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| Banff, Alberta back country on June 5, 2026 |
This is the third of the talks from the CHCI panel, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now" in Banff, Alberta. The others were Chris Nealon’s and Asheesh Kapur Siddique’s is here, along with my introduction to the panel.
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This paper is a response to two trends I've noticed over the past couple of years.
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| Landing Santa Barbara Airport on Jan 30, 2026 |
Chris here: I'm posting a set of answers to a reporter’s questions from Charlie Hale, one of the authors cited for criticism in the Vanderbilt-Washington University “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” The reporter, Emma Whitford, wrote a good piece in Inside Higher Ed about the scholars who were cited as examples of the alleged decline of qualitative scholarship. None of the scholars she’d reached had been told that they were cited in it.
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| From Tunnel Mtn, Banff on June 6, 2026 |
This is the second of the talks from the CHCI panel, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now" in Banff, Alberta. Chris Nealon’s is here, my introduction to the panel is here.
Society needs the cultural knowledge that the humanities produces in its research and disseminates in its scholarship and pedagogy to make sense of the crises of the present. Chris has written about this need and convincingly argued for it, so I don’t have to. Instead, today I want to talk about politics: how do we make this happen?
Society has a need for humanistic knowledge. But there is no political movement in support of the academic humanities. There is a political movement about the humanities in the US-- on the political Right and it is deeply destructive to the project of democracy. While the Right over the last decade has built institutions and invested in undermining us by stealing our resources, destroying humanities programs and departments, and sowing doubt in our scholarship, the Resistance has not responded with anything near the militancy required. We need something different. I want to begin a discussion about what building a political movement looks like. The political structure of democracies is partisan: parties are the central vehicle through which politics happens. In the US, the ideologies of “Right” and “Left” are not exact correlates to “Republican” and “Democrat.’ These parties are, however, the only way that ideological visions get enacted in public institutions through legislation and bureaucracy.
My remarks will proceed in three parts. First, I will describe the political Right’s movement to supplant the academic humanities and why it is threatening to the work we do. Second, I will turn to the political Left in the United States and explain why it, in its own way, is anti-humanistic in important respects. The point of the first two parts is to argue that there is currently no meaningful political support for building the present we want. Third, and finally, I want to end on a hopeful note, by thinking about what it would take to build political support on the Left for robust publicly funded humanities research.
So to begin: the political Right has a project for the present and future of the humanities in higher education – the creation of parallel institutions to traditional academic departments that teach courses and sponsor research in humanities fields, though especially political and economic thought, that aligns with various center-right policy objectives. In the US, while there were early predecessors, like the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University (founded 1961; part of GMU since mid-1980s), and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (2000) at Princeton University, these are so-called ‘civic centers’ that began to proliferate around 2015, often funded by right-wing state legislatures and/or right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers. Their creation was co-extensive with a renewed assault on higher ed’s institutional autonomy.
These civic centers, such as the Hamilton School at the University of Florida (initially funded by $3 million in taxpayer dollars by the Florida legislature), the Chase Center at Ohio State University (initially funded by $24 million in taxpayer dollars by the Ohio legislature), and the Civitas Institute (now School of Civic Leadership) at UT-Austin (funded both by the state and private donors), work within universities in the same way that tobacco and tech companies work to subvert publicly accountable, democratic knowledge structures and institutions. As Alondra Nelson pointed out in her keynote lecture, they do this by casting doubt on the humanistic knowledge produced in universities, attacking it as “woke,” “political,” invalid, and unserious. They create parallel institutions that exist to produce politicized ideology disguised as “objective” scholarship and often cast in the rhetoric of “civics” that is squarely aimed at destroying the departments and cultures of teaching and scholarship in the humanities and the very idea of public funding for what we do.
Through civic centers, the right-wing is seizing on the crisis of funding and adjunctification in our universities for counter-majoritarian ends. As the historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd has written of these centers, “The right’s approach to higher education has been three-pronged: it has sought to create competing and parallel institutions, to wrest control from existing colleges, and ultimately, to defund public education entirely.”
None of the rhetoric is new, of course; if the ‘culture wars’ of the late 20th century was the ‘new McCarthyism,’ this is the Red Scare 3.0 - the political right has not had a new idea about universities since Joe McCarthy. It is the political right’s fixed vision of the future of the humanities in higher education go at least since Ronald Reagan became governor of California in 1967. You may know that, during a press conference in 1967 after being elected governor of California, and in the context of his push to introduce tuition into public higher ed in California, Reagan stated “we do believe that there are certain intellectual luxuries that perhaps we could do without for a year or two without hurting the cause of education.” Pressed to define these “intellectual luxuries,” Reagan pointed to only two examples: first, he referred to a course at UC Davis “where they teach you to hang the Governor in effigy.” Second, Reagan referred to “a state back in the Midwest where they discovered that a state university was offering a master's degree in the repair of band instruments, and I thought that this was sort of subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” We cannot give any concession or quarter to this continuing tradition of blanket hostility: it is completely dangerous and invalid. It is actually worse to have right-wing humanities than no humanities at all.
So far so retro culture war. Turning from the right’s attacks, I note that we have increasingly lost the center-left, the professional-managerial class (PMC) that once embraced what we do in public higher education.
As bad as the right has continued to be since 2020, I would argue that their attacks are not actually the politically worst for us: the center-left attacks have been far more damaging. Since the racist backlash to Black Lives Matter, followed by the backlash to campus protests opposing Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza, the center-left has joined this campaign. Deeply influential institutions within American political liberalism like The New York Times and The Atlantic have peddled a version of the right-wing narrative aimed at casting doubt on the project of the university and indicting the humanities in particular as the source of the university’s now-dubious project. They are reshaping PMC opinion against the idea of publicly-funded humanities teaching and scholarship.
There is so much to say about this; I can talk more about how this is happening in the Q & A. As for higher-ed media, an event earlier this week encapsulated everything wrong with it: the Chronicle of Higher Education just re-published an essay that originally appeared at the right wing outlet Persuasion, arguing, and I am not making this up, that humanists should stop doing and publishing research because what we produce is trash. The literal title of the article is “Most Humanities Research Should Stop.” I’ll say it again: this is in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Maybe we need a panel at the next CHCI about why the media coverage of humanities research and teaching is so bad and destructive.
So the center-left has, in its own way, abandoned the idea of robust public support for curiosity-driven humanistic education and scholarship and has fully embraced neoliberalism. Where do they think the humanities fit in our educational landscape? The center-left has decided that the purpose of public higher education is to supply workers for the economy, not citizens to participate in democracy. The value of any public investment in public education – whether from the teaching side or the research side – must be justified in terms of “return on investment” where “return” is defined in purely monetary terms, with all the non-monetary returns rendered illegible according to neoliberal reason. According to this vision, the humanities are fine in private institutions but their role in public education is less clear. This is important: Democrats do not have any problem with, and indeed support, the teaching of the humanities in private colleges and universities. This points to the center-left having no problem, per se, with adjunctification and contingency in humanities instruction in private institutions, and especially highly selective ones – look at the reliance on contingent faculty in core curriculum programs at UChicago and Columbia, or in History & Literature and Social Studies at Harvard; look, perhaps most egregiously, at contingent faculty in college writing programs, again, especially private ones. Do any private college or university writing programs have tenure-line appointments?
Whether the center-left supports research for the humanities in private colleges and universities is a more muddled question. What is clear is that in public education, the Democrats post-Reagan have emphasized STEM above all. The Clinton administration began this with its pivot to STEM education as the focus of its priorities and public investment. Barack Obama famously quipped in 2014 that “folks can make a lot more potentially with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree.” The Obama administration proposed reductions to NEH and NEA funding in 2011 and 2012. Joe Biden was better, but still, annual NEH funding even under Democratic administrations has never been anywhere near $1 billion. Prior to DOGE, the NSF spent 17.5 times more on undergraduate research than the Congressional funds available to the NEH for individual fellowships to scholars.
In 2022, Obama’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardonna, tweeted, “Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce.” Note the language here: the purpose of the public education system is to train workers for industry. Whatever industry demands, the taxpayer should supply. An echo of this came again in the context of the debate over student loan forgiveness during the Biden administration. In 2023, when the US House of Representatives voted to overturn Biden’s student debt relief program, the Democratic congresswoman and Reed College graduate Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, explained why she supported overturning the Biden student loan forgiveness program:
“Expansions of student debt forgiveness need to be matched dollar-for-dollar with investments in career & technical education. I can’t support the first without the other. The severe shortage of trades workers needs to be seen & treated as a national priority. It’s about respect.
I’m all for repairing what’s busted but the higher education system is totaled. College costs too much & the credentials produced get unwarranted social status, justifying more cost increases by our country’s elite. They need to snap out of it & the system needs a total overhaul.”
Let me underscore again that Congresswoman Perez went to Reed. She had the humanities experience we want students to have. But that experience does not seem to have led her to believe in the value of publicly-funded intellectual curiosity. There is no necessary correlation between classroom exposure to what we do and the willingness of either the college-educated public or college-educated politicians to then go out and support the university we want to build.
This is not because pedagogy is not important; far from it. It is because pedagogy in itself is not enough: we need politics – and we need politicians – to make political change happen.
Now for a very brief part three. The construction of a robust public infrastructure for funding humanities research depends in the United States on winning political support. We don’t have that now. But I strongly believe we have a chance right now, even though things are so bad, to build this political support: the next Democratic administration will need to rebuild the federal government knowledge infrastructure, completely and totally. It’s time for us, as humanists, to lay out what we need in terms of public support.
We need to be talking to the administration in exile. Media is a huge part of this: the turn by center-left media outlets that influential Democrats read, like the New York Times and The Atlantic, against humanistic scholarship and teaching, is a big problem. The retreat of private funding for university-based humanities research is also a big problem, one that I have written about, but of course in electoral democracies, private foundations are not accountable to publics in the same way as state institutions are, and while we can and should say things about the retreat of private funding (and I have) we actually have an opportunity right now to articulate what a reconstructed NEH should look like and how much it should be funded. The center-right will not let this serious crisis go to waste; neither should we.
This is one of talks from the CHCI panel, "The Humanities We Can Build Right Now" in Banff, Alberta. My explanation of the context and my introduction to the panel are here.
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Thanks for having me, folks. I had been planning to devote my short presentation to an outline of the crisis facing STEM fields, and how understanding that crisis can make a difference for how we think about the assaults on the humanities. I’d be happy to talk about that in our conversation after this panel. But after listening to Professor Alondra Nelson’s fantastic opening keynote on Monday, I found myself wanting to pick up on her insights, and run with them a little bit.
As you recall, Professor Nelson walked us through a distinction between stochastic and epistemological frames for knowledge, where the stochastic names the random, unpredictable play of the material world, which nonetheless always holds out the promise of the predictability of phenomena, while epistemological language holds out a different promise, the knowledge of how and why things work the way they do. And she pointed us to the idea of agnotology, which if I followed right, describes both the production of obfuscatory anti-knowledge, and study of that obfuscation.
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| Banff, Alberta back country on June 3, 2026 |
CHCI funds research initiatives, among other things--see their Climate Futures call and other initiatives. The theme of this year's meeting was "Building the Future We Want," which is also an implicit theme of this blog. Building that future means putting humanities research into modes of influence in the world, which involves transforming our existing knowledge system, an issue with which I'm a bit obsessed.
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| New Haven People's Center on April 18, 2026 |
I gave this talk at the 45th Anniversary Conference of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, April 17, 2026. Many thanks to the organizers, speakers, audience, and my co-panelists.
I’m going to talk about humanities ambition in a time of diminished authority for its fields, and I’ll say we need big increases in our ambition in response. But I have to note that the humanities won’t get enough help from their universities, and in many cases will have to fight them. The Trump administration’s systematic efforts to erase people of color from the American past and present has been translated on campuses as quiet acceptance, via, in particular, the deletion of DEI programs and the merging or closure of departments associated with ethnicity, sexuality, or countries and cultures MAGA America dislikes.
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| East Village on October 31, 2022 |
There’s some good stuff in Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic article, “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” but the piece unravels into a tool of the thing people actually hate about the humanities, which is not its implications for social justice but its civil wars. It blames the increasingly desperate struggles of the academic humanities not on right-wing enemies but on liberal humanists—a woke Mellon Foundation and its president Elizabeth Alexander.
I was one of the people that Harper interviewed for this article. (Here, “Harper” always refers to the author, Tyler Austin Harper). He was fun to talk with, is a serious person, and worked hard on this piece, all of which I respect. When we spoke, I emphasized our terrible money problems, which I argued tower over our manageable and ordinary methodological debates.
I said that the real issue is our lack of the funding to produce and disseminate our knowledge at the scale that would get the kind of social attention allotted to medicine and computer science. We may think this is intrinsic to their topics and status but it is mainly the result of their vast organizational labor, labor of a kind that the humanities establishment, Mellon included, refuses to try.
Harper cites my Public Humanities piece on funding—“Humanities Decline in Darkness”-- for a statistic in which federal humanities funding rounds to zero. But you have to get to his third-to-last paragraph before he makes his best causal claim about the current situation:
The humanities are in the mess they’re in because of federal budget cuts, and because of administrators who care more about the football team than about William Faulkner, and because of the toxic pragmatism of an American culture that has a hard time valuing anything that is not immediately, aggressively useful. But the humanities are also in this mess because those of us who care about them have often preferred hunkering down in a defensive crouch . . .
I would have finished that last sentence by writing, “and so we don’t build the data and resource infrastructure that would make our needs visible to politicians and the public.” But that’s not where Harper goes.
Harper’s other most effective moment comes from Phillip Brian Harper, the Mellon program director for higher learning:
“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change. It’s not to serve in perpetuity as the piggy bank for research.” Mellon, he said, was never supposed to be a panacea for the humanities.
Great, but who will do the shaking of university management? Mellon? Phil Harper says its role is to catalyze. On this topic, it’s not.
He is of course right that the situation is completely appalling. To repeat, even though sociocultural knowledge is essential to solving any of the world’s epic problems, the rich universities listed below spend almost none of their institutional funds for R&D on non-STEM fields.
Figure 1. Institutional Expenditues on R&D, Selected Universities
Yes, these figures likely exclude individual faculty research funds via outside grants, named chairs, and other department-managed funds. But as indicators of institutional investment in humanities infrastructure, they are shocking. Universities’ own refusal to fund humanities research is also one cause of our society’s inability to deal with its core problems.
Yet Harper comes not to bury funding failure but to chastise social justice. The fault for him lies not in Trump’s destruction of the National Endowment for the Humanities or 40 years of right-wing culture wars, but in Mellon’s interest in a better society.
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Harper makes two main claims. The first is that “classical” and “social justice” scholarship aren’t complementary approaches but rivals. They compete bitterly for scarce and dwindling funds.
The solution to this is obviously an alliance between rivals to fight for massively better funding for all, at least ten times more funding than socio-cultural scholarship has today.
But Harper diverts attention from funding with his second argument: “social justice” research is a betrayal of humanities scholarship, a kind of negation of it. This increase in “the decidedly sublunary work of furnishing political propaganda” makes Harper wonder whether the academic humanities are worth saving at all. And Mellon, he writes, has shifted to funding this political propaganda since the arrival of Elizabeth Alexander as president.
Let’s try to understand this claim. Harper’s evidence for a policy shift is a Foundation announcement dated June 30, 2020. Mellon declared a new focus on “just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking where ideas and imagination can thrive.” Board chair Kathryn A. Hall explained that “our reinvigorated mission and strategic direction . . . not only builds on our historic commitment to the arts and humanities, but rightly emphasizes a desire to make the ‘beauty, transcendence, and freedom’ found there accessible and empowering to all members of society.”
The new direction assumes the complementarity of what we might call “basic” and “applied” humanities research, and not that applied research—addressing social questions—debases basic scholarship. Complementarity—with awareness of different modes, aims, and questions--is assumed in every STEM field and social science of which I’m aware, so Harper has a special burden to show that the humanities are unlike all other forms of academic research in this way.
Alexander confirms complementarity in the announcement by adding, “We are a problem-solving foundation looking to address historical inequities in the fields we fund.” This also expresses reflexivity about Mellon’s own role in knowledge creation, which includes a past of supporting the kind of epistemic biases and limits that need constant correction in every field.
The new Mellon direction also seemed to aim at the democratization of humanities knowledge—at taking the results of humanities research outside of a small elite while also learning from communities about their existing knowledges and practices.
Harper presumably approves of problem-solving, and he definitely opposes the perpetuation of historical inequities which he agrees exist. He sounds fine with humanities for the people, which is the official policy of the state humanities councils and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) whose origin story he affirms. He writes,
[U]nder Alexander, the foundation deserves credit for working to create a more economically just landscape within higher education. Before Alexander’s arrival, Mellon tended to disburse lavish funding to institutions that were already rich. Now, as part of Mellon’s commitment to equity, it is making a conscious effort to provide funding to public and less selective institutions. It has also increased funding for university-led prison education programs
All true, good, and important. So what is so bad about Mellon’s new direction?
Nothing, actually. (Its inaction on overall funding is a separate question to which I’ll return) But to save what must have been the original idea for the story, Harper spends most of the piece making the false argument that “applied” humanities scholarship (not his term) is political propaganda.
How does he show this? First there’s his prior, the false legacy dualism in criticism and some related humanities fields in which the criticism of texts and historical materials (basic) is denatured and corrupted by engaging in criticism of society (applied). It’s this dualism that turns “social justice” into “political propaganda” that ruins scholarship.
This dualism may encourage him to search his anecdotes for polarity. For example, he spoke with a scholar who “confessed that . . .he had reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race; he did win a grant. I suspect that this may not be a rare occurrence.” Harper’s assumed incompatibility between the first and more race-focused version of this scholar’s work makes this a problem rather than progress.
Second is Harper’s assumption that it’s bad to get steered or shaped by a call’s language or a program officers. There seems to be a tacit idealization of “classical” humanities scholarship as pre-social and not in any good way developed by thinking about problems it might solve, or by being asked to change emphases in a proposal by an agency official.
I see this as a humanities provincialism about sponsored research, which always involves calls, program officers, public pressures, institutional forces and so on. This is not epistemically less valid than idealized autonomous scholarship. Remember actor-network theory and dozens of related ways of discussing the collaborative nature of thinking. So the scholar who “reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race” likely improved his project. Program officers at NIH, NSF, and other STEM agencies do this advising routinely. Agency shaping can be good or bad.
Harper doesn’t have the evidence to rule out good shaping in that more-race-oriented project or the others. (Gabriella Coleman’s valuable commentary on Harper, “The Exposé that Wasn’t,” is really good on this point.)
So it’s not that “social justice” aims are inherently anti-intellectual and ruin scholarship. Better knowledge in many areas can come from working like Pasteur rather than like Einstein, to reference a classic study of the (complicated) relation between basic and applied research. And it’s also not true that agency shaping is bad per se.
So Harper falls back on a third way of making his claim that woke Mellon is ruining the humanities. That is to scorn sample program language as self-evidently non-scholarly.
Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice.
I assume Harper means this program, run by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Awarded titles include the following:
· The Dam, the Road, the Port: The Transformation of the Brazilian Northeast during the Long Twentieth-Century
· State of Mine(Mind): Affective Geographies of California's Rural North
· Urban Tropics: Dwelling under South and Southeast Asian Urban Microclimates
· Uneasy Intimacies: Seeing Irei and Aesthetic Ambiguity Through Fukunosuke Kusumi's Art
· Black Anti-settler Placemaking: Cooperation Jackson's Eco-villages from Mississippi to Vermont
· Fiber Optics: Henequén Classification and its Consequences
· Troubled Waters : Natural Disaster, Space, and the State in Precolonial Panjab (1707-1849)
Check these and the others out for yourself. They all analyze major issues and strike me as likely to make original contributions to knowledge. I don’t at all see Harper’s justification for assimilating all the projects to “identity” and “justice” studies. To do this, he needs to stereotype everyone on the basis of the appearance of words like “settler,” “queer,” “colonial” etc. I don’t even see how they’re all applied rather than basic research. He offers no evidence (just the legacy assumption) that these are not intensely scholarly, deeply intellectual projects.
At breakfast before drafting this post, I read an interesting review of The Deformation: Attention and Discernment in Catholic Reformation Art and Architecture by Susanna Berger (Princeton University Press, 2025). “Central to The Deformation,” the reviewer writes, “is the question of how religious elites wielded anamorphosis as a means of gatekeeping the divine.” I love this kind of stuff. But is a book about the relations among perspective in drawing, theology, and institutional power in 17th century Europe clearly epistemically “classical”—pure, basic research-- and thus intellectually superior to work on “Affective Geographies of California's Rural North”? The answer is no. Mellon / ACLS funded research simply cannot and should not be delegitimated with superficial separating of the sheep from the goats.
The same goes for Harper’s disdain for a grant to Colorado College.
In the summer of 2023, Colorado College hosted a conference based on this prompt: “How do the humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work, and how can humanities methods—from inquiry and critique to creative production and performance—dismantle systems of oppression, create and sustain community and solidarity, and advance liberation?” It does not seem to occur to those asking such questions that the humanities may not be especially well equipped to “dismantle systems of oppression.” Nor do they seem to consider that what might in fact be most valuable about fields like English, history, and philosophy is that they aspire to stand above the flotsam and jetsam of our immediate circumstances, and instead set their sights on what the classicist Leo Strauss called the “permanent problems” that have troubled human beings from time immemorial.
Harper doesn’t actually know what the conference organizers did and did not consider, but in any case, “how to dismantle systems of oppression” is one of the ‘permanent problems” of human beings. It is also a running theme of literature, history, and philosophy for thousands of years. One might find the Colorado College formulations a bit plodding and yet not try to discredit the program through a false distinction between intellectual work and its social contributions.
I can imagine Harper doing a different kind of research that leads to a different article about the humanities. He would go to Colorado College, interview the students, staff, and faculty involved in the program, and sit in on its courses for a few weeks while also visiting classes that aren’t part of the program. He could then compare and contrast and identify the actual cognitive and other effects of the program on the participants. We would all learn something about what actually happens through humanities funding on college campuses to (and by) students and their teachers—for better and worse. This is the real void in public understanding, and Harper’s dismissal of a program on the basis of its terminology doesn’t help fill it in.
So, Mellon’s new direction is less elitist. It puts greater emphasis on “applied” over “basic” research (“Pasteur’s Quadrant”) while insisting on their complementarity (and equal intellectuality). It funds some research on white supremacy and overcoming it--along with funding many other things, and really this funding is a drop in the bucket of overall social need for knowledge about racial nationalism, the authoritarian personality, etc. Mellon program directors shape applications, as they always have. They may now fund a higher proportion of outreach and communication programs compared to applied or basic research, but Harper doesn’t get into this important issue. Finally, Mellon is the last big national funder in research-starved humanities field. Only the last of these strikes me as a scandal.
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Daylight does appear when Harper takes the other side of his own argument.
It is hard to argue that the tens of millions of dollars that Mellon is putting toward internships for working-class kids at public colleges and universities would be better spent financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France. But this calculus also says something about the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods—programs for humanities undergrads, resources for Ph.D. students, traditional humanities research, support for emerging fields and endowment-poor universities—against one another.
Yes, absolutely: we must address with the intent of solving “the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods against one another.” We must at the same time argue for “financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France.” But it isn’t Elizabeth Alexander or Mellon that set up the zero-sum game. This happens when critics pit different kinds of humanities scholarship against each other.
Mellon et al. didn’t set up the zero-sum funding game. But what are they doing about fixing it?
I’d trace some of Harper’s completely valid distress about the system to having grown up in this barren funding world where one’s work is always losing out to someone else’s. The real issue with the humanities’ national leadership isn’t that they politicize scholarship, but that they don’t fight openly and systematically to fund a great deal more of it.
This gets us back to Phil Harper’s statement:
“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves. . . . The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change.”
But Mellon is not doing that.
I can find reports galore about the crisis in STEM funding—everything from the cuts to indirect cost recovery to the losses of whole areas of research (like racial disparity in public health outcomes that NIH had funded for years) and of scientific personnel. I can find nothing from the humanities associations about their research funding problems.
NEH has been gutted, yet MLA, which did indeed help sue the government over NEH, has joined NHA, AHA, APA et al. in neither collecting data to show the funding problem nor developing a systematic plan for building such funding.
Similarly, the ACLS’s Strategic Framework 2025-2030 doesn’t have a sentence about tracking humanities research funding or expanding it. I see all these great scholars on the board. What are they doing? What are we actually doing? Why isn’t something like Figure 1 above on Mellon’s website as part of a large, structural analysis, rather than on the blog of an obscure professor? Universities need to be “taken by the collar.” But who will take the humanities agencies by the collar?
None of the solutions are really so abstract anymore. People here and there have sketched out plans. I outlined one version in a long discussion paper for the MLA Executive Council in 2022, and ended my presidential address in January 2023 with a sketch of the steps we need to take, somewhat expanded in the print version (“Criticism After This Crisis”). Also in 2022, a sub-committee of the Executive Council developed a reporting structure on cuts (or growth) across the country, planning to use the Association’s large, elected Delegate Assembly to feed information to headquarters for analysis and reporting. The Association never set this up.
Two years went by, and the MLA then set up a panel explicitly about funding at the Convention in January 2025.
Figure 2. MLA Convention Program 2023, Panel 139
The panel was an excellent (re)start on the topic, and the panelists had a good planning meeting afterwards. We outlined NEH, Mellon, MLA, ACLS working together on research data, reporting, development. Then Trump took office and started his attacks. My colleagues bailed on the plan, which as far as I know, is dead.
With some discipline, we can replace our historic humanities pastime, discrediting each other’s research, with the project of building a material base for all of it. If we can’t show basic mutual respect for divergent (and radical) research within the profession, then we are doomed. But actually we can do this, and many, many of us already are.
I again invite both Harpers and everyone else into the effort of building the material base.
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| Indiana University on November 3, 2025 |
Chair of Germanic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington
Indiana University, one of the great American public universities, is currently melting down with a speed and violence unprecedented in the history of higher education. It is difficult to recognize the world-class institution that was founded in the idyllic city of Bloomington in 1820 and built over decades, most decisively by the long-term president and chancellor of Indiana University, Herman B. Wells. Beloved among residents of the state of Indiana and a destination for thousands of students from across the United States and the world, the public university gained its national and global reputation in the 1950s primarily on the basis of its humanities departments and one of the country’s best music schools.
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| Hyde Park, Chicago on June 25, 2017 |
Case in point: in July, UChicago’s Division of Arts and Humanities announced plans for a reorganization that would cut its number of departments in half, among other things. The announcement came “just three months after UChicago Arts and the Humanities Division rebranded as a consolidated division.” In mid-August, the Division’s dean, Deborah Nelson, announced a reduction of PhD admissions for some departments and a full “pause” in others. A week later, Nelson announced that the pause in PhD admissions would cover the entire Division, with a couple of exceptions.
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| Australian National University |
The Australian National University (ANU) has said it needs to reclaim a budget shortfall of $250m. To do its bit, the College of Arts and Social Sciences last week published a roadmap to meet the University’s goal for its areas. Its change proposal boils down to a list of cuts that will damage staff, students, as well as local families, communities and economies.
It might help to put the ANU’s situation in context. Although ANU is a small institution by Australian standards, with roughly 4500 staff and 22,000 students, it has historically been high performing. In the recently released QS 2026 World University Rankings, ANU, a member of the prestigious Group of Eight network, slipped slightly to come in fourth out of 36 Australian universities and 32nd globally.
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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.
