Lynne Cheney Under Consideration For Appointment To “Expert” Social Studies Panel

Lynne Cheney, wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is under consideration as a possible nominee to an expert panel that will guide the revision of social studies curriculum in Texas, Capitol Annex has learned.

Cheney is well-known for crusading against national history and social studies standards in the 1990s, calling the standards–which the National Endowment for the Humanities helped fund while Cheney was its chair–”grim and gloomy.” Cheney also denounced the standards as a monument to political correctness, claimed they gave insufficient attention to Confederate General Robert E. Lee and the Wright brothers and focusing far too much on figures like Harriet Tubman, and worried that they concentrated too much on embarrassing episodes in the nation’s history, such as the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism.

According to a source familiar with the deliberations of the unnamed State Board of Education member who is considering Cheney as a potential nominee, it is unknown if Cheney has been formally contacted about serving on the panel.

Given that the State Board of Education is reportedly considering giving the so-called Expert Review Panel a tremendous amount of authority over how social studies curriculum is crafted, the news that there is potential for a polarizing figure like Cheney to join fuax historian David Barton and anti-gay evangelist Peter Marshall is disturbing, to say the least. Cheney, whose most recent jobs included serving on corporate boards, does have a more academic resume than Barton or Marshall, to say the least, as she has a PhD in 19th Century British Literature. Nevertheless, that by no means qualifies her to sit on an “expert panel” to review social studies curriculum. Not only that, but Cheney is simply an only slightly less radical version of Barton and Marshall when it comes to how history should be taught in public schools.

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