S2E4 William D. Adam’s’ Reading of ”The Urgency of Democracy”

In preparation for election day on November 1st, today we are hosting William D. Adams—the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities—for a reading of his essay “The Urgency of Democracy.” 

Link to essay: https://mcspolicycenter.umaine.edu/mpr/2021/06/16/the-urgency-of-democracy/

William D. Adams served as the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017 and where he launched a new initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, as a way to demonstrate the critical role humanities scholarship can play in public life. He was president of Colby College from 2000 to 2014 and served previously as president at Bucknell University. At Colby, Adams led a multimillion dollar campaign that included expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art and support for several other humanities-based initiatives.

Transcript

Eric Miller: In preparation for election day, today we are hosting William D. Adams—the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities—for a reading of his essay “The Urgency of Democracy.”

William D. Adams served as the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2014 to 2017 and where he launched a new initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, as a way to demonstrate the critical role humanities scholarship can play in public life. He was president of Colby College from 2000 to 2014 and served previously as president at Bucknell University. At Colby, Adams led a multimillion-dollar campaign that included expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art and support for several other humanities-based initiatives.

(Music)

This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the Center. On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. The article covered in this episode was published as the Margaret Chase Smith Essay in Maine Policy Review, Volume 24, Number 1.

Here is William D. Adams.

Williams D. Adams: Maine is well known for producing impressive political leaders and for producing impressive women political leaders in particular. Senator Margaret Chase Smith is rightly remembered as the first of these in the contemporary era, anticipating and no doubt inspiring the impressive careers of Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Chellie Pingree, among others.

Senator Smith grew up in Skowhegan, where her father was the town barber. She attended Lincoln and Garfield elementary schools and Skowhegan High School. I don’t know what subjects Senator Smith learned at Lincoln and Garfield elementary schools or at Skowhegan High School, but considering her distinguished career it’s not too fanciful to imagine that they included healthy doses of civics, American political history, and the American constitutional tradition.

In Maine and across the country, these foundational concerns of primary and secondary education, along with many humanities subjects, are under increasing pressure. We are familiar with the reasons—fewer resources, the pressure of testing regimes and expectations, the introduction of new technologies, and misguided, if understandable, anxiety over career readiness, which continue to envelop many of our policy frameworks for assessing and reforming education.

The effects of this pressure are not surprising. According to statistics produced by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, in both 1994 and 2010 “a substantial majority” of school-age children in the United States “failed to demonstrate ‘proficiency’ in U.S. history.”1 Worse still, nearly 60 percent of high school seniors graduating in those years failed to demonstrate even a basic knowledge of U.S. history. It’s some consolation, though not much