The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant funds appear to have been put towards supporting two awards at nearly 10 percent of the agency’s annual $207 million budget, the New York Times reported.
The Trump administration previously canceled the NEH grants that had been approved under the former Biden administration, laid off the majority of the agency’s staff, and most recently fired the scholarly council that reviewed the grants.
One of the awards was given to the conservative Jewish educational group Tikvah. A $10.4 million purse will support the “Jewish Civilization Project,” which aims to fight antisemitism. The now-defunct advising council reportedly voted against it due to vagueness in its application, as well as concerns that the project was too centered on advocacy.
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“While it is essential to combat the rise of anti-Semitism in the political and legal arenas,” NEH acting chairman Michael McDonald said in a statement, “the humanities also have a vital role to play in this fight. And Tikvah is well positioned to bring a comprehensive approach, grounded in the best of humanities scholarship, to educating future leaders and the broader public on the ways in which the sinister and hate-filled attacks on Jewish people that we have been witnessing on American campuses and streets are, at a deeper level, also attacks on the very foundations that have made the United States the exceptional nation that it is.”
Efforts funded through this project include creating a Jewish civilization curriculum for middle and high school students, expanding a high school fellowship program offering seminars on Jewish civilization, developing university courses in the Jewish humanities, offering public programs, supporting a series of scholarly books on Jewish resilience, and establishing a fellowship program for early-career journalists writing about anti-Semitism and Jewish history and culture.
When the $34.8 million grant announcement for 97 projects was originally announced by the agency on August 1, Tikvah was not included but later added on September 15.
Another recipient includes the University of Virginia, which was awarded $10 million to the “Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America: Creating and Sustaining Access to Founding Era/Early Republic Primary Sources” project. The funds will support editorial work on papers related to the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the Founding Era, as well as a new public website called ForgingUS that will offer timelines and digital exhibits of these documents in honor of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding.
Additionally, McDonald announced hundreds of smaller discretionary “chairman’s grants” that can also be awarded without scholarly review.
Four of those grant have been awarded, but the names of the recipients have yet to be disclosed. One such project, which received $30,000, is titled “Meritocracy vs. Equity: The Declaration of Independence in Tension With Critical Race Theory and D.E.I.”
In a letter sent to McDonald this week, Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, the top Democrat on the congressional subcommittee in charge of the endowment, rebuked these recent changes, writing that “it has become increasingly apparent that the agency’s ability to conduct grantmaking has been seriously damaged.”
Awarding such a large sum with no scholarly review is an “irresponsible approach to awarding taxpayer dollars,” she said. Pingree then ask called for a meeting on the matter, and listed several questions and concerns related to the agency’s staff cuts, fired review council, and budget allocations.
She ends the letter with an expression of dismay: “I am deeply concerned by the rapid destruction of NEH, and am committed to ensuring that NEH can once again conduct a rigorous process for selecting grantees, as it had previously successfully done since its founding in 1965. It is imperative that the damage inflicted on this agency be undone and that the integrity of NEH be rebuilt. Communities across the country are relying on it.”
