On Feb. 11, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on its website that it had modified its funding criteria for eligible humanities projects in compliance with three recent executive orders. According to the announcement, “NEH awards may not be used for the following purposes:

• promotion of gender ideology;
• promotion of discriminatory equity ideology;
• support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives or activities; or
• environmental justice initiatives or activities.”

These prohibitions impose the terminology of Executive Orders 14151, 14168 and 14190 onto future applicants for NEH funding, whether individual scholars, museums, nonprofit organizations or colleges (including historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges). Published well within the stipulated 60-day window for government agency compliance with the order to terminate all “equity-related” initiatives, grants or contracts, these prohibitions represent a swift implementation of the Trump administration’s point-by-point mandate for “Ending Radical Indoctrination.”

I can only begin to conjecture here about what the consequences of the NEH’s new criteria might be for the humanities, the domain of cultural and intellectual inquiry the NEH was created to foster. To cite the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, “While no government can call a great artist or scholar into existence, it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.”

To uphold conditions defined by prohibition rather than freedom—and with prohibitions explicitly targeting the right to existence of queer and transgender people (“gender ideology”), the ability in any way to offset egregious structural inequalities in educational and cultural access (“DEI”), and even the very right to advocate on behalf of anyone’s rights (“discriminatory equity ideology”)—is to betray the very terms under which the NEH was created. In revising its Notice of Funding Opportunities, the NEH is in violation of its public mission.

Presumably, as a government agency perpetually under threat of budget cuts, the NEH hastened to implement Trump’s executive orders in order to fend off wholesale elimination. The NEH is a federal agency and is thus directly implicated in the executive orders, provided those orders are constitutional. By complying with Trump’s ideology, the National Endowment may perhaps live to see another day, thereby preserving the careers of at least some of its approximately 185 employees and its ability—to do what?

The NEH has not yet fully overhauled its website to reflect its compliance. Of its current listings of Great Projects Past and Present, perhaps “The Papers of George Washington,” “Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” and “The Real Buffalo Bill” might manage to squeeze through under the new stipulations, but would the Created Equal documentary film project be so lucky? Would a biography of union organizer César Chavez manage to qualify as a fundable project, or a documentary about “A Black Surgeon in the Age of Jim Crow”? How about the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database? The NEH has leveraged its own institutional survival on the forfeit of future such projects.

The problem is a far deeper one, however. In what universe should it be too much to ask that a state-sponsored institution created to uphold the “material conditions” for freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry put up even the slightest resistance to the inhumane, reactionary and repressive edicts issued by the Trump regime? Even today, the NEH website champions its past support for projects that uphold justice in the face of oppression, that resist totalitarian erasure. Yet the NEH itself has mustered no such resistance. Instead, it has announced that any such projects are now ineligible for consideration.

Of one thing I am certain: The National Endowment for the Humanities has forfeited its claim to the word “humanities.” The humanities do not designate a prohibitive sphere of capitulation to ruling forces. The humanities are not furthered by a governmental agency that serves, willingly or unwillingly, as an ideological extension of a political party. The humanities are a domain of inquiry, of questioning and investigation, not of unquestioning acquiescence.

As a literature professor and an educator in the humanities for more than a quarter century, I have assured my students that the study of cultural, artistic and intellectual production is continuous with its practice. This not only means that humanistic inquiry involves creativity, creation and a commitment to thinking freely, but it also means that humanistic inquiry necessarily upholds the same responsibility to questions of ethics, value and meaning with which any other historical action must reckon. Humanists cannot, and do not, stand meekly aside while the “real” agents of historical change make big decisions.

In posting a recent message to the frequently asked questions web form on the NEH website, I wrote that in light of the NEH’s silent capitulation to Trump’s executive orders, I was ashamed to call myself a humanist. I hereby recant that statement. I am not ashamed to call myself a humanist. It is the National Endowment for the Humanities that should be ashamed. Or, better yet, I call on the NEH and all its 185 employees, including and especially NEH chair Shelly C. Lowe, to recant their compliance with Executive Orders 14151, 14168 and 14190 and join other national and international agencies, organizations and individuals in resisting the inhumane and unconstitutional decrees of the Trump administration.