Tim Henderson was up late last Wednesday night, keeping an eye on the weather as catastrophic storms barreled across Tennessee toward Nashville. Around midnight, his email pinged. Amid overlapping National Weather Service alerts of damaging hail, tornadoes and flash floods, he read the message: Humanities Tennessee, where Mr. Henderson is the chief executive, had just lost all its federal funding.
It’s not as if Mr. Henderson didn’t see this news coming. As with the actual tornadoes, the economic and ideological tornadoes emanating from Washington first touched down at some distance, but their destruction was always headed this way. Employees at the National Endowment for the Humanities had already learned that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was recommending staff cuts of up to 80 percent.
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.
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.
Humanities Tennessee, for example, funds traveling museum exhibitions and speaking series, neighborhood story projects, writing workshops for teenagers and a magnificent book festival, just for starters. Chapter 16, Humanities Tennessee’s vibrant daily web publication about the literary life of this state, is rare among nonprofit media outlets. (I know that because for 10 years I was its editor.)
Federal grants to state councils were designed to be “seed money,” as Mr. Henderson puts it — a way to keep the lights on while the organizations seek philanthropic support from donors and corporations, and other grant funding, to expand their offerings. The federal funds are meant to create the conditions for public-private partnerships to bloom.
But some states are wealthier than others, and some benefit from serving a populace that doesn’t need to be persuaded of the value of the humanities. Before they can begin to make the case for supporting humanities programming, more than a few state councils must work, first, to explain what the humanities even are. Mr. Henderson has fielded calls from people looking for the Humane Society.
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: “It’s how human beings understand themselves, interact with each other, come to make communities — all of those things about being human,” Mr. Henderson said in a phone interview. “In the public humanities, we’re trying to make those things immediate and relevant. But that’s hard to write an elevator pitch for.”
Which is why federal appropriations are so crucial. These funds are marshaled with the greatest possible care to benefit the most people. The savings achieved by cutting them “amounts to a rounding error” in the context of the federal budget, as a statement from the National Humanities Alliance notes, but many state humanities councils would not survive without them. The N.E.H. itself may not survive.
I am not, I admit, a disinterested party here. As editor of Chapter 16, I was an independent contractor, not involved in Humanities Tennessee’s other operations. But I had a front-row seat to the crucial work a state humanities council does — work that most Americans never recognize. I can’t even count the times that people arriving at the Southern Festival of Books, a Humanities Tennessee initiative, have asked me where the ticket booth is. They always look astonished when I tell them there isn’t one. Festival events are free.
In the context of other planned cuts — a far from complete list includes funding for science (including the science of storm prediction), public schools, Meals on Wheels, health care for impoverished people, the federal lands and parks that belong to all of us, protections for the air we breathe and the water we drink — losing the N.E.H. might not seem like the biggest tragedy in the world.
This is exactly what the architects and enforcers of Project 2025 want us to do: They want us to fight over who deserves the biggest piece of a pie that is so diminished and distorted it doesn’t even look like a pie anymore. They are leading us, willingly, into a scarcity mind-set. But these resources are not scarce. They have already been approved by Congress.
Over the years, certain Republicans have attempted to generate controversy by calling the N.E.H. an expense the government could not afford. But in the past, funding has always been preserved because the humanities are not ultimately a partisan issue. Whichever party held the White House, whichever party controlled Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities survived.
That’s because Americans really like book festivals and local history museums and summer writing camps for teenagers. We like seeing hometown heroes celebrated and remembered. We like hearing hometown authors read from their books. We like being invited to join a conversation in which our opinions and our experiences matter. We especially like it when such gifts are available to everyone, and not just to those who can afford the price of a ticket.
We live in an age of abounding ironies, and this one is a doozy. Eliminating federal funding for the humanities saves next to no money, but it will cost the American people something precious: one of the few federal institutions whose whole purpose is to foster community and thoughtful discussion across the polarities that increasingly divide and depress us.
And surely that is part of the point. Maybe it’s the whole point. So long as we’re busy fighting with one another, this wrecking-ball administration thinks, we won’t notice that it’s dismantling the protections we rely on and destroying the treasures we love.
In a social media post last week, Humanities Tennessee urged Americans to call members of Congress and let them know how the public humanities matter. Which storybook characters did our children meet at the book festival? What museum exhibit taught us something we didn’t know about the place where we have always lived? How does it feel to join a respectful conversation about a contentious subject?
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.
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