Jim Leach, the ninth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, will be holding a lecture on Tuesday at 4 p.m.

The lecture, titled “Civility in a Troubled Economy,” will be hosted in room 101 College of Design.

Leach finished his Civility Tour last May, which consisted of him visiting all 50 states to discuss the issue of having opposing attitudes without a civil and democratic exchange of ideas.

The Civility Tour took Leach 19 months. The tour ended in Hawaii.

Leach was nominated to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities by President Obama and took the position in August 2009.

According to the NEH website, the organization is “an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities.”

He was an Iowa representative in Congress for 30 years, from 1977 to 2007. As a representative he led the Banking and Financial Services Committee, the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

Following his time as an Iowa representative, Leach was the interim director of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University from September 2007 to September 2008. He was also a visiting professor at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, where he taught public and international affairs.

Leach was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1942. He received his bachelor’s degree in politics in 1964 from Princeton University and his master’s degree in Soviet studies in 1966 from Johns Hopkins University.