After all this time, I don't now recall exactly how I responded, especially since Dad's second piece of fatherly advice was to join the Masons, something I was fairly sure did not appeal to me. But his suggestion regarding government work was not entirely out of the blue. As he knew, both J and I had already found the federal government an accommodating employer. Like many other college students, we worked part-time and during summers as career-conditional temporary workers at the IRS branch in Austin. But as I may well have informed him as we sat there in the steam room, my experience of government employment so far had not made me eager to choose that as my life's work. And so the subject dropped, with no more said by either of us. I eventually completed college, got a temporary deferment to teach high school Latin, and from there followed a path of least resistance until my draft board found me unfit for military service.
Skipping ahead about ten years, I was by then teaching English at a small liberal arts college rather than high school Latin. When I flunked my draft physical, I returned to university to acquire the necessary post graduate credentials for college teaching. But after two years in the classroom, I was on leave with a government-sponsored residential fellowship at the University of Chicago, working on a research project and attending a seminar along with eight other fellows from colleges around the country. We were all grateful beneficiaries of the same grant program. I mention this because it turned out that one of those other fellows was a childhood friend of William Bennett, who was soon to become Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the government agency that was paying for our fellowships. And not long after that fellowship year ended, the new friend I'd met in Chicago found himself "on loan to the feds," working at NEH having been recruited by his old chum to start a grant program of summer seminars for high school teachers. Interestingly, as things progressed many of our little band of NEH fellows from that residential year in Chicago were invited to propose seminar topics for this new program.
The NEH Summer Seminars for School Teachers were an immediate success, and the program grew rapidly. After an initial offering of fifteen seminars at various colleges and universities across the country in that first year, the program expanded to around fifty in the second year. One of those was a seminar I had proposed based more or less on work I had been doing during my fellowship year in Chicago. Now I have mentioned all of these circumstances to illustrate how one may find oneself suddenly contemplating a career choice that had only a few years earlier seemed most unlikely, if not completely out of the question. For not long after I had finished directing my NEH summer seminar, during the next school year, I received a letter from my friend who was administering the program saying he was going to return to teaching and inquiring whether I would be interested in coming to Washington, DC, to become a grant administrator? That was when I learned that the government had a sort of exchange program, something known as the Inter-Governmental Personnel Act, which allowed agencies to hire on a temporary basis employees with specific expertise to assist, for example, in the management of certain specialized programs.
The next thing I knew, I was flying to Washington, DC, to meet with the Director of the NEH Division of Fellowships and Seminars and with other members of the NEH staff. Of course, I already knew the division director, having met her in the spring of 1984 at an organizational meeting for new seminar directors held prior to directing my own summer seminar. Now, only a year later, I was in Washington being encouraged to consider working in that program and in others administered by the division. It seemed to be one of those opportunities that was too good to pass up. While I enjoyed teaching at Centenary College and had formed some close relationships with my colleagues, neither J nor I was ever completely comfortable living in Shreveport. Somehow we felt we just did not quite fit in there. Washington, on the other hand, was a city we both knew and liked, and there was the additional attraction of moving closer to one of our oldest and best friends who was also working for the federal government in Washington. I had a feeling all of my interviews had gone well, and that was confirmed when I had a phone call even before I flew back to Shreveport offering me the job.
It did not take long for me and J to decide to pack up and move to Washington, or as it turned out to Alexandria, Virginia, for my two-year assignment at NEH. The plan was that I would take a two-year leave of absence from Centenary, but would remain officially on the faculty, while the government reimbursed my salary and benefits and also paid my expenses for relocating to Washington. At the end of my two years, I would return to Centenary, bringing back my new expertise in the realm of government grants. Suddenly, it felt like we were getting a nice raise, would have a chance to live in an exciting new environment, and I could see whether or not I would enjoy life away from the classroom and working regular hours in an office. And so in the waning days of summer, in 1985, we packed up all our belongings, or nearly all of them, in a rented truck and moved ourselves to a high rise apartment building in the Landmark neighborhood of Alexandria.
We barely had time to unpack before I was due at my new job. My first tasks were to learn the bus and metro routes from Alexandria into the District of Columbia, for I had no intention of driving my car. But it turned out that the daily commute became routine almost immediately, as did my new work-day regimen. I was one of three new Inter-Governmental Personnel Act appointees who had been hired by the Division of Fellowships and Seminars, and we all bonded not only as the new guys, but also because of our special status as visiting professionals. In fact, we soon learned that the regular staff at NEH included quite a few who had first arrived as IPAs (as we were known). One advantage of being a visiting IPA was that the regular staff and NEH administration were eager to show us every aspect of the workings of the agency. In a matter of months I probably had a better understanding of the agency's organization and inner workings than many of the regular staff. Moreover, NEH was a small agency, and it was possible to get to know just about everyone. In many ways, apart from the lack of teaching assignments, it was not unlike working in a small liberal arts college. Nearly every member of the professional staff held advanced degrees in their specific disciplines of the humanities, and most were PhDs. The atmosphere was relaxed and collegial.
After a very brief time, I found that I was actually enjoying my work in a government bureaucracy. Admittedly, this was no ordinary agency. As I just pointed out, the atmosphere was more like a college than a government office. Even many of the political appointees had previous experience working in educational institutions, and the few who did not, were soon absorbed into the culture of the agency. One of the more salient aspects of this culture was that there was only a rather weak sense of hierarchy. Despite the familiar government titles -- directors, deputy directors, assistant directors, program officers, program assistants, etc. -- the mood of collaboration and the general uniformity of professional qualifications, not to mention the rather high degree of individual autonomy given to program staff, tended to obscure the chain of command. But as I eventually discovered, in every bureaucracy those chains are always there. Yet the question would remain how binding would they be?
When my two years were coming to a close, I began contemplating staying on. I had adjusted much more easily than I had expected to keeping regular office hours. And I found that I missed the classroom much less than I would have anticipated. In addition, there were other compensations that I had not foreseen. Far from having to abandon my scholarship, I was actually encouraged by my new colleagues to continue working on it. In my first year I attended a weekly seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I met other scholars and renewed my acquaintance with that institution and those who worked there. And in my travels for NEH I became acquainted with many of the scholars who had won NEH grants. I also found that those I had known before I joined the NEH staff were eager to continue our relationships and get to know me better. And on a more personal level, both J and I were enjoying living in Northern Virginia much more than we had living in Shreveport.
And so the time seemed right to make a decision and cut my ties to Centenary College. Moreover, the perfect position seemed to be opening up at NEH. After four years as an experiment staffed by IPAs, the Summer Seminars for School Teachers program was going to be made a regular part of the Division of Fellowships and Seminars, administered by the regular professional staff. An opening had been advertised; I applied, was interviewed and appointed. When I knew my appointment was certain, I contacted Centenary and resigned my tenure. It was something of a momentous occasion. I was one of only a few members of the NEH permanent staff who had actually resigned a tenured position, often looked on as the holy grail of academic life, to become a government bureaucrat.
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One thing I had enjoyed during my first two years at NEH was the relative freedom and scope to do my work in my own way and at my own pace. Supervision was relatively light, and so long as you got your work done in a timely fashion, you could pretty much arrange your own schedule to suit your personal working habits. No one ever seemed to come around checking on what you were doing, but then we were all working in open cubicles, so it wasn't difficult to know what your office colleagues were up to. In fact, it took a while to get used to the idea that telephone conversations, of which there were many, were easily overheard by those in adjoining work spaces. But apart from the unavoidable eavesdropping on one another's phone calls, the open work space encouraged respect for privacy, and generally we did not interrupt one another or intrude uninvited into someone else's personal space. Still, as time went by and we became more familiar with our office mates, there were occasions when someone would break the decorum and shout to someone over or through the cubicle walls, but these breaches of office protocol were exceptions rather than the rule.
So what was it like working in a small federal agency? Well, like everything else that very much depended on who you were in the hierarchy and what you were expected to be doing with your time in the office. For most of the non-professional staff, what we referred to as the support staff, it was probably about the same as it would have been anywhere else in the federal government, a lot of paper shuffling and filing. NEH staff were hired in the usual way, given the usual job descriptions and standard job titles, grade levels, salaries, etc. But our mission was rather specialized. Like the National Science Foundation for the sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities exists to support (with tax dollars) the fields or disciplines of the humanities. Operationally, that tends to mean making grants, lots of grants, large and small, in a rather wide variety of different grant programs. Some grants support television shows, or films; some support museum exhibits, archaeological expeditions, or book publication; many go to humanities institutions, particularly universities and colleges, but also museums and libraries; and some go directly to individual teachers and scholars.
The principal work of the NEH professional staff is to administer these grant programs, insuring fair and unbiased review of proposals and oversight of the grants once they are awarded. On a day to day basis that means devoting a great deal of time to paperwork and record keeping. One reason the Endowment was eager to bring in a steady stream of new IPAs was to get fresh contacts with those working in the various fields of the humanities. When I arrived with two other new IPAs in 1985, we represented three different disciplines: I was in English literature, the two others worked in classical philosophy and in medieval European history. During the twenty-five years I spent at the agency, that quest for disciplinary diversity remained as important as any of the other more conventional aspects of staff recruitment. The first thing we began learning as newly hired bureaucrats, almost from the moment we were assigned our cubicles, was how to assemble a panel of expert reviewers. And that one task remained a constant for me during my time working at NEH. That was not always the case for others who worked there, but it was something I did efficiently and with relatively little difficulty, and such skills or talents or whatever you might call them were appreciated.
At first the actual job of recruiting panelists, before the advent of email and the Internet, consisted in making dozens, although it sometimes seemed like hundreds, of telephone calls to potential reviewers. For the programs I worked in that meant cold calling lots of college professors and school teachers. Now anyone who knows me at all will know that I do not enjoy talking on the telephone. In particular, I do not relish calling strangers and asking them to do me a favor. And serving on a panel of reviewers for a grant program is definitely a favor, if not to me personally, to the NEH and to the applicants, and to the humanities, as we pointed out repeatedly to those who might seem reluctant to consent. Of course, we also paid them a small stipend and reimbursed their travel and lodging expenses. In fact, I soon realized that one of the greatest inducements we had to offer was an overnight, expenses paid, trip to Washington, DC. Some potential panelists may have viewed that as recreational travel, but many saw it as an opportunity to do some research at the Library of Congress, or the National Archives, or Folger Shakespeare Library, or even to visit with NEH staff about their own research. Many panelists had either been applicants in the past or aspired to be one in the future.
Thankfully, not all my time was spent on the telephone, even in those first years, when panel recruiting seemed to be the prime reason I'd been brought to Washington. We also devoted time to meetings, both formal and informal, asking questions about potential reviewers or consulting about issues arising in grant and program administration. But perhaps the favorite activity for most of the professional staff was travel. There were many reasons for staff travel: representing NEH at professional meetings, conducting grant workshops, and visiting funded projects. Many programs conducted site visits; they are a form of quality control. And it so happened that the seminars programs I worked for required dozens of site visits every summer, so many that most of the division's professional staff had an opportunity to travel somewhere every year. Seminars were offered at colleges and universities all across the country including Hawaii and Alaska, and also abroad in England, France, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere. The trips to Europe were in great demand, and often went to the division director or deputy director, but not always. I spent many weeks of every summer traveling from campus to campus visiting seminars. I used to keep track of all the states I had been to on a little black and white map of the United States, coloring in each state I went to with a yellow marker. My map was mostly yellow when I retired, but there were still a few uncolored states.
Of course, a considerable amount of time was spent reading and doing research. Before you could recruit a panel of reviewers, you had to know what they were going to be called upon to review. That meant first reading all of the grant proposals, analyzing the content, and determining what distribution of disciplinary expertise would be required among a group of generally five panelists. Then you had to go looking for potential experts working in those fields, being careful not to invite anyone who was a current applicant to that or another NEH program. A computer would have been very helpful, and NEH did have a computer system where records of applicants and reviewers could be searched, sort of. It was a WANG, an antiquated mainframe system with only a few terminals shared by the entire staff. One of our colleagues in the Division of Fellowships and Seminars was expert in using the WANG, and he did his best to teach us the intricacies of that somewhat esoteric machine, even supplying an instructional booklet, but the seemingly interminable menus and lists of commands were more frustrating than helpful. And much of the information retrieved on the screen had to be transferred to hand-written notes, since printing out the data was even more difficult than retrieving it.
It would be nearly a decade before NEH staff would have computers on our desks, and even longer before the grant and panel records stored on the WANG would be easily accessible. It was not yet 1990, and office automation was not even a topic of discussion. But we did have IBM Selectrics upon which we typed some of our correspondence and most of our other office paperwork. Not all paperwork, however, was done without assistance. When I first arrived at the Endowment, many of the professional staff had secretaries, or access to secretaries. Most programs consisted of at least three staff members: a program officer, a program specialist, and a secretary. If the program was sufficiently large or complicated to administer, it might also have an additional program officer, sometimes referred to as a humanities administrator. Secretaries helped everyone with official correspondence; some even took dictation. They also answered the phones and relayed phone messages, a valuable role in a time before answering machines and voicemail were in general use. The program secretary was also supposed to file all the paperwork, although this could sometimes be an issue under certain circumstances.
Although I did a lot of my own paperwork those first two years, while I was an IPA, I also worked with many of the division's program secretaries as I was assigned to recruit panels for different fellowship and seminar programs. But when I was hired as a program officer, responsible for my own seminar program, I also assumed the role of supervisor for several other members of the staff, including a program secretary. It was a learning experience for all of us. My secretary was a very eager and agreeable young woman who quite naturally, based on the prevailing office culture and the fact that I was her direct supervisor, expected me to assign all of her work. Eventually I became aware of a certain amount of tension resulting from my assumption, probably based on my own experience as a sort of freelance IPA in the division, that the program specialist would actually give her some of her more routine daily work assignments.
Perhaps this is the place to mention that I was fortunate during the time I was a program officer, and later an assistant director, to have three excellent program specialists, all very intelligent, talented women, whom I could confidently count on to administer my program with very little direct supervision from me. Program specialists were the ones who worked most closely with the day to day operation of the programs. And while they might, from time to time, do other work in the division, generally their attention was focused on the details of administering their own programs. Technically, they did not make key decisions, but no program officer I knew would make an important decision regarding program objectives or administration, without close consultation with the program specialist. That was both good supervision and good sense.
Perhaps this is the place to mention that I was fortunate during the time I was a program officer, and later an assistant director, to have three excellent program specialists, all very intelligent, talented women, whom I could confidently count on to administer my program with very little direct supervision from me. Program specialists were the ones who worked most closely with the day to day operation of the programs. And while they might, from time to time, do other work in the division, generally their attention was focused on the details of administering their own programs. Technically, they did not make key decisions, but no program officer I knew would make an important decision regarding program objectives or administration, without close consultation with the program specialist. That was both good supervision and good sense.
My first program specialist was the woman who had been more or less hand picked to run the Summer Seminars for School Teachers program alongside a program officer who was not a regular member of the NEH staff. She had done this with two previous IPAs before I became the first regular member of the staff to guide the program. Of course, we already knew one another very well from my previous role in the division as an IPA assigned to the seminars program along with the other IPA who was actually the program officer. But more than that, she knew both of us previously as seminar directors: one from the first summer of seminars, and one from the second. To say my transition was seamless may be overstating it a bit, but only by a bit. I knew my program specialist was more knowledgeable about the administration of the program than I was, but she knew I was as thoroughly committed to the program's mission and ideals as both previous program officers. We were a great team, and everyone on the program staff happily accepted her as the sort of operational administrator of the program, including our program secretary.
But one thing I quickly learned working in a government agency is that bureaucrats abhor change. Somehow I had managed to avoid any obvious conflict as I assumed my new duties and supervisory responsibilities. But then it's relatively easy to supervise good people. In any case, everything seemed to be going well in my new career. And so it continued for about a year, and then one summer afternoon, while I was in Ohio on a site visit at one of our seminars, I found a message waiting for me back at my hotel. It was my excellent program specialist calling to alert me that she was going to be accepting another position. It seems one of my colleagues in the division was moving to another agency and had offered to take my program specialist along with him. Clever guy that he was, he had spotted the best administrator in the division, and who could resent her from taking the opportunity for a promotion and more responsibility. I warned her she would be doing all the work for her new boss, and she was kind enough not to point out that she was already doing just about the same thing for me.
So there I was; at least I'd been warned before I returned to the office to find myself soon to be without a specialist. Then I had a brilliant thought. What one man can do, another man can do. There was an excellent program specialist in another division who was rumored to be unhappy with her current assignment and supervisor. Shortly after I returned from travel, I met with this person to see if she might be interested in a change of scenery. Not only was she interested, she knew a way to make it happen almost immediately. We worked it out with the personnel office so that she could be reassigned, thus making what was known as a lateral move from her current position to the opening I now had in my program. Voila, position filled. I was congratulating myself on my administrative prowess, but I had not anticipated the reactions of other members of my staff. Everyone seemed delighted at first. Our new specialist was happy in her new position and threw herself with enthusiasm into proving herself even more competent than the woman she was replacing.
But little time passed before I began to detect signs of friction between our new specialist and our program secretary. Apparently, while our secretary had previously raised no objections to being more or less under the supervision of the previous program specialist, she had seen her departure as an opportunity to assert some independence. There was now noticeable tension in the personal relationship between these two members of my staff. Suddenly, I found myself playing the part of mediator a bit more than I was accustomed to, and taking on more direct supervision of our secretary, who began to think of herself as my secretary. This was only exacerbated when I was promoted from program officer to assistant director. The program secretary felt that my promotion had carried along with it, or at least had seemed to imply, a sort of upgrade in her responsibilities. And I had to admit, at least to myself, that there may have been good reasons for that, based on practices established by the previous assistant director with respect to his secretary.
Thus it began to dawn on me that all of those hierarchies I'd been ignoring were still there. And while they may have been slightly more subtle than in other government agencies, they could still present challenges as one rose from one bureaucratic level to the next. Not only was I confronted by some newly recognized tension between my secretary and my new program specialist, but I began to receive visits from the other program officers who were now under my supervision. In fact, I was discovering that in this new role of assistant director, I was expected to do a lot more supervising than I had been used to. It was an odd sensation, but something I should have anticipated. Of course, I had been a department chair, but that really was a figurehead position. I did not supervise my department colleagues, most of whom outranked me in seniority and professorial status. Besides, while I signed everyone's annual performance review, we all wrote our own narratives, and my signature was little more than a ritual or formality. We all understood that it was the dean or the president of the college who made the important decisions, particularly where salaries and raises were concerned. Now I was working within a bureaucratic system where my performance evaluations were meaningful and translated directly into dollars and cents.
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In time I realized that I had been living a fairly charmed existence my first few years as a bureaucrat. After being hired at an entry level for program officers, I was quickly promoted in my first two years through two GS levels as I rose from a program officer responsible for a single seminars program, to assistant director responsible for two seminars programs, a travel grants program, a program for high school students, and eventually a new program of short term summer grants for college teachers. This also meant I was supervising four other program officers, in addition to my own staff consisting of one program officer level humanities administrator, a program specialist, and a secretary. My rather rapid rise, while not unheard of, did draw attention from other members of the professional staff who had been around longer and perhaps rightfully felt they had been passed over for someone with political connections. In fact, I had no political connections, but I could not deny my friendships with members of the staff whom I had first met in that year of residence at the University of Chicago played a significant role in my appointments. The division's newly hired deputy director had been one of my Chicago colleagues and had previously worked along side our mutual friend who had been the childhood buddy of Bill Bennett.
One thing you learn rather quickly when working in government agencies is that there is generally tension between the career bureaucrats and the political appointees. As I said earlier, there is nothing bureaucracies dislike more than change, and yet federal bureaucracies are more or less predicated on the necessity for change every four to eight years when administrations change, whether or not there is a change of parties. Each new administration brings along its own political allies, who are eventually inserted into every agency and department of the federal government. Even the Chairman of the NEH is appointed by the President. Nor does it end there. Each newly appointed agency head brings along a certain number of aides and assistants. Now a few of these positions are actually political positions, something known as Schedule C appointments, which lack some of the permanence of the regular Civil Service jobs. But it is not unheard of, in fact, it's fairly common, for new agency heads to get some of their friends and associates appointed to regular Civil Service positions. One way is to bring them along as Schedule C appointees, and then have them later apply for regular positions as these become available. This is sometimes known among the regular staff as burrowing in. Another way, as I discovered, is to bring them in as IPAs, and let them then apply for regular positions. Thus to some of my new colleagues, I looked suspiciously like someone with political contacts.
But as often happens, things were not as they appeared. Although I have never been very politically active, I have not tried to disguise my political views, which hardly aligned with those of William Bennett (who in any case had left NEH by the time I arrived) or his successor, Lynne Cheney. But my views regarding the seminars program I had been hired to administer were correctly aligned, and arriving as I did in an interval between chairmen, I somehow was given the benefit of the doubt by those who were in charge of the agency. I was known to be the right sort of guy for their purposes. And in these cases, sometimes that is sufficient for one to get by. Fortunately, my division colleagues accepted with a certain amount of grudging good grace that I was the beneficiary of an unusual measure of good luck for being in the right place at the right time and knowing some of the right people. Nevertheless, I had an uneasy feeling that this good fortune could not go on forever, and that turned out the be exactly correct.
With the next change of administrations, also a change of political parties, the NEH got a new chairman and wheels were set in motion that would bring about considerable drama both for me and for the agency. But the first hints of these alterations came during a sort of interregnum that sometimes happens between chairmen. The agency gets along fairly well with an acting-chairman, usually appointed from among the correctly aligned senior staff. Although government agencies are not supposed to be political, everything in Washington is to some degree determined by politics. And over time, as a result of staff appointments, burrowing in, and just the luck of the draw, an agency's staff tends to reflect a fairly broad spectrum of political views. This generally makes little difference, but in times of change and during those brief periods when agencies are without a duly appointed head, things can get interesting. Some acting chairmen see their role as that of caretaker; some see it a bit differently, more as an opportunity to get things done. And that's what began happening. Almost immediately our acting chairman began a process of reorganization and realignment among programs and staff.
Again, as I said, most bureaucrats see change, any change, as necessarily bad. One of my division colleagues once used the metaphor of pulling a loose thread on a sweater: pretty soon the whole thing unravels and you're left holding a tangle of yarn. At first that seemed a bit extreme to me, but then he had been a bureaucrat for a lot longer than I had. And sure enough, those first signs of reorganization during the interregnum were rather quickly overtaken by profound alterations necessitated by a change in Congressional leadership that followed the first mid-term elections after the change of administrations. That was when Newt Gingrich, the new leader of the Republican majority, began calling for a good deal more than a reorganization of our agency. His new agenda, which he referred to as a contract, called for the elimination of all superfluous government spending, and he vowed to begin with the cultural agencies.
It is not really possible to overstate the impact of this political storm and the resulting reorganization of the agency. Many of those who experienced it were profoundly changed in their views of government, politics, and the country. But like all times of stress, it brought out the best and the worst in many of those associated with the NEH. The staff felt betrayed by former chairmen and political appointees who called for defunding and abolishing the agency. They were proclaiming that it had been politicized or had perverted or failed in its mission, when in fact many of the programs, including those I was administering, were simply carrying on without change. Later some who launched these early political attacks recanted, but the damage and been done. Friendships were ended as a result of some of these betrayals or perceived betrayals. There were also interesting ironies when some prominent critics of the agency later realized that members of their own family stood to lose their jobs as a result of the cuts they were advocating. Fortunately, for those of us who felt we were a valuable and worthy part of the federal government, it was much easier to cut funding than to abolish the cultural agencies entirely. But those cuts were sufficient to bring about profound changes in programs and staffing.
© 2016 by Michael L. Hall
