Saving the NEH

Dr. Norrell Edwards considers the Trump administration’s termination of National Endowment for the Humanities grants.

By Norrell EdwardsMay 13, 2025

• Education

• Politics

AROUND THIS TIME last spring, I received an email that made me cry. I had been awarded an NEH development grant to create a new course that I called Publishing Today: Reconnecting the Humanities Ecosystem. I applied for the grant for this project because I firmly believed—and still do—that the survival of humanities education depends on our efforts to connect literary and cultural work within the classroom to institutions outside academia.

I proposed a class—which I started this year, and which is still ongoing—that would combine literary studies with opportunities to learn about the current material processes that create literature. Thus far, the class has been unlike any other English class offered at my university. Guest speakers from some of the most storied literary organizations and publishers in the United States—Penguin Random House, The Paris Review, as well as this magazine—visited my classroom to discuss how books are published, edited, and produced. We’ve talked to editors, executive directors, marketing executives, authors, and independent bookstore managers—all of whom offered my students invaluable insights and professional tools. In the spirit of public accessibility and education, the class is open to anyone via Zoom or in person. Last week, a guest walked in who had seen a flyer at a local library. It occurred to me that I had built the kind of class I had so desperately wanted for myself when I was in college over a decade ago.

On Wednesday, April 2, I received the email I’d been dreading since the start of the new year—our National Endowment for the Humanities grant had been terminated. The day before, I had received at least three emails from professional associations (The Modern Language Association, the American Studies Association, and the National Humanities Alliance) warning that the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had now set its sights on the NEH, but I still couldn’t believe how quickly this was unfolding (although the dismantling of USAID should have been a clue). I didn’t know it then, but I was among thousands whose funding was cut. Not only were already-appropriated grants severed but also funding for state humanities councils, individual fellowships, scholarly societies, and community organizations. Most of NEH’s 180 employees are in the process of being removed from their positions. President Donald Trump’s formal budget proposal for 2026 urges the complete elimination of the NEH, along with the National Endowment for the Arts.

These aren’t just faceless bureaucrats. These are people I have met personally through training sessions, workshops, and NEH communications. Their lives were changing too, of course, and I can’t begin to imagine how the trajectory of their lives has been altered by these cuts. The money has apparently been reappropriated already. Last week, The New York Times reported that our current administration will take the millions of dollars ransacked from the Humanities to help build Trump’s “Garden of Heroes,” a grandiose sculpture garden at the White House.

Meanwhile, my project remains unfinished. The heart of the proposal and most of our NEH grant was meant to provide fully funded internships for three students in the class. The students had already started applying. What would I tell them? This would have been their opportunity to actualize the skills they’d learned in class, perhaps even offering them a head start in their careers. We are at a regional college in Central New York that does not boast the same kinds of internships that other prestigious or elite colleges and universities offer. Many of my students come from working-class or middle-class backgrounds, across race and ethnicity. These students often can’t afford not to work, so a paid internship can be life-changing.

I had a similar trajectory myself. I am a professor today because of pipeline programs like the McNair Scholars Program, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, and the Leadership Alliance. All those initiatives allowed me to pursue academic research while being paid. Those programs ensured that I could quit my part-time job at Payless (back when that still existed) and focus on ideas and the life of the mind. There are many paths to a career in the humanities, but this administration seems hell-bent on foreclosing all of them.

Of course, this is not unexpected. Make no mistake—this administration despises public service. The decimation of the National Endowment for the Humanities means that many states will have virtually no state funding for cultural activities. While this is an attack on public education in line with the administration’s decision to shutter the Department of Education and police the most prestigious and elite universities, it is also part of a larger agenda to end federal public service. They have cut millions in funding to a diverse spectrum of public-serving organizations: the Institute for Museum and Library Services, which provides librarian and archivist training across the United States, scholarships for Native students, and unique programs like AI adoption and disaster preparedness; public health programming that tracks diseases, supports access to vaccines and mental health and addiction services, and improves health infrastructures; veterans affairs initiatives that support veterans’ healthcare, 80,000 employee positions, a suicide hotline, benefits, and research; USAID programming that reduces global poverty, provides medicine and food (not to mention clean potable water), protects women and girls from sexual violence, and offers lifesaving humanitarian assistance such as HIV medications; and Department of Health and Human Services initiatives that manage drug regulation, biomedical research, teacher training, hospital reimbursement, and child welfare initiatives. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Public health, higher education, weather forecasting—every area of the federal government is being impacted and weathering some kind of crisis.

The values of this administration are clear: the United States is for the wealthy. The rest of us have to make our own way upstream. There is no interest in using taxpayer dollars to support upward mobility or the public good. I worry for my students, particularly those who want to work in the humanities. How will they carve out careers for themselves? The odds are already bad: according to Business Insider, the average knowledge worker job received 244 applications in February 2025. What will happen next year, when that number could easily double? As always, connections and nepotism will determine the outcome for most positions.

Even the classic grad-school route—the one I followed—is in peril. I entered college on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis, matured during the Occupy Wall Street movement, and entered a PhD program directly after undergrad because finding a job in New York City at that time seemed impossible. The situation now is even worse, as federal funding cuts are forcing research institutions to rescind doctoral acceptance letters. I can see the options for my students narrowing, with only one clear outcome: more graduating students will be forced into underpaid, low-income positions for the foreseeable future.

This is not the future I had hoped for, and it’s not the future I worked very hard to avoid. I wanted to provide my students with a sense of opportunity, and that has been very abruptly cut off. I worry for them, but I also worry for how the humanities—and all of us readers, writers, and culture workers, not to mention the public at large—will fare in this new environment. My class is a casualty among so many. The NEH is doing important work, and it deserves to be saved.

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Featured image: Photo from “President Trump Hosts First Cabinet Meeting,” February 26, 2025. CC0, whitehouse.gov. Accessed May 9, 2025. Image has been cropped.