hile Dick Cheney has built a political career as a consensus-minded Republican with few sharp edges, his wife Lynne has been a different kind of conservative - a full-throated social critic at the center of the culture wars.
Lynne Cheney, 58, led the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993, a platform from which she criticized political correctness and feminist theory at American colleges. She became a lightning rod for liberal scholars and many Democrats, and was branded a traitor in 1995 when she urged Congress to end federal funding for the NEH. The endowment experienced double-digit budget cuts in the aftermath.
''She took on academia, which she thought was becoming too political, too multicultural, too post-modern,'' said Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard University.
At a press conference yesterday in Austin, Governor Bush said Lynne Cheney would be ''an incredibly important member'' of his campaign team. Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist, said Mrs. Cheney had helped the governor on education reform and would have a speaking role at the Republican National Convention next week.
Both friends and critics of Cheney described her yesterday as intelligent, outspoken, and opinionated - and more overtly ideological than her husband or George and Laura Bush.
Cheney gained a national platform in 1995 as the co-host ''from the right'' on CNN's ''Crossfire Sunday,'' where she lobbed barbs at liberal guests on political and cultural issues. She also began a national association for college trustees and alumni who support tough academic standards and believe liberals have too much influence over higher education.
She is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, where she is working on a book tentatively titled ''Schoolthink: The Ideas That Are Undermining American Education, and What We Can Do About Them.''
''Hers is a conservatism of common sense,'' said Dinesh D'Souza, an author and colleague of Cheney's in Washington. ''She believes deep down that there is a certain historical truth. And she regards as clever or ultimately malicious the people who try to deny the existence of truth.''
Cheney was born in Casper, Wyo., attended college in Colorado and earned a doctorate in philosophy in 19th century British literature from the University of Wisconsin. She married Richard Cheney in 1964, and they have two children.
She was an editor at Washingtonian magazine when President Reagan appointed her chairman of the NEH, which provides grants to academics, historians, libraries, and museums, among others.
Several scholars and humanities leaders said yesterday that Cheney took a dim view of grant proposals that reflected liberal academic theories, such as Marxism, feminism, or postcolonial studies. Some grants for such projects were approved, but others were rejected, they said.
''She was very concerned about cutting-edge types of research that historians and others were engaged in,'' said Lee W. Formwalt, executive director of the Organization of American Historians. ''Being a conservative, she wanted to go back to the traditional way things were taught and researched.''
Cheney could not be reached for comment yesterday, but some of her allies said her record was being distorted.
''She put a stop to the political agenda at the NEH, and that's why so many scholars are upset,'' said John Silber, the chancellor of Boston University. He called Cheney a bulwark against political correctness, ''the phenomenon that Western culture is no damn good and you have to criticize it.''
As head of the NEH, Cheney supported the PBS ''Civil War'' series and a group of grants to improve libraries and preserve books. But she became known for arguing that higher education was rife with elitist, leftist scholars who practiced historical revisionism.
In 1994 and 1995, Cheney aimed her fire at a set of voluntary, national standards for American history that were being developed in part with NEH money she approved.
In an Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, titled ''The End of History,'' Cheney attacked the standards for leaving out white males such as Albert Einstein, Robert E. Lee, and the Wright Brothers, while making frequent mention of Harriet Tubman, McCarthyism, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Gary B. Nash, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, who helped develop the standards, cited a letter from Cheney expressing her early support for the standards. He said she repudiated them in order to shore up the conservative credentials of herself and her husband.
In Austin, Mary Leonard of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.
