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 current government orders. Based on the announcement, “NEH awards will not be used for the next functions:
- promotion of gender ideology;
- promotion of discriminatory fairness ideology;
- assist 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 Government 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). Revealed nicely 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 results of the NEH’s new standards may 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 awesome artist or scholar into existence, it’s mandatory and applicable 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 inventive expertise.”
To uphold circumstances outlined by prohibition moderately than freedom—and with prohibitions explicitly focusing on the correct to existence of queer and transgender folks (“gender ideology”), the power in any method 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 below 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 below menace of finances cuts, the NEH hastened to implement Trump’s government orders as a way to fend off wholesale elimination. The NEH is a federal company and is thus instantly implicated within the government orders, offered these orders are constitutional. By complying with Trump’s ideology, the Nationwide Endowment might maybe stay to see one other day, thereby preserving the careers of at the very least a few of its roughly 185 workers and its capability—to do what?
The NEH has not but totally 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 by below 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 or not 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 this time, the NEH web site champions its previous assist 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 are actually 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 will not be furthered by a governmental company that serves, willingly or unwillingly, as an ideological extension of a political celebration. 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, inventive and mental manufacturing is steady with its observe. This not solely implies that humanistic inquiry entails creativity, creation and a dedication to considering freely, nevertheless it additionally implies that humanistic inquiry essentially upholds the identical duty to questions of ethics, worth and which means with which some other historic motion should reckon. Humanists can not, and don’t, stand meekly apart whereas the “actual” brokers of historic change make huge selections.
In posting a current message to the regularly requested questions net kind on the NEH web site, I wrote that in mild 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 Government Orders 14151, 14168 and 14190 and be a part of different nationwide and worldwide companies, organizations and people in resisting the inhumane and unconstitutional decrees of the Trump administration.