'It is so embedded': UNC humanities programs impacted amid federal funding cuts

Following cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, STEM programs are not the only ones grappling with a lack of research funding. UNC Humanities programs are also facing challenges for the future. 

In addition to cutting funding for research organizations including the National Institutes of Health, the Trump administration has also targeted the NEH, one of the most prominent funding sources for humanities research.

Ashley Melzer is the director of the UNC Arts and Humanities Grant Studio, which helps faculty members, as well as undergraduate and graduate students, find grant funding for their research projects. A large portion of that funding comes directly from the NEH.

“There's a lot of humanities scholars who already don't have enough funding to do the amazing work that they do,” Melzer said. “So it's like I said before, this is not a new fight in some ways. It's just a more devastating one.” 

The NEH funds support fellowships for faculty members at UNC in the humanities, providing money for professors to write books and conduct research. But the impact of the NEH extends past the university level, funding data and evaluation, teacher workshops, community history projects, public lectures, exhibit films and state humanities and arts councils. 

“It's hard to recognize the importance of arts and humanities because it is so embedded," Melzer said. "It's [like] trying to get fish to pay attention to the water."

The public programming and research lost as a result of NEH budget cuts also means that the preservation and access of cultural heritage is at risk, Melzer said. 

A research project called “Stories of Resilience: Latino Community Health Workers and COVID Response in North Carolina” was one of the projects canceled as a result of the funding cuts. The project had initially been awarded $150,000.

Melzer said the project was among a list being impacted by the cuts, with some individual fellows receiving stop work orders after they had completed three-fourths of their research. 

“There will be faculty members who never get the time they need to write the work that they need to, or they have to do it at the expense of their personal lives, at their ability to serve students in the way that they really want to,” Melzer said.

Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies Sharon Holland said the “substantive curtailing” of humanities research and scholarship is the first full scale effort to shut down the NEH, and said that the humanities have historically been under fire.

Holland said cuts to the NEH could impact collaboration between fields, citing her own collaborations with friends and colleagues in STEM. Pitting the two fields of study against each other, she said, makes it easier for the research areas and pathways to innovation and creativity to be cut altogether. 

Holland said that even one professor's research project being shut down, and the subsequent inability to hire and fund student researchers, will prevent undergraduate and graduate students from gaining momentum in their own academic work, and in some cases, even delaying graduation rates. 

Junior Dani Elliott, an English major and humanities research editor at UNC JOURney, emphasized the importance of having accessible research opportunities for undergraduates in all academic areas. UNC JOURney is a student-run journal that provides undergraduate students the opportunity to have their research published.

The Trump administration's denouncement of diversity, equity and inclusion has also been a cause of concern for the journal’s existence as an institution and publication, due to some of the topics it takes on. 

“I'm looking around at my peers. I'm looking around at the people who came before me. I'm looking at my mentors, and I'm looking at their fear,” Elliot said.

Holland agreed that the humanities are at a greater risk under an anti-DEI administration, but attempting to put “DEI” terms under one umbrella isn’t feasible. These stories, and histories, have long outdated the phrase itself, she said. 

“They hate DEI. They hate immigration. So they're trying to throw everything out, right? But what it's really demonstrating is how interconnected we all are,” Holland said. "You can't get rid of BIPOC employees or BIPOC related projects without also getting rid of folks who don't do that work."

In the grand scheme of the national budget, the NEH receives a very small portion of federal funding. The cuts now being posed to the endowment will impact access to humanities programs in every state. 

“If we are preventing people from doing research in the humanities, we are preventing people from better understanding the human condition, from better understanding themselves, from better understanding the political state of the country that we live in,” Elliott said.

@mariaesullivan

@dailytarheel | university@dailytarheel.com