On January 15, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $75.1 million for humanities projects across the country. Presented as part of President Donald Trump’s January 25, 2025 executive order, “Celebrating America’s Birthday,” the move is the latest example of how the Trump administration is increasingly using federal funding as a vehicle to achieve its broader goals of reshaping higher education. The NEH is now channeling grants toward civics, Western canon, and “Great Books” programs in what supporters describe as a corrective to decades of ideologically liberal dominance on university campuses.
For more than a decade, federal and state governments have funded university programs aimed at shaping civic norms and institutional culture through diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices and curriculum development tied to government-supported social justice goals. As Insight Into Academia explained in 2023, under grant rules in place during the Biden administration, “federal agencies—which funded more than $49 billion in university research and development projects in 2021—typically require applicants to show they are considering diversity and equity in their work.”
Earlier this year, the federal government issued guidance warning colleges and universities that they could lose federal funding if they maintained certain DEI programs. In August, a federal judge ruled that directive violated the First Amendment and federal procedural requirements.
At the same time, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) moved to cancel more than $175 million worth of NEH grants, many tied to DEI and related ideological programming. Those cancellations were likewise blocked by a federal judge.
Although Trump’s 2026 budget proposal called for eliminating the NEH altogether, that effort failed. On January 15, 2026, bipartisan majorities in Congress voted to continue funding the agency, approving a $207 million appropriation for the current fiscal year.
Having failed to dismantle the NEH over what the administration viewed as its role in promoting an incompatible ideology, the Trump administration has instead repurposed the agency, using federal humanities funding to advance its own preferred ideological framework. Critics argue that the new NEH awards are a form of conservative indoctrination, while conservatives view that funding as a way of providing ideological balance on campuses.
What is concerning even for those who seek more viewpoint diversity on campus is that, according to sources who spoke with the New York Times, the recipients of the largest NEH awards at $10 million each—the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (FEHE), the University of North Carolina, and the University of Texas (Austin)—were all noncompetitive, with those schools and organizations “selected to apply,” rather than chosen through a fair and open process.
Responding to similar accusations made by a UNC classics professor, the NEH objected to that characterization of the grant process, with a spokesperson writing that “like all NEH grant applications, the UNC application was subject to NEH’s normal rigorous review process and was indeed evaluated by an external panel of experts,” adding that “it received strong support from the external peer reviewers and the NEH career staff recommended it for funding.”
One of those recipients is FEHE, a civic education organization with programs at top universities like Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton. It shares a number of staff and leadership with the Witherspoon Institute. Advocates of new civic education centers like FEHE often describe them as an alternative to legislative bans on teaching, which would violate students’ First Amendment rights to receive information. In a 2021 essay for the Hoover Institute, conservative scholars warned that efforts to prohibit instruction of topics such as critical race theory (CRT) would trigger a frenzy of political censorship, predicting legislative crackdowns which “resemble the old arcade game of Whac-A-Mole” in which disfavored ideas on both the left and the right would be “beat down” and suppressed through funding threats. The Hoover Institute suggests that civics programs like FEHE would equip students to evaluate and resist “bad speech” on their own, overcoming it with “good” speech, instead of outright government speech bans. The $10 million NEH award to FEHE will fund new “classical humanities” programs across its network of institutes at 15 U.S. and UK universities and an “Emerging Scholars Program” in the humanities.
According to NEH grant listings, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s $10.1 million award is earmarked for fundraising toward an endowment supporting faculty positions at its School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL), which will help fund eight endowed professorships focused on American political thought, constitutionalism, and the classical foundations of civic education, along with new graduate and professional programs. Erik Gellman, a history professor and vice president of the Chapel Hill chapter of the American Association of University Professors, called the award “infuriating” in a comment to Inside Higher Ed, contrasting the increased federal funding for SCiLL to the elimination of its area studies programs.
SCiLL has been mired in controversy since its launch, troubled by faculty departures and allegations of politicized hiring, so much so that in September 2025, UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts retained outside counsel to conduct an independent review of the school. University officials have defended the school, saying its hiring followed university rules and that early turnover is merely reflective of routine start-up instability.
Reporting from the Assembly, a North Carolina news site, first documented how several members of the four person NEH council involved in reviewing the grants for SCiLL funding had prior professional and personal ties to the program and its leadership. One is Keegan Callanan, a political theorist and longtime associate of SCiLL director Jed Atkins, who has been connected to the school since its inception and also serves as higher education director for the foundation of the hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer. Another is Matthew Rose, the brother of a SCiLL professor. Together, Callanan and Rose control 50 percent of NEH funding.
Also receiving the NEH’s largest award through the allegedly noncompetitive process was the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), which will now receive funding to launch two new undergraduate majors: Great Books and Strategy and Statecraft, including 16 new faculty positions with instruction focused on Western civilization, American constitutionalism, and national security studies. UT-Austin—perhaps more than any other major university which receives federal funding—has taken a conciliatory and deferential approach to each of the Trump administration’s various demands, in ways that have aggravated various factions of faculty and students on campus.
In October, UT-Austin became one of 10 colleges to be invited to sign Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would grant any college who agreed to new government-authored “restrictions” and regulations access to preferential federal funding opportunities. Signatories to that compact would be required to “adopt policies prohibiting” students and faculty from using their free speech to express support for “violence, murder or genocide,” even in the abstract, as well as “support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations,” an obvious effort to deprive Americans of their first amendment rights on behalf of a foreign government. UT-Austin was the only college not to outright reject that deal. Local reports from KXAN alleged at the time that “many of the elements in that compact are already happening or in the works on that campus.”
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The National Endowment for the Humanities has increasingly been used not merely to promote American history and culture, but to subsidize foreign-aligned ideological projects, most notably initiatives advancing Israeli state interests in American schools. In September, the NEH announced it would award the organization Tikvah with a $10.4 million grant for its “Jewish Civilization Project”—what the agency proudly described as “the largest NEH grant award to date in the agency’s 60-year history”—with the stated goal of “countering the pathology of anti-Semitism” in the United States. In the same announcement, NEH revised its notice of funding opportunities to place schools, colleges, and universities “on notice that if they receive NEH financial assistance for humanities programs and activities, the agency will hold them accountable for tolerating discrimination or harassment against Jewish students in violation of civil rights law.”
Funded by Zionist billionaires like Paul Singer and Roger Hertog, Tikvah has long been a centerpiece of the pro-Israel neoconservative think tank world, with leadership and faculty that have included the former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, Benjamin Netanyahu’s media adviser Ran Baratz, and senior figures from Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hudson Institute. In addition to “countering anti-semitism,” the NEH award will be used to support K-12 and university curriculum on Jewish civilization, public programming on antisemitism, and fellowships for young journalists focused on Jewish history and culture, among other purposes. It is notable that the government award to the Singer-backed Tikvah Fund was again partially decided by Callanan, who simultaneously serves as an adviser for the Paul Singer Foundation.
Regardless of which party holds power, federal funding continues to function as a lever for conditioning and regulating the ideological orientation of American universities.
