The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced more than $75 million in awards, including $10 million grants to two public universities with “civics” schools and to an education network headquartered at a conservative think tank.
The grants continue the Trump administration’s funding of university programs labeled as civics, civil discourse, Western civilization, great books and other topics that many conservatives back. Earlier this month, the administration announced it awarded nearly $52 million in other grants to civil discourse efforts at universities. Now the NEH, which the Trump administration overhauled last year, says it’s further fueling the spread of such initiatives.
The largest NEH awards—$10 million apiece—are going to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Texas at Austin and the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education. The New York Times, citing unnamed sources, reported that “many of the large grants” from NEH, including those three, “were noncompetitive, meaning the recipients were selected to apply.”
The NEH and White House didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Friday.
Last year, the Department of Government Efficiency sent termination notices to 65 percent of the NEH’s staff and canceled more than 1,000 grants totaling $175 million. They allegedly related to themes that didn’t align with the administration’s political agenda, including diversity, equity and inclusion; gender ideology; and environmental justice. The president proposed defunding the NEH entirely in the current fiscal year budget.
But a federal judge blocked cancellation of the grants. Now, the Trump administration may be using the NEH, like other agencies it proposed defunding, to advance its causes.
The White House fired multiple members of the National Council on the Humanities, an NEH advisory board that has 26 seats. Only four members remain, all Trump appointees.
Three didn’t respond to requests for comment Friday. One—Russell Berman, a Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution—deferred comment to the NEH’s acting chair, Michael McDonald, who also didn’t return requests for comment.
The NEH’s list of funded projects says Chapel Hill’s $10.1 million is for “fundraising for an endowment” to pay for faculty positions at the university’s controversial School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL). The university, in its own news release, said the money is being paired with a $10 million match to support creating “eight endowed professorships focused on American political thought and constitutionalism, the classical foundations of civic education, great books and leadership.”
Chapel Hill said the endowment will also support a planned master’s degree program in military leadership for active-duty officers and a Ph.D. program for future civic educators. Money will also go toward strengthening SCiLL’s undergraduate teaching, mentorship, public-facing civic education initiatives and K–12 and summer civics programs, the institution said.
“With NEH’s support, SCiLL can become a national hub for viewpoint-diverse civics-related scholarship,” said Dan DiSalvo, SCiLL’s associate dean of faculty development and curriculum, in the release.
But Erik Gellman, vice president of the Chapel Hill chapter of the American Association of University Professors and a history professor, called the award “infuriating.” He called SCiLL a “conservative-driven school.”
“In the same moment when UNC has just cut six area centers in the name of austerity, now we learn that the most redundant part of the university and the most scandal-ridden part of the university has received an unprecedented grant that was solicited and noncompetitive,” Gellman told Inside Higher Ed. Chapel Hill spokespeople didn’t comment beyond their news release.
In a press release, UT Austin said its $10 million grant will go toward launching two new undergraduate majors—Strategy and Statecraft and the Great Books—and fund 16 new faculty positions in its School of Civic Leadership.
A spokesperson for UT Austin said in an email that the two majors, if they’re approved by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating board, would “teach students about the writings that shaped Western civilization; America’s constitutional, diplomatic and military history; and prepare them with the knowledge and judgment to strategically defend America’s interests in a complex world.”
The $10 million going to the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education is for a project dubbed Recovering the Humanities in Service of the University.
Kelly Hanlon, FEHE’s operations director, said the foundation “does not have any political, ideological or religious affiliation, nor does it fund policy work.” But FEHE is based at—and shares its president with—the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative think tank next to Princeton University’s campus. The FEHE/Witherspoon president, Luis Tellez, became prominent in the fight against same-sex marriage and has long been a leader within Opus Dei, the controversial conservative Roman Catholic group. FEHE has also received millions of dollars from conservative donors.
FEHE, in its own release, said the NEH money will help “implement a multi-year project to revitalize the humanities at universities across the United States.”
“The NEH grant will increase the ability of the FEHE network to offer mentorship opportunities for undergraduates and graduate students, an increased number of graduate scholarships and postdoctoral fellowships, and more funding for course development and teaching fellowships,” plus allow the foundation “to develop new partnerships and programs in the humanities,” the release said. According to FEHE, it supports a network of 25 programs and institutes at 15 “elite universities” in the U.S. and the United Kingdom as well as two “independent academic organizations.”
Other large NEH grants include $1 million to the Christian Pepperdine University for a lecture and roundtable series and digital content on American global leadership; $5 million to Ohio State University’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society for civic education; and $5.6 million to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point for its American Foundations program.
Joan Scott, a professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, said, “It just seems to me that we now have the ideological arm of the Trump administration giving out money to support the production of knowledge in ways that they approve of.”
“The money goes to various ‘civic institutes’ established specifically to counter teaching that is critical of aspects of American history, of capitalism, etc.,” Scott said. “In a way, the NEH has become a parallel institution to the Koch Foundation.”
