Sheldon Hackney, who led Penn and the National Endowment for the Humanities, dies Dr. Hackney was born in Alabama, grew up in the segregated South and entered academia as a chronicler of the region's complex history. He rose quickly in the field of university administration, becoming provost of Princeton University shortly before his 40th birthday and president of Tulane University in New Orleans three years later. He came to national attention as president of the University of Pennsylvania, which he led from 1981 until 1993, when President Bill Clinton selected him for the NEH post. An independent federal agency, it is a sister organization to the National Endowment for the Arts and funds humanities initiatives across the country. Dr. Hackney's tenure at Penn coincided with the start of what became known as the "culture wars" - the heated public debates over topics such as abortion, religious freedom and race relations. At Penn, Dr. Hackney was credited with raising undergraduate minority enrollment from 13 to 30 percent and with increasing the endowment from about $160 million to $1 billion. He became better known to the general public, however, for his handling of two on-campus incidents that made national news. In January 1993 - months before Dr. Hackney's nomination to lead the NEH - a Penn student grew frustrated with several African American women who were making noise outside his dorm and shouted, "Shut up, you water buffalo!" Citing the university's speech code, the women accused him of racial harassment. The male student, who was from Israel, insisted that the insult was not a racial epithet but rather a translation of a Yiddish expression for a bothersome person. The women ultimately dropped their charges, but the incident nonetheless attracted widespread attention. Dr. Hackney drew criticism for deciding not to insert himself into the university's judicial process. Months later, several African American students trashed 14,000 copies of the campus newspaper in a protest of the publication's alleged institutional racism. Dr. Hackney was widely quoted as saying that "two important university values, diversity and open expression, appear to be in conflict" - a comment that fanned the anger of detractors who had already considered him excessively politically correct. He insisted that his remarks had been taken out of context and that he had also said, "freedom of expression must take precedence over diversity." The incidents were presented during his Senate confirmation proceedings as litmus tests of his commitment to free speech. Critics derided him as the "pope of political correctness." "I resent bitterly being slandered by slogan," he told the Senate committee. I am not just a cardboard figure. I am someone who has spent years defending free speech, and I will do that at NEH as well.