Trump Administration's Attack on the Humanities Is an Attack on All of Us

On March 31, word began to leak that DOGE was targeting the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). A few days later, it began rescinding grants made during the Biden Administration and moving forward with a plan to cut 80% of the NEH staff.

Grantees received the same email. “Your grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities,” it said.

It announced that “NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda…. Your grant’s immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. The termination of your grant represents an urgent priority for the administration….”

There's nothing subtle here. As in other areas of the federal government, the administration intends to turn NEH, or whatever is left of it, into an arm of its propaganda machine.

Labeling the termination of its grants as an “urgent priority” seems bizarre in a country whose political system is being turned upside down and whose alliances are in ruins. Yet that language reveals the administration’s eagerness to eliminate all sources of independent and critical thought.

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You cannot construct an autocratic regime if that thinking lasts too long. Otherwise, why bother with NEH? Its 2024 budget was two hundred and eleven million dollars.

That’s barely a rounding error for the federal government’s overall expenditure. But recall, as MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones observes, Trump is “slashing funds for museums and libraries, as a way to coerce these and other liberal arts institutions to bend to his movement’s will….”

Understanding that is one reason why all of us have a stake in the work that the NEH supported and in the humanities generally. Democracy requires the kind of thinking and commitment that the humanities nurture.

As the political theorist, Danielle Allen reminds us, “The people in this country and in Europe who designed systems of representative democracy had been broadly and deeply educated in history, geography, philosophy, literature, and art. This makes obvious sense the moment one pauses to ask what is involved in educating someone to participate in political and civic activities.”

That kind of education is what the humanities offer. They offer citizens an indispensable resource for “making judgments about grounding principles for the political order and about possible alternative approaches to the formal institutional organization of state power. …If we are to make judgments about the core principles or values that should orient our judgments about what will bring about our safety and happiness, surely we need philosophy, religion or the history of religion, and literature.”

We don’t have to romanticize the humanities to grasp Allen’s point. Sure, plenty of horrible things have been done by people steeped in the humanities but the skills and values they teach offer an important bulwark against the authoritarian impulse.

Those things are not just what people learn in schools and colleges. They can be found in the work performed by libraries, museums, and cultural events, which the NEH supported in the past.

The history of the NEH can be traced back to 1965 and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. “Though this period,” Daniel Geary argues, “has been called the high tide of liberalism, the content of the Great Society cultural agenda was classical or traditionalist by today's standards….At times, advocates for founding the NEH could be downright Tocquevillian in their rhetoric, presenting the arts and humanities as ballast for modern democracy.”

Since then, NEH has made grants to people of all political persuasions. They have supported school teachers, librarians, museum staff, and state humanities councils throughout the nation, in red states as well as blue ones.

The NEH claims “a significant record of achievement through its grantmaking programs. Over these five decades, NEH has awarded more than $5.7 billion for humanities projects through more than 65,000 grants. That public investment has led to the creation of books, films, and museum exhibits and to ensuring the preservation of significant cultural resources around the country.”

That is why, Geary reports, even Republican presidents “have found the endowment a helpful tool for supporting the civic education required for a healthy democracy…” He concludes that “If ‘democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens,’ then federal support of humanities research and education is a public investment in the future of our republic….”

The president and his team seem not to have gotten the message. Or maybe they have and don’t want to invest in the republic's future.

Other culture warriors have attacked and tried to cripple the NEH. A culture wars superstar, Lynne Cheney was chair of the NEH from 1986–92. She used her position to politicize the agency and to try to make sure that “historians and other scholars follow(ed) ‘the right path.’”

An article in Salon explains that the issue during Cheney’s tenure was “what's not being funded, which viewpoints are being excluded, and what critical-thinking tools for students are being suppressed.”

Shortly after Cheney left the NEH, the then-House Speaker’s so-called “Contract with America” called for its elimination. He failed to accomplish that goal but did manage to make steep cuts in its funding.

Trump is now making what Cheney and Gingrich did look like child’s play. Why ask Congress? Instead, send in DOGE to fire staff, rescind grants, and leave NEH an empty shell.

Their attack on NEH comes at a particularly bad time given the precarious state of the humanities in colleges and universities. Enrollments in humanities courses are way down, and universities are closing humanities departments.

At first glance, neither those grim facts nor the fate of the NEH is likely to arouse the American public. Both seem inconsequential given everything else that is going on.

But it is a mistake to do so.

As the Human Rights Foundation says, “Authoritarians have always understood a certain truth: creativity is a threat to their power.” In his time, Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, understood that.

He believed an enlightened citizenry was essential for a functioning republic and safeguarding against potential tyranny. “Self-government is not possible,” he said, “unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight.”

The humanities were then, and are now, an important part of the education Jefferson thought was indispensable for a self-governing people. Killing the NEH and crippling the humanities is a step on the way to ending the people’s capacity to govern themselves.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.