By LYLAH SCHMEDEL-PERMANNA
California colleges and universities are still missing over $5 million worth of humanities grants, despite one federal district court order to return funds to University of California campuses. For at least 19 other campuses, the money remains out of reach as lawsuits continue to challenge the Trump administration’s abrupt halt of promised funding in April, when the National Endowment for the Humanities canceled over $10.2 million to already-awarded projects in California.
Now campuses must scramble for limited, alternative funding if they want to keep their projects alive.
For students like Kathleen Boswell, a teaching credential student at Cal State San Bernardino, the loss affects their professional advancement. Boswell and fellow teaching credential students were ready to participate in the first cohort of the “Inland Empire Project,” originally to launch this fall. This project would have provided training and curriculum for current and prospective K-12 teachers to use local history to talk about national topics, such as world wars. Boswell especially looked forward to testing new approaches to connect students with American history.
“Kids get really excited when history is in their grasp,” she said. “If they can connect to local history, they can connect to the broader scope of history. It’s a domino effect.”
President Trump announced plans to gut the National Endowment for the Humanities in his most-recent budget, starting with cutting two-thirds of the agency’s staff. The agency is the largest public funder of the humanities nationwide, created alongside the National Endowment for the Arts after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act into law in 1965. The law asserts that the arts are vital to democracy. Ever since, NEH awards represent a coveted prize in the humanities field.
Earlier this year, the agency announced major ideological shifts for the types of projects it would support to comply with the president’s executive orders. Those orders aim to eliminate federal funding for programs that promote such ideals as diversity, gender equity, and environmental justice.
During the first three days of April, letters went out to most NEH grant recipients stating that their funding was terminated. A letter sent on April 2 to Cal State San Bernardino states that, “NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.” The termination was effective immediately.
CalMatters reached out to all 29 California campuses that had ongoing NEH-funded projects at that time, as listed on the federal grant tracker USA Spending. CalMatters found that every California campus but one had their funding cut by confirming with public information officers at each college and checking the American Historical Association’s database of terminated NEH grants.
The only campus spared, the California Institute of Technology, confirmed its funding for the Einstein Papers Project remained intact. The collection houses more than 90,000 of Albert Einstein’s written records.
Terminated projects covered a wide variety of topics, from digitizing the history of Catherine the Great at the University of Southern California to the creation of a minor in human rights and border studies at San Diego State University. Some colleges were in the midst of their project spending when they received the news, while others were slated to start in the upcoming months. Canceled grants ranged from about $23,000 to over $500,000. USC’s canceled projects totaled over $1.2 million.
UC researchers then sued federal agencies. In that case, Thakur v. Trump, a federal district court issued a preliminary injunction in June ordering the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Endowment for the Humanities to reinstate grants to the UCs that were not given a grant-specific explanation as to why they were chosen for termination. That case is still ongoing.
