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DOGE terminated our NEH project grant, and what that means. [1]

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Date: 2025-04-06

On Thursday evening we received notification that our open 3-year NEH grant, “Establishing an undergraduate Book Studies minor at Indiana University” was terminated, effective immediately. We were one of dozens of active NEH grants across the country—many awarded during the Biden administration—that received cancelation notices that night. More cancellations may be coming.

Our grant was awarded in January of 2024 through the NEH program on “Humanities Educational Programs at Universities.” It supported the creation of an immersive undergraduate minor that combined book history with book arts, under the auspices of a research and teaching center at IUB called “The Book Lab.” Our humanities ‘lab’ focuses on books of all kinds as material objects. We duplicate traditional models of producing books, pre-print and print—we make ink; we make paper; we experiment with letter press printing, and on and on. We experiment with the benefits and liabilities of digitization, and digital book design. We find previously unknown manuscripts, hidden in early print book bindings (a la the big news at Cambridge Univ. just last week). The first year students in my current Book Lab class have studied book history and book design, spent time at the special collections library here, met and interviewed a book artist, had a tour of our book preservation lab. They have learned about the ways books have been put together at different times and places. About how beetles (“bookworms”) chew holes in pages—and why it matters. They have learned how to sew bindings, how to design quartos—via digital and analogue methods—; how to design typeface; how to think about the white space on a folio or bifolium, etc. In short, they are discovering things that will contribute to the final semester project in which each of them design and make their own handmade book. I might add that they are enjoying it while learning a ton of things—practical, aesthetic, philosophical, historical.

Along with a range of colleagues, we are designing a program of study that could be taught across an interdisciplinary range of ‘bookish’ disciplines—English; Middle Eastern Studies; History; Library Science and Informatics; Religious Studies; French and Italian; Studio Art; East Asian Studies. We are in the middle of designing an introductory course (to be piloted next fall). We were planning meetings over the summer, but now the funds for that are frozen. We were hoping to bring in a few experts, but now those funds are frozen. We were going to purchase a few important supplies, but now those funds are frozen.

The notification letter of termination of our grant was entirely irregular: it didn’t come through the NEH secure notification system, as required; it didn’t even come from an @neh.gov email address. The letter was sloppily written and did not offer any concrete reasons for the cancelation other than the Trump administration’s ‘funding priorities.’ NOTE: as with all the NIH and NSF funding, these monies were already allocated by Congress. We have the funds in an account here. DOGE is trying to get the university to send those funds back. But back where, exactly? According to NYT reporting, approximately 80% of the NEH staff have been put on leave—and that seems to include our program officer.

There are many longer term ways that these cuts (a teeny, tiny portion of the government budget) will harm students and the humanities. I’ll name three: 1) faculty already have very little time to devote to designing new and innovative programs of study and the elimination of this funding makes that worse; 2) graduate students working on projects funded via NEH program grants will no longer have access to the kind of real-time learning that managing a program enables (collaboration; problem solving; budget management; real-time ingenuity in responding to difficulties all supporting the virtues of adaptability and flexibility; 3) Humanities scholars will have a much harder time establishing innovative programs at institutions—and isn’t innovation in education a hallmark value much touted these days?

These cuts are, in the grand scheme of things, small. And the issue may be down on the list of urgent disasters that demand our attention now. I get that. But small humanities grants have an outsized effect as a return on investment—there is a direct relation between these small amounts of money and the revitalization of classroom, the possibility of work in the archives, and the hope for innovations of humanities research and scholarship, especially for the next generation of curious, engaged undergraduate and graduate students.

Yes, these cuts are totally illegal. If you are so inclined, please put this on the list of things to protest in comments to your Congresscritters. These programs are really popular even with many red state representatives—and in my case, this harms the students and citizens of the increasingly reddest of the red, Indiana.

This is only my second diary—and I’ve been lurking here a very long while!

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