Finally I reached the point of beginning my doctoral dissertation. Under Cross that did not involve exploring possible topics, writing a proposal, and getting it approved. Instead, you made an appointment, he suggested a topic based on your interests, and you went off and wrote your thesis. So I went in for my appointment, and he said, "Well, Miss White, there are two possibilities. First, you could continue your work on the Damascus Document." The Damascus Document is one of the major Dead Sea Scrolls, and I had written a seminar paper on it that he liked very much, which in fact became my first publication. So that would have been all right. He continued, "The second would be to edit and publish some of my Deuteronomy fragments from Cave 4." These were manuscripts that had never been published and were unknown to the scholarly community; I would have first crack at them. So I managed to squeak out, "I think, Professor, I would like to edit your manuscripts!" Thus a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar was born.
I was very lucky to be given this opportunity, obviously. The year was 1986 and pressure had been growing on the editorial team from the scholarly community and even in the popular press to get their scrolls published. Cross and Strugnell had decided to respond to this pressure by giving small batches of their allotments of scrolls to present and former graduate students, so that they could oversee the process but get the scrolls published. That is how I, at the tender age of 26, became a member of the scrolls editorial team.
In order to edit my six precious Deuteronomy manuscripts (the number would later grow to nine) I had to go to Jerusalem to actually work with the scroll fragments, which at that time were stored in a bomb shelter in the basement of the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem. I had never been abroad before, so I was pretty nervous. But the moment my plane landed in Tel Aviv I was bitten by the travel bug, and I am still infected with the virus. I packed a lot into that first three-week trip, and I packed a lot in my suitcase to bring home! But most importantly, I learned to read scroll fragments.
For this I received a private tutorial from John Strugnell, who had become the editor-in-chief of the scrolls project and spent half of every year in Jerusalem at the French biblical school. Every morning I would walk to the Rockefeller Museum, descend to the basement in an old freight elevator, get the curator to unlock the bomb shelter, and retrieve the manuscript on which I was working from the drawer in which it was kept. These manuscripts were fragments, little brittle pieces of leather often so blackened or faded that the writing was no longer visible under ordinary light. The conditions in which they were kept, even in the 1980s, were still pretty primitive; there was no control of light or heat, and I was allowed to handle the fragments myself with my bare hands. Those days are long gone!
I would spend the morning copying the writing on my fragments, comparing what I saw with infrared photographs and taking various measurements. After lunch I worked in the library on text critical questions, and in the late afternoon I would visit Strugnell's study, where he would go over my work of the day, correcting and guiding me along in the process. By the time I left Jerusalem three weeks later I had a working transcription of every fragment of every manuscript.
I finished my dissertation and graduated in 1988, and those Deuteronomy manuscripts were published in the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert, vol. 14. Around the time that I graduated I experienced a major crisis in my personal life that knocked me flat for about a year, so I was shocked when over that summer Strugnell and Cross made a suggestion that would turn out to have a profound impact on my life. My first position was as a one-year Visiting Assistant Professor at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, with no guarantee of continuing. So they suggested that I apply for the National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Albright Institute for Archaeological Research in Jerusalem to continue my work on the scrolls (I had by then taken on some of Strugnell's manuscripts as well). I did apply, although I really didn't think I'd get it, and lo and behold I did! In the summer of 1989 I moved to Jerusalem to the Albright Institute and began the next formative experience of my life.
The Albright Institute is the American school for archaeological and biblical research in Jerusalem, and it hosts scholars from all over North America each year. While at the Albright the scholars live together, take meals together, and work on their individual research projects, but most importantly they take field trips to archaeological sites in Israel and Palestine. That year began my exposure to archaeology, and I became an enthusiastic armchair archaeologist. I travelled all over the country and also went camel trekking in the Negev Desert and camping in the Sinai Peninsula. Later I would add Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Jordan to my list of archaeological explorations. I never became a "dirt" archaeologist, but I developed a good working knowledge of Syro-Palestinian archaeology and the contribution it could make to biblical studies.
Another aspect of life at the Albright was that it served as the unofficial headquarters for American archaeologists working in Israel. Afternoon tea was served at 4:00 p.m., and everyone gathered in the garden to hear the latest gossip (archaeologists are a pretty gossipy bunch). I made many friends in that garden who have remained close colleagues all these years.
I also received a political education at the Albright simply by living there. The Institute is located in East Jerusalem, which is the Palestinian section of the city. When I first went to the Holy Land, I was a pretty unthinking supporter of the State of Israel, as I think most Americans are. Living in East Jerusalem introduced me to the Palestinian side of the question, which is the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of life under Israeli occupation. That occupation has lasted over fifty years now, and shows no signs of ending. In fact, in the last few years the violence directed at Palestinians by the Israelis has gotten worse instead of better.
My church in Jerusalem was St. George's Cathedral, which has both English- and Arabic-speaking congregations. Under the auspices of St. George's I was able to visit places in the West Bank that would otherwise have been closed to me, as well as the Gaza Strip. I also got to meet Archbishop Desmond Tutu with my mother at Christmas that year, but that's another story. Since that time I have always felt that Americans need to be more aware of the plight of the Palestinians. While I always have and always will support the State of Israel's right to exist and the necessity of a Jewish national homeland, I also support the right of the Palestinian people to a state of their own. Unfortunately, in the present political climate that seems unlikely to happen.
All of the elements that formed my intellectual life and my professional career were now in place. I went on to teach at Albright College, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, where I met my husband Dan. I won't embarrass him by detailing the impact he has had on my intellectual development, except to say that even though I have never taken a formal philosophy course in my life I have received the equivalent of a graduate education in it through my conversations with Dan.
In 1997 I came to UNL to chair the Classics department, and I have spent twenty-one happy years at the university and at St. Mark's on the Campus. I have received good support for my research over the years, both from the university in the form of sabbatical leaves, research grants, and travel funding, and from outside agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. That brings me to my last big point this afternoon: the importance of funding humanities research with state and federal dollars. Too often the humanities are the "poor cousins" of the hard sciences and the social sciences, scrounging for scarce money because our research is deemed "not practical" or not having any benefit for the citizens of the state or the nation. But nothing could be further from the truth. It is the humanities and the arts that develop our capacity for virtue and empathy, that nurture our creativity and aesthetic sense, and that make us human in the highest sense of that term. They are what has drawn us here on this beautiful spring afternoon to listen to a lecture, and what makes the space we are in aesthetically pleasing. They are, in short, what creates civilization, and without them we are no longer human in that highest sense of the term.
The wealthy will always have access to the arts and humanities because they can pay for them, and they do, both for themselves and their children. They pay for violin and piano lessons, for tickets to the opera, the symphony, and the theatre, and they support the arts through charitable donations. It is the not-wealthy who are denied access to the arts and humanitiesp when arts programs are cut in the public schools, when art history is one of the first programs mentioned for cutting when the university faces a budget crisis, or when the NEH and the NEA are zeroed out for funding in the president's latest budget. The humanities and the arts deserve our tax dollar support just as much as the hard sciences and in fact need it more, because let's face it, private industry will support science research but will rarely support the humanities and the arts. So my third rallying cry this afternoon is "Support humanities and arts research at UNL and in the United States!"
That brings me to the end of my "Last Lecture" here in Lincoln. When I was a child I read books, and that simple activity was the bedrock on which an intellectual life and a scholarly career was founded. I hope that I have left you with four challenges this afternoon: 1) the importance of promoting reading for small children even before school; 2) the necessity of providing strong K-12 education for all children and making the funding of the public schools a priority at the local and state level; 3) the recognition of the liberal arts as the foundation of a baccalaureate degree no matter what majors students pursue; and 4) the pressing need to continue funding for humanities research in Nebraska and in the United States. Thank you very much.
