Bruce Cole

In Memoriam, 1938-2018

Bruce Cole was a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His areas of expertise included the teaching of American history and civics, and private and federal cultural policy.

Read full bio.

Bruce Cole was a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His areas of expertise included the teaching of American history and civics, and private and federal cultural policy.

Mr. Cole, the former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, was the author of fourteen books and numerous articles. His fifteenth book, Art from the Swamp, was published in 2018 by Encounter Books.

Under Mr. Cole’s leadership (from 2001 to 2009), the NEH launched key initiatives, including We the People, a program designed to encourage the teaching, study and understanding of American history and culture, and the Picturing America project, which uses great American art to teach our nation’s history and culture in 80,000 schools and public libraries nationwide. He also created the NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative and Office, which made the NEH a national leader in this new frontier of humanities access and knowledge. Under his tenure—the longest in NEH history—the NEH developed partnerships with several foreign countries, including Mexico and China. Mr. Cole managed a budget of $150 million and a staff of 170 and was responsible for awards totaling over $800 million dollars.

Before taking the NEH chairmanship, Mr. Cole was Distinguished Professor of Art History and Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. In 2008, he received the President’s Medal from the University for “excellence in service, achievement and teaching.” In 2006, Governor Mitch Daniels awarded Mr. Cole the Sagamore of the Wabash, which recognizes individuals who have brought distinction to the state of Indiana.

Born in Ohio, Mr. Cole earned his B.A. from Case Western Reserve University, a master’s degree from Oberlin College, and a doctorate from Bryn Mawr College. He was a recipient of nine honorary doctorate degrees. For two years he was the William E. Suida Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. Mr. Cole held fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Kress Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a corresponding member of the Accademia Senese degli Intronati, the oldest learned society in Europe.

Mr. Cole served as a delegate on the U.S. National Commission for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), on the boards of the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Norman Rockwell Museum, and as a Senate-appointed member of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. He was also a member of the boards of American Heritage and the Jack Miller Center. In 2010, Mr. Cole was appointed by Governor Mitch Daniels to a three-year term on Indiana University’s Board of Trustees.

In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded Mr. Cole the Presidential Citizens Medal “for his work to strengthen our national memory and ensure that our country’s heritage is passed on to future generations.” The medal is second only to the Presidential Medal of Freedom among the honors the President can confer upon a civilian. Also in 2008, Mr. Cole was decorated Knight of the Grand Cross, the highest honor of the Republic of Italy.

In August 2013, Mr. Cole was appointed by President Barack Obama to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission.


Close bio

What’s Wrong with the Humanities?

Bruce Cole

The humanities are declining because too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.

Articles

The Public Discourse / February 3, 2016

Breaking the Bonds of the Past

Bruce Cole

Hiram Powers’s ‘The Greek Slave’ helped shape American arts, politics and taste.

Articles

Wall Street Journal / January 1, 2016

‘Ornament & Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice’ Review

Bruce Cole

It’s time art history acknowledged Carlo Crivelli’s greatness.

Articles

Wall Street Journal / December 30, 2015

Letters to a Young Connoisseur

Bruce Cole

Kenneth Clark thanked Bernard Berenson for “emancipating” him from the intellectual fashions of the age.

Articles

Wall Street Journal / October 7, 2015

Beach Bums

Bruce Cole

On “BEACH” at the National Building Museum, the Eisenhower Memorial, and the end of James Billington’s tenure as Librarian of Congress.

Articles

New York Survival Story

Bruce Cole

A new book tells the story of a “near-death experience” that threatened the future not only of the New York Public Library but of its vast collection of books, rare manuscripts, artifacts, and ephemera.

Articles

Too Cool in the Capital

Bruce Cole

The National Portrait Gallery does best when it focuses on high-caliber artists, rather then pandering to its visitors with exhibitions that attempt to be “cool.” Elsewhere in the capital, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission continues to lurch along.

Articles

American Amnesia

Bruce Cole

The release of the U.S. Department of Education’s latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for history, civics and geography shows that we are raising another generation of historical and civic amnesiacs.

Articles

Washington Times / May 14, 2015

Gehry’s Middle Finger

Bruce Cole

The gullible bureaucrats responsible for hiring Frank Gehry for the Eisenhower Memorial put the American taxpayer into the hands of a fashionable architect whose works, quite frankly, are already starting to look clichéd and dated.

Articles

A Monumental Shame

Bruce Cole

The noble idea to build a memorial to Dwight Eisenhower has become a classic Washington boondoggle, an object lesson on how not to build a memorial in that city.

Articles

Greatness in Miniature

Bruce Cole

A concise new biography offers good insight into the character of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Articles

National Review / October 30, 2014

The Imprint of Battle

Bruce Cole

A Virginia Museum of Fine Arts exhibition of high-quality etchings, engravings, lithographs and dry points, all accompanied by helpful explanatory labels, chronicle World War I from the British Isles to the deserts of the Near East.

Articles

Wall Street Journal / August 29, 2014