"Cultural Power and the Role of the Humanities"

National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Jim Leach delivers the keynote address on "Cultural Power and the Role of the Humanities" at the Barnett Symposium on Cultural Soft Power: Practice, Policy and the Arts at Ohio State University.

We Americans radically underestimate the pervasive power of culture and the importance of the humanities in American life and thought…The humanities are critical to citizenship, to American national security, to increasing the store of cultural knowledge. But as everyone in the academy senses, society is beginning to undervalue a host of humanities disciplines at a time when they have never been more essential.