To the editor:
Jonathan Eburne calls the Nationwide Endowment for the Humanities’ posting of the manager orders relating to the promotion of gender, fairness and environmental justice ideology an act of “capitulation” equal to “the ideological extension of a political occasion” (“An Open Letter to the NEH,” Feb. 28, 2025). I share his vital stance towards the manager orders and the spirit driving them. However his accusation towards the NEH is unfair and normalizes a harmful misreading of the scope of the orders that larger schooling should keep away from.
The NEH chair and staffers are federal workers, certain to obey authorities directives. To refuse compliance would invite quick termination of the company’s proficient, skilled employees and name the way forward for the company into query. With them would go very important funding and stewardship for the humanities that sustains college, college students, state humanities councils and members of the general public.
To be clear, these orders apply throughout the federal authorities, and nothing in them is particular to the NEH. They don’t apply to analysis and instructing; one (EO 14173) features a carve-out for establishments of upper schooling.
By treating NEH initiatives as falling below the scope of the orders, Eburne implicitly assents to the notion that analysis and instructing are equal to selling ideology. That is certainly the guiding perception in Florida, and it’s shared by the present administration.
In truth, “selling ideology” shouldn’t be an correct definition of scholarly or scientific inquiry, together with the essential work of instructing and doing analysis on gender, fairness and the surroundings.
It’s essential that we rise up towards makes an attempt to outline teachers as promoters of ideology and thus as untrustworthy stewards of information, or, because the vice chairman has put it, devoted to “deceit and lies, to not the reality.” It’s malicious abuse of language designed to undermine folks’s confidence in academia and in experience basically. The best technique is to not settle for a nasty definition—it’s to name out the definition as fallacious and reject the labeling whereas these orders are litigated within the courts.
