Why It Matters That Trump Wants to Kill the NEA and NEH

The National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities are no strangers to the political crosshairs. And it came as little surprise to many scholars that President Trump would propose to eliminate them in his first budget.

Still, the president’s plan is a stark statement of his values and, in it, campus and scholarly leaders see an attack on intellectual inquiry.

“This administration is saying we do not value the study and research in fields like history and literature,” says Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association. “We do not value the arts. We do not value educational opportunities for large swaths of Americans.”

Mr. Trump’s budget functions as a signal to his base, says David A. Smith, a senior lecturer in history at Baylor University who has conducted research on the NEA. “If the president comes out swinging at the NEA, it’s to score credibility points with groups that want to see it gone,” he says. Opposing an agency like the NEA appeals both to those who object to it “from a cultural standpoint, because they don’t support what it does, and from a libertarian standpoint, because the government shouldn’t be doing stuff like this.”

No other president has specifically proposed eliminating the NEA and NEH before, although both endowments have been repeated targets of fiscal and social conservatives in Congress and in the White House. Created by an act signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the two endowments operated in relative quiet until 1981, when President Ronald Reagan’s budget director called them out as superfluous federal activity and an easy savings.

The agencies came under fire again in the late 1980s when Republicans in Congress proposed eliminating federal money for the National Endowment for the Arts based on its support for controversial artists such as Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Mr. Trump may not see the value of spending about $148 million a year each on both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, but there are indications Congress disagrees and that, in the end, the president’s stance may not translate into any policy change.

A group of 25 Democratic and Republican senators sent a letter to the president last month expressing their support for continued funding of the two cultural endowments.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said in a statement to The Chronicle that she believed “we can find a way to commit to fiscal responsibility while continuing to support the important benefits that NEA and NEH provide.”

Stephen Kidd, executive director of the National Humanities Alliance, an advocacy group, said that “the feedback we’ve been getting from those who have been talking with members of Congress is that support remains quite high” for funding the agencies.

There is at least one practical reason that the NEA and NEH may enjoy bipartisan support. “Congress realizes that these agencies spread money around the country to all these different districts, and they’re beneficial to a lot of people,” says Donna M. Binkiewicz, a lecturer in history at California State University at Long Beach who wrote a book about the NEA.

What the End Would Mean

What would it mean if the NEA and NEH were eliminated? The ramifications would be felt on campuses across the country.

The nearly $300 million appropriated for the two agencies for the 2016 fiscal year is disbursed across all 50 states, with much of it going to state arts and humanities councils. A portion of the money makes its way to individual colleges, and it finances a wide array of projects.

At Duke University, for example, NEH funds have been used to broaden graduate-school training to include preparation for nonacademic careers, and for museum exhibitions and library projects, among other uses. Relatively small amounts of funding can create an outsized impact, says Richard H. Brodhead, Duke’s president.

NEA and NEH money can also function as a multiplier. Many grant recipients use an agency’s seal of approval as a basis to solicit matching funds from charitable foundations, often at a rate of three private dollars for each federal dollar, according to Lea Jacobs, associate vice chancellor for research for arts and humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Ms. Jacobs has sat on NEH review panels, and says the process rigorously and impartially vets the projects that receive grants, saving potential donors the trouble. “If you get NEH funding, that makes people sit up and take notice,” she says.

The threat of losing federal support for the arts and humanities could have an equally disproportionate effect. Many projects would “have to be funded privately, or not happen,” Ms. Jacobs says. Given the recent strains on all sources of funding for the arts and humanities, not happening might be the more likely outcome. “You don’t imagine research projects that you could never fund,” she says. Defunding the national endowments would have “a depressive effect on what research or publishing projects are attempted.”

Losing the money doled out each year by the NEA and NEH, especially the former, would have effects that extend far beyond campuses. Arts organizations in major cities would probably weather the loss of NEA funds, says Ms. Binkiewicz of Cal State Long Beach. “The people who would be hurt the most are people in small towns and rural areas, in small schools or poorer districts, where there really isn’t a lot of other funding for these kinds of activities.”

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.