Barnaby Conrad Keeney was born on October 17, 1914 in Halfway, Oregon, United States, the son of Maud Barnaby Conrad and Robert Mayro Keeney, a metallurgical engineer. The family moved frequently, finally settling in Hartford, Connecticut.
Keeney graduated in 1936 from the University of North Carolina and attended Harvard University, where he received his master's degree in 1937 and his doctorate in 1939, both in medieval history.
Keeney began teaching at Harvard in 1939. War interrupted his Harvard career. Enlisting in 1942, he served in Europe as an army intelligence officer. While engaged in combat, he risked his life to gather information. He left active duty as a captain in 1945. He returned to Harvard's history department, only to be wooed away to Providence, Rhode Island, as assistant professor of history at Brown University in 1946. Keeney's dissertation, Judgment by Peers, published in 1949, concerned the institutional and ideological origins of democratic constitutionalism. He continued to publish articles in medieval history during his early career. A full professor by 1951, he became dean of Brown's graduate school in 1952 and, a year later, dean of the college. War again interrupted Keeney's academic career: he went to Washington in 1951 amid the Korean conflict to work for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and returned to Brown the following year.
Keeney became president of Brown University in 1955. An admitted elitist, he believed in "superior opportunities for superior students" at every educational level. He set high standards for Brown students and faculty but worried about gifted young people who could not develop their potential because of inferior schools. Identifying undereducated teachers as part of the problem, Keeney decided to improve their opportunities. In 1957, Brown instituted a Master of Arts in Teaching program. Aspiring and present teachers took regular liberal arts courses, concentrating on their specialty, while taking methodological courses in education. Keeney also recognized, years before affirmative action became a maxim, that elite colleges were not properly serving minorities. He instituted an informal but aggressive policy of encouraging black students to apply to Brown and Pembroke (Brown's women's college), and almost tripled the graduate school enrollment in part to increase opportunities for minorities and women denied admission to other prestigious universities. He also established a relationship between Brown and predominantly African-American Tougaloo College in Mississippi. During his tenure, Keeney enforced fair housing regulations for off-campus students and ordered fraternities to eliminate discriminatory clauses from their charters or leave their national organizations. In addition, he initiated Brown's medical education program. After a decade on the job, Keeney remarked, a university president "gets pleased with his work . That is a dangerous state of affairs. "
Having achieved all his goals, he resigned July 1, 1966, to face new challenges as the first chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). In 1963, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Council of Graduate Schools of the United States, and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa created the Commission for the Humanities, naming Keeney as its chair. Its 1964 Report for the Humanities received wide and favorable attention in the media and Congress. The bill establishing the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities easily passed Congress, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it in September 1965. Keeney's term (1966 - 1970) was decisive for the NEH. However, Keeney--the only chair appointed without regard to political affiliation--found himself engaged in a philosophical argument over the mission of the NEH.
Academics considered the NEH an organization for financing scholarly research. With an eye on Congress, Keeney promoted programs that would serve a more general public. In his last two years, when "relevance" became the byword on college campuses, the NEH extended its definition of humanities to encompass subjects like peace, urbanization, and ethnicity. Keeney suggested that his most significant general achievement as NEH chair was to reduce "the breach between those who deal directly with human problems, and those who seek insight into them through professional study. " When President Richard M. Nixon limited him to one term, Keeney elected to remain in Washington as the chief executive officer of the Washington Consortium of Universities. The six-year-old consortium of Georgetown, George Washington, Catholic, American, and Howard universities wanted to create a strong, prestigious entity that would provide a first-class education at less cost. As CEO, Keeney was expected to have sufficient clout to achieve a consensus among university presidents and academic deans. Within months, however, he realized that maintaining the status quo was more important to individualistic deans and department heads than elevating the reputations of their schools. Keeney tendered his resignation effective July 1971, the first anniversary of his appointment. His only legacy was an impressionistic report suggesting several options for creating a viable graduate-level consortium. None was effectively implemented.
The Claremont Graduate School (CGS) next sought Keeney's expertise. Part of the Claremont (California) Colleges, CGS appointed Keeney its first president, effective in 1971 upon his resignation from the consortium. It selected him because he retained his reputation as a "fixer" and a fund-raiser. Besides making CGS financially sound, Keeney was able to carry out his philosophy of graduate education: preparing tomorrow's college teachers. He retired from CGS in 1976. The quiet of Keeney's retirement was broken briefly in 1978 when New Times revealed that he secretly worked for the CIA while Brown's president. He made no apologies for this relationship; he was serving his country. Keeney's post-Brown career had been devoted to promoting his philosophy of a liberal arts education in a changing world. During these years he wrote and lectured on the humanities and on education for both academic and public audiences. Keeney succeeded in making academia more intelligible to the public and vice versa.
During Keeney's administration at Brown University, enrollment increased from about 3, 600 to over 4, 600. His major tangible accomplishments at Brown included raising more than $85 million, more than doubling its physical plant, almost doubling its land area, and doubling its faculty. Keeney also played a crucial role in the development of the National Endowment for the Humanities: its organization into divisions, its development of a permanent professional staff, its establishment of grant procedures, and its selection of a prestigious and active oversight council. For his service in World War II, he received the Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and Silver Star.
Quotations:
"It has been abundantly demonstrated that education of itself does not solve social problems, but it is equally clear that a population with general education properly used enlarges the talent of society to solve them. "
"In a typical "Keeneyism", it must be clearly understood that the scholar does not lose dignity by being intelligible. "
On June 27, 1941, Keeney married Mary Elizabeth Critchfield. They had three children.
