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| Palenque, Chiapas, on April 11, 2005 |
At the NEH, the DOGE attack seems to mean cancellation of most grant programs and to mandatory administrative leave, leading to termination for 70-80 percent of its 180 staff. This is double the estimates of the standard staff reduction that DOGE demands; a skeleton crew is to staff the remainder. Grantees are receiving termination notices, some of which they’re posting online. Confusion reigns as to the current status and future of grants, not to mention people’s jobs and the endowment itself. It’s the kind of situation you’d expect during a world war, except for DOGE’s additional dosage of contempt for the people and the missions being “demolished,” as one Health and Human Services staffer described the effects.
In response, the Modern Language Association (MLA), the National Humanities Alliance (NHA), the American Studies Association (ASA) and many other humanities associations have called on everyone to contact their elected representatives to object as loudly as they can. The American Folklore Society has a very good pagefor doing this.
Humanities people are racing out to join the Hands Off protests,
which are increasingly gigantic and amazing.
The Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) has called for the collection of stories of the effects of the cuts. The stories are out there (Oklahoma, New Mexico, Ohio, Tennessee, Illinois, etc) and can (and must) be assembled into a national picture. Various entities have set up pages to record grant cancellations (The Association for Computers and the Humanities; The National Humanities Alliance). This is a great start.
Some current and terminated federal employees have set up Alt National Forest Service, Alt CDC, Alt NIH Bluesky which has been joined by, among others, Alt National Endowment for the Humanities. A shadow federal government is taking shape on line.
This is the best mobilization of humanities forces that I’ve seen in my academic lifetime. I couldn’t be happier about this energy and determination. Many thanks to everyone who is throwing themselves into the cause with such intelligence and abandon.
This brings us to the question of remedies. A few need to be set aside.
First, the executive branch is not an audience for reasoned explanations of the value of the humanities for knowledge and the public. It’s not that Trump and his people don’t care. They deeply care about the humanities—in the sense of deeply hating them-- and want to erase them and the socio-historical realities they represent. The grant termination letters read:
“Your grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination.” [The letter] went on, “Your grant’s immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities.” Instead, the NEH would be “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the president’s agenda.”
The language asserts a categorical contradiction between the research the NEH funds and the president’s agenda. I am sure that is what Trumpism believes. The sadism of blanket terminations is the self-affirmation of a righteous and also victimized cause--no audience there.
Second is our elected Congress: also not an audience. Angry calls do need to be put in the historical and political record, but Congress didn’t do this hit. Trump’s DOGE did, and Congress has no effect on Trump or DOGE. The Republicans are fine with most of what is happening, very much including resubordinating people of color, and anyway for 40 years they’ve been saying all these jobs and agencies are undergrowth to be cleared from the yellow brick road to tax cuts. Their own voters aren’t happy, but they cast them as boozers if they want services and clowns if Musk cuts their government job. On the other side, the Democrats can’t come to the phone right now.
So, the main audiences I see are:
(1) academics and our kindred knowledge workers in and out of federal government, whose laboriously-created expertise in science, arts, letters, social research is getting torched and their public missions sneeringly destroyed. (See the great description of science labor in this piece by Neel V. Patel). This cross-institutional solidarity around work and public mission is very important.
(2) academic administrators, who are accommodating their institutions to Trump’s rules and will continue to without strong pressure from their faculty, staff, and students (e.g. Harvard, Rutgers, Indiana University-Bloomington, U Mass-Amherst . . .).
(3) the wider non-MAGA public, which is increasingly distressed by the chaos and damage and could use good information and storylines.
(4) the courts, both state and federal. This means lawfare as never before waged by humanities associations.
Suing is the key action now, as I see it--suing the Trump administration and its agents to get temporary restraining orders pending further action by the courts. DOGE has a known playbook. There has been a flood tlawsuits against DOGE’s actions, and “as of March 25, at least 53 of those rulings have at least temporarily paused some of the administration’s initiatives.” Lawfare has a litigation tracker, which shows how busy the Trump ligitation world has been.
The courts have arguably been the most successful venue of opposition to Trump destruction, for the basic reason that these attacks on government agencies and employees are illegal and/or unconstitutional in whole or in part, in process or in substance. Illegality suggests gradual or eventual plaintiff victory, barring blanket rejection of court orders in the coming months.
In addition to this long chain of litigation, three recent cases support this positive trajectory. I will name them without comment on their claims, because the important thing here is the growing ecosystem of legal contestations of Trump’s unbounded executive authority.
The AAUP, with the American Federation of Teachers and the Democracy Project sued the Trump administration over their $400 million in extortionate cuts to Columbia University unless they control academic units and expression to the dictates of the Department of Education. This is an essential collaboration between teachers in K-12 and universities for the defense, autonomy, and better governance of their institutions. It should be something of a model for other suits in education.
Second is the lawsuit against Trump and associations brought by 21 states to block the gutting of NEH’s kindred agency, the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The Introduction to the complaint for declarative and injunctory relief argues,
One option that our Constitution does not give the President is to shutter the agencies himself, in defiance of the administrative procedures that Congress required to be followed, the appropriations that Congress ordered to be spent, and the separation of powers that every officer of our government has sworn to uphold. Accordingly, the Closure Order should be declared unlawful, and Defendants’ actions implementing that unlawful order should be vacated.
The attempt to stop the gutting of IMLS joins this ever-growing mass of complaints that establish a pattern of administrative illegality that in turn sets the stage for reversals.
Which brings me to a third case: a defeat in the Supreme Court for plaintiffs that had challenged the summary termination of the Department of Education’s teacher training grants (Department of Education v. California et al.). The Court vacated a temporary restraining order that had invoked the Administrative Procedures Act so that DofEd can continue to withhold grant funding.
The decision is important for its dissents. Justice Kagan noted, “Nowhere in its papers does the Government defend the legality of canceling the education grants at issue here.” Similarly, Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Sotomayor, wrote that the Court wades in to allow “its new summary grant termination policy . . . even though the TRO preserves the pretermination status quo and causes zero concrete harm to the Government. By contrast, reinstating the challenged grant-termination policy will inflict significant harm on grantees—a fact that the Government barely contests. Worse still, the Government does not even deign to defend the lawfulness of its actions.” Such opinions repeatedly flag Illegality as the essence of this administration’s summary practices, and build a cumulative case in defeats (of which there are more to come) as well as victories.
As I write, there are rumors that the NHA is indeed planning to sue. I hope this is true! I hope they are joined by the MLA, AHA, APA, ACLS, Mellon—the many agencies who possibly for the first time need to stand and battle together.
I have a final thought about the sometimes hidden centrality of the humanities disciplines to the whole society.
The humanities are at the bottom of the official epistemological ladder, but are at the top of the mystery index of direct mass impacts on humankind. They feed directly into The Culture, and in the common understanding are inseparable from it. Over the past sixty years there has been a revolution in the knowledge that history, philosophy, criticism, ethnic studies, linguistics, folklore, ethnomusicology and their many related fields have produced. That knowledge has underwritten a cultural revolution, all pointing toward (though never achieving) something like general egalitarian diversity—in sexuality, gender, race, culture, national and linguistic status. This revolution in consciousness is real, though DOGE, building on decades of right-wing counterrevolution of the kind chronicled by John Ganz and many others, is trying to stuff it in a coffin.
We humanities folk don’t often believe in our own revolution in part because, being inside it, we clearly see its incompleteness and failures. These are real, and so much remains to be done. Meanwhile, the political right believes passionately in our revolution. It has been trying to destroy it for the same sixty years—Nixon was a culture warrior, Agnew was a culture warrior, Reagan was a culture warrior, Wallace was a culture warrior, etc.
The right believes in the left’s cultural revolution because it did in fact shift the ethical momentum of West towards equality, reciprocity, recognition, just distribution, and now a just climate transition and economic justice for the global South. These ideas—wrong word--these atmospheres of pervasive feeling and expectation define the trajectory of progress as widely understood across the world. The right is angry in part because it is always in a reactionary posture in relation to what seems to be, in spite of reversals and incompletions, the flow of general expectations for common life.
This humanities power is why the right fights so hard against diversity. “Diversity” to the academic left marks the dilution and betrayal of the civil rights vision of full racial equality, Black power, the giving of rules to institutions by people of color—dilution through its replacement with a procedural surveillance that preserves white institutions while also flattering them. To the right, however, diversity means the end of white patriarchy, free markets, and America. The war on diversity has merged with the war on pro-Palestinian students and with the corporate right’s war on “bureaucracy,” now put into hyperdrive by the tech broligarchy. As Evgeny Morozov writes,
Unable to reprogram their workforce through direct means, Silicon Valley’s oligarch-intellectuals adopted a more elegant solution: condemning “woke” infiltration with the fervor of medieval witch-hunters while disguising national security behind the rhetoric of patriotic duty.
[Alex] Karp, having already crowned “wokeness” the “central risk to Palantir and America,” now demands geopolitical fealty from his payroll peasantry. They must support Israel and oppose China; those who disagree are free to look for employment elsewhere. As he told his Davos audience in 2023, “we want [employees] who want to be on the side of the West. You may not agree with that and, bless you, don’t work here.
The current government is therefore trying to erase the word diversity from the language, exterminate its offices, terminate its people, and wipe what it represents—the value, power, the simple abundant presence of people of color—off the face of society.
As Joan W. Scott rightly notes, Trump’s “history executive order is nothing less than the takeover of educational and cultural institutions—schools, museums, public statues, commemorative anniversary events—in the name of an official authoritarian ideology committed to white supremacy, Christian theology, and the promotion of intolerant nationalist pride.”
Equally, DOGE goes after centers of government expertise regarding society because these knowledge centers and knowledge workers are rival centers of power and creation. DOGE orders effectively eliminate academic freedom for academics and government workers alike.
My point here is that the Trump-Musk escalation of a sixty-year crusade is so savage, so destructive, so degenerated, so hostile to counter- knowledge, to history, to social reality itself, precisely because of the power of those diverse knowledges and peoples and government agencies to which the humanities disciplines are bound. It is the (painfully unfinished and yet real) triumph of the humanities that they are trying to undo.
To quote George Lipsitz quoting Rahsaan Roland Kirk, “this ain’t no sideshow.” And for that reason the humanities system have to fight to win.
