We got the first long-term forecast warning of a hurricane forming on November 6th, 2024. We prepared for a Category 3 hurricane and that’s what hit the National Science Foundation. But as has become common in the last few years, the hurricane underwent a rapid intensification and what hit the Institute of Museum and Library Services and then the National Endowment for the Humanities was a Category 5 hurricane that took out everything in its path. It will be a long time before we know the full extent of the damage but the initial reports indicate it is catastrophic. The era of the NEH offering grant funding to “promote progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts in the United States” is over. Forever or just for now? No one knows.
One week out, the Association for Computers and the Humanities has compiled a list of grants it believes to be terminated: 1,133 funded projects totaling $363,420,921 or about $30 million less than it would cost to buy every American adult a $1.50 hotdog from Costco (sorry kids, the bank’s empty already, them’s the breaks). This isn’t about government efficiency, it’s a money grab as is made very clear in the grant termination letters: the “NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”
One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, so let me take a moment to eulogize my terminated NEH project.
Mathematical Humanists was funded by the NEH to conduct a series of 12 workshops that would teach participants the mathematics behind common digital humanities techniques. My co-PI Ashley Sanders and I did the first two workshops for 24 participants in summer 2024 and were getting ready to send out acceptance emails to 56 people for the four summer 2025 workshops, when we received the termination letter. It directed us to stop work effective two days earlier–apparently we possess time travel technology.
A lot of the time, a grant is about a single person or a group of people’s research goals. This was an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant, which meant it had a wider audience and participants were expected to go out and further share what they had learned for a multiplying effect. A quick count shows 235 professors (from community college to R1 universities), PhD students, librarians, cultural heritage scholars, independent scholars, and even high school teachers applied for one or more of our workshops. The workshops brought in applicants from across the United States–Alaska to Florida, California to New York, Wisconsin to Texas–and even some from overseas.
Furthermore, the grant’s end goal was not just to conduct 12 workshops and call it a day. Instead, the 12 workshops were to be used as an incubator for an asynchronous, self-guided version of each workshop (graph theory/network analysis, statistics, linear algebra, and discrete math). The end result of the grant would have made the workshops’ materials available for anyone to take, for free, in perpetuity. The transformative potential of the workshops was immense. Its loss is commensurate with that potential.
There is no way to know what could have been. But I can also tell you another story about an NEH project that lived up to its potential.
Upon accepting my job at George Mason University, I was invited to join the World History Commons team as a co-PI. The project started the same semester I did. Today, anyone who is looking for an open educational resource with peer-reviewed content for world and global history can find over 2,000 annotated primary sources, teaching guides, methods overviews, and website reviews. Every year, the site sees more and more traffic as people discover it and add it to their teaching repertoire. In 2024 alone, the site had over 220,000 visitors from the United States (and another 100,000 visitors from the rest of the world) and almost half a million pageviews. Cumulatively over time, we’re at over 1.5 million pageviews and it’s likely we’ll hit 2 million in 2025. That’s a pretty darn good long-term return on the NEH’s investment of your taxpayer dollars.
Or you could have a hot dog and be hungry again by dinnertime.
