On Feb. 11, the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities introduced on its web site that it had modified its funding standards for eligible humanities tasks in compliance with three latest government orders. In keeping with the announcement, “NEH awards is probably not used for the next functions:
- promotion of gender ideology;
- promotion of discriminatory fairness ideology;
- help for variety, fairness, and inclusion (DEI) or variety, fairness, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives or actions; or
- environmental justice initiatives or actions.”
These prohibitions impose the terminology of Govt Orders 14151, 14168 and 14190 onto future candidates for NEH funding, whether or not particular person students, museums, nonprofit organizations or faculties (together with traditionally Black faculties and universities and tribal faculties). Printed effectively throughout the stipulated 60-day window for presidency company compliance with the order to terminate all “equity-related” initiatives, grants or contracts, these prohibitions signify a swift implementation of the Trump administration’s point-by-point mandate for “Ending Radical Indoctrination.”
I can solely start to conjecture right here about what the implications of the NEH’s new standards could be for the humanities, the area of cultural and mental inquiry the NEH was created to foster. To quote the Nationwide Basis on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, “Whereas no authorities can name an incredible artist or scholar into existence, it’s needed and acceptable for the Federal Authorities to assist create and maintain not solely a local weather encouraging freedom of thought, creativeness, and inquiry but additionally the fabric circumstances facilitating the discharge of this artistic expertise.”
To uphold circumstances outlined by prohibition fairly than freedom—and with prohibitions explicitly concentrating on the correct to existence of queer and transgender individuals (“gender ideology”), the flexibility in any approach to offset egregious structural inequalities in academic and cultural entry (“DEI”), and even the very proper to advocate on behalf of anybody’s rights (“discriminatory fairness ideology”)—is to betray the very phrases underneath which the NEH was created. In revising its Discover of Funding Alternatives, the NEH is in violation of its public mission.
Presumably, as a authorities company perpetually underneath menace of finances cuts, the NEH hastened to implement Trump’s government orders to be able to fend off wholesale elimination. The NEH is a federal company and is thus instantly implicated within the government orders, supplied these orders are constitutional. By complying with Trump’s ideology, the Nationwide Endowment could maybe stay to see one other day, thereby preserving the careers of no less than a few of its roughly 185 workers and its potential—to do what?
The NEH has not but absolutely overhauled its web site to mirror its compliance. Of its present listings of Nice Initiatives Previous and Current, maybe “The Papers of George Washington,” “Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” and “The Actual Buffalo Invoice” would possibly handle to squeeze via underneath the brand new stipulations, however would the Created Equal documentary movie challenge be so fortunate? Would a biography of union organizer César Chavez handle to qualify as a fundable challenge, or a documentary about “A Black Surgeon within the Age of Jim Crow”? How about the Transatlantic Slave Commerce Database? The NEH has leveraged its personal institutional survival on the forfeit of future such tasks.
The issue is a far deeper one, nevertheless. In what universe ought to it’s an excessive amount of to ask {that a} state-sponsored establishment created to uphold the “materials circumstances” for freedom of thought, creativeness and inquiry put up even the slightest resistance to the inhumane, reactionary and repressive edicts issued by the Trump regime? Even at the moment, the NEH web site champions its previous help for tasks that uphold justice within the face of oppression, that resist totalitarian erasure. But the NEH itself has mustered no such resistance. As a substitute, it has introduced that any such tasks at the moment are ineligible for consideration.
Of 1 factor I’m sure: The Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities has forfeited its declare to the phrase “humanities.” The humanities don’t designate a prohibitive sphere of capitulation to ruling forces. The humanities are usually not furthered by a governmental company that serves, willingly or unwillingly, as an ideological extension of a political social gathering. The humanities are a site of inquiry, of questioning and investigation, not of unquestioning acquiescence.
As a literature professor and an educator within the humanities for greater than 1 / 4 century, I’ve assured my college students that the examine of cultural, creative and mental manufacturing is steady with its apply. This not solely implies that humanistic inquiry includes creativity, creation and a dedication to pondering freely, nevertheless it additionally implies that humanistic inquiry essentially upholds the identical duty to questions of ethics, worth and that means with which some other historic motion should reckon. Humanists can’t, and don’t, stand meekly apart whereas the “actual” brokers of historic change make large choices.
In posting a latest message to the often requested questions internet kind on the NEH web site, I wrote that in gentle of the NEH’s silent capitulation to Trump’s government orders, I used to be ashamed to name myself a humanist. I hereby recant that assertion. I’m not ashamed to name myself a humanist. It’s the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities that must be ashamed. Or, higher but, I name on the NEH and all its 185 workers, together with and particularly NEH chair Shelly C. Lowe, to recant their compliance with Govt Orders 14151, 14168 and 14190 and be part of different nationwide and worldwide businesses, organizations and people in resisting the inhumane and unconstitutional decrees of the Trump administration.
