On Thursday night, the Trump administration placed 80 percent of National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) staff members on administrative leave and blocked its grants to state humanities councils. The entire NEH is effectively being dismantled.

I deplore these actions and stand with the staff of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Research in history, art history, music history, literary studies, and interdisciplinary humanities also depends fundamentally on grants and fellowships from the NEH.

I personally know many professors and researchers whose NEH grants for humanities research and programming were frozen on Thursday night. These blocks on current grants are improper and illegal, since the federal funds have been allocated by the U.S. Congress to the NEH, and then granted by the agency to humanities researchers and programs through competitive and peer-reviewed grant processes.

“In a university setting, the term generally refers to subjects like history, religion, philosophy, literature and art. In the context of the public humanities, the definition can be harder to pin down,” according to Margaret Renkl in an essay published in The New York Times.

For this reason, each state’s humanities council creates programs and competitive proposal processes to distribute the public humanities funding that it receives from the NEH.

Museum exhibitions, book fairs, film festivals, public lectures, storytelling programs, and other cultural events in every state depend on federal funds distributed by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Many auditoriums across the nation may soon be empty.

“The N.E.H. is one of the least-known of the federal agencies, but its work reaches a huge number of Americans, including those in Republican districts. It awards grants that fund research fellowships, programs at museums and historic sites, website development and documentary filmmaking, among a host of other projects related to the public humanities. But it also disburses a great chunk of its appropriation — some $65 million of an annual budget of roughly $210 million — directly to nonprofit humanities councils in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories,” according to Margaret Renkl.

“These independent affiliates of the N.E.H. then reallocate those funds to programming tailored to the people of their own state. Through the work of the state humanities councils, in other words, the N.E.H. is doing exactly what Republicans have always said they wanted to do with federal funds: It gives federal money back to the states.”

Renkl argues that “we need to tell the people who represent us a story — a true story — that reminds them of our shared humanity. Because the concept of a shared humanity is something too many of them, and too many of us, have lately all but forgotten.”

Renkl, Margaret. “The N.E.H. Does What Republicans Always Wanted. DOGE Slashed It Anyway.” The New York Times (7 April 2025).

The Illinois Humanities Council website provides information on public humanities in the State of Illinois, where I live.