At their core, the humanities are all about what makes us human — like language, religion, philosophy, history, art, community, and identity.
In practical terms, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) have funded historical preservation, museums, literary festivals, media projects and community-based research. Examples include Ken Burns' film The Civil War and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, as well as efforts to save the Tlingit language and to mark the Mississippi Blues Trail.
Funding the future, from AI to community colleges
"The humanities help us understand the human experience in the past and today in order to frame it and shape it for the future," said Lauren Tilton, a professor of digital humanities at the University of Richmond.
Last year, a project she manages received a grant of $491,863 for the Center for Liberal Arts and AI (CLAAI) at the University of Richmond, as part of the NEH's Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence initiative.
The center would be the nexus for 15 colleges across the southeast aiming to study "how we understand and develop AI because AI is affecting all parts of our lives. How do we want to design AI? What do we want it to do? What do we not want it to do and how does it impact people and communities?" Tilton said.
After working on the project for two years, her group expected to launch the Center for Liberal Arts and AI this fall. Then, last week, she got a letter stating that NEH funds for her project were terminated effective immediately. More than a thousand grants befell the same fate in rural and urban areas in all 50 states.
"It was incredibly painful to read," said Tilton.
The letter stated, in part, that the agency was "repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of President Trump's agenda."
Tilton said she believes the AI center would further President Trump's agenda, pointing to his executive orders related to AI. "So now we're defunding the very area and research and teaching that is supposed to be central to the future of our nation," she said.
As for what now, Tilton said the schools involved are looking to private philanthropy for funding. "We're moving forward. But the shifts in funding really slows us down," she said.
Making grants more accessible
Neither the White House nor the NEH responded to NPR's requests for comment.
Critics of federal funding for arts and culture have argued that taxpayers shouldn't pay for highbrow museums, theaters and other institutions that don't serve everyday Americans.
"Since art museums, symphony orchestras, humanities scholarship, and public television and radio are enjoyed predominantly by people of greater-than-average income and education," writes the libertarian think tank Cato Institute in its Handbook for Policy Makers, "the federal cultural agencies oversee a fundamentally unfair transfer of wealth from the lower classes up."
Yet both the arts and humanities endowments have awarded millions of dollars in grants that prioritize underserved communities across the U.S. They include the NEH's Cultural and Community Resilience grant program, which supported efforts to safeguard cultural resources from the effects of climate change and the NEA's Challenge America, which primarily supported small arts organizations. The future of both of those initiatives is unclear. Challenge America has been "canceled for FY 2026" and Cultural and Community Resilience is "not being reoffered," according to the agencies' websites.
R. Chris Davis is a history professor at Lone Star College which has campuses throughout the Houston area. He was thrilled to learn about the Humanities Initiatives at Community Colleges, a grant program the NEH launched in 2015.
"It's an opportunity for faculty to explore ideas, initiatives, professional development, and create course content for students at these oftentimes underserved institutions," he said.
Last spring, Lone Star College-Online received a $150,000 NEH grant for Davis to develop customized courses that would teach history through the lens of different "thematic tracks" such as technology, culture, sports or medicine. Davis said the idea came after surveying students about what would make them more engaged in history.
Davis said students could supplement their regular course content with topics "geared more toward their interests."
Now, with the grant terminated, the project is "in limbo." Davis said he's mostly disappointed for his students.
"Many of our students are working full time. They're caretakers of parents or their own kids," he said. "So anything we can do to help them be more successful, make their college career more interesting, improve not just success rates, but retention rates. You know, this was an idea to help foster that."
Getting an NEH grant is like scoring a home run
It is no small feat to receive a Humanities endowment grant. The competition is stiff. In most cases applicants must have a proven track record, describe their proposals and budgets in detail, enlist academic consultants and show how they will measure impact.
"It was a huge honor to be awarded a National Endowment for Humanities grant last year," said filmmaker Yuriko Romer. "And now for this to happen is just heartbreaking.
Last August, Romer was awarded a grant for Diamond Diplomacy, a documentary tracing the history of U.S.-Japan relations through the lens of baseball. "I was originally awarded $600,000 for my documentary and the remaining balance sits at $342,598," she said.
Romer started working on Diamond Diplomacy about 10 years ago "because it's taken me that long to raise the money to make this film."
She said she's employed about 14 people to help with production, research, accessing archival material and more. There are plans to screen the documentary at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, at the end of May.
Romer said she's on the homestretch to finish the film but in order to pay for expenses and compensate her crew, she's "going to have to cobble together some more funding at this point."
Romer said losing the remainder of her NEH grant is discouraging — that making documentaries is a tough business. "None of us do this to make money," she said. "We're all passionate about the stories that we want to tell."
Meghan Sullivan edited this story for radio and the web. Chloee Weiner produced the radio piece.
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