Sheldon Hackney

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Sheldon Francis Hackney (born 1933) is a prominent U.S. educator. He is the Boies Professor of United States History at the University of Pennsylvania. He previously served as the provost of Princeton University from 1972 to 1975, the president of Tulane University from 1975 to 1980, and the president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1981 to 1993. He was also the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from 1993 to 1997, appointed by President Clinton. He was the son-in-law of Virginia and Clifford Durr.

Hackney specializes in the history of the American South since the Civil War. He has in an interest in American utopias and other social movements with an emphasis on the Civil Rights Movement and the 1960s. Among the articles and books on history that Hackney has published, "Populism to Progressivism in Alabama" won the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association.

Hackney was president of the University of Pennsylvania during the so-called Water Buffalo Incident, a controversial affair involving a student charged with racial harassment that raised issues involving free speech and university judicial procedures nationally. In particular, Hackney's role in the incident was a subject of his 1993 Senate confirmation hearings for the NEH appointment. Hackney published memoir about the turmoil of his confirmation, The Politics of Presidential Appointment: A Memoir of the Culture War [ISBN 1-58838-068-8], was published in 2002.