Going to War on Humanism
Why protecting our commitment to arts and sciences matters.
The last two weeks have been busy, personally and nationally, with not a pause in sight. I have lots to share, but I can’t quite bring myself to share my own thoughts and news when the nation’s news is of such extreme import.
In the past week, we have seen the Trump administration attack the way that federal money is spent on intellectual inquiry that advances scientific knowledge and the arts. These changes are made in the name of reform, specifically, often, financial reform, but also as a rejection of what the right sees as the ideology of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). The irony, though, is that the changes being implemented are going to damage and set back American life across party lines. In particular, we are going to do meaningful damage to our ability to acquire scientific knowledge, which will lead to thousands of good jobs being lost (or never created in the first place). We are also likely—though this still is to be seen—to lose some hard-won ground around our acquisition of knowledge about how women’s health works.
The list of dangerous changes is too long even to enumerate, but three particular things are on my mind. Taken together, they signal to me that this administration is not just going after a few intellectuals and prominent journalist critics, as many of us surmised it would. It is going after the whole project of humanism.
Culture Wars: Changes and cuts to the NEA. Last week saw Trump both appointing himself director of the Kennedy Center and the announcement that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) had canceled a grant program, Challenge America for “underserved” communities. Instead, it was encouraging people to apply to its general grants and, in particular, as the New York Times reported, those “that ‘celebrate and honor the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity’ during the lead-up to the 250th anniversary of American independence in July 2026.”
One of the pages from the NEA—for research grants—that disappeared this week.
Why does this matter? On the one hand, it seems reasonable for the federal government to use some of its funds to support art that celebrates American history and an important anniversary of the declaration of American independence. On the other hand, collapsing all arts grants into a category in which grants pertaining to patriotic art are prioritized runs the risk, even under the most open-minded of administrations, of encouraging artists to produce propaganda. In this case, the NEA is encouraging artists to celebrate America under an administration that has demonstrated a very narrow view of what America is. Prioritizing patriotic art under this administration will all too likely turn a richly humanistic arts culture into a sham set of props for a false narrative about the ideals of the American past and future. That these risks are real should be clear when we look at other cultures that had flourishing arts and humanities whose pluralism came under attack, including Germany in the 1920s.
One of the functions of art—one hopes—is to be a site of resistance to dominant thinking; it is to remain an avant-garde, a way of seeing and making that peers into the future to brings us news about the limiting frameworks of the present. And so one could—and should, I think—be a bit skeptical of the taste and preferences of the NEA under any given administration. (Certainly, the right would argue that the NEA under Biden reflected all the aspects of “woke-ism” that it saw as an ideology in its own right. Parts of the NEA site still reflect that administration’s views, which clearly prioritize diversity and underrepresented communities; see below.) But there is a startling difference between a federal arts funding organization that prioritizes diversity in the arts and one that rejects it, between one that seeks actively to build an inclusive future and one that prioritizes a backward-looking, nostalgic, and dangerously exclusive view of patriotism. The proof will be in the pudding, of course; I will be curious to see which projects—and which artists—are actually funded under the new priorities.Changes to science: Last week, NPR and Science reported that, according to anonymous sources at the National Science Foundation (NSF), administrators were using a list of words to comb through 10,000 grants to decide if they comply with the recent slew of executive orders aimed at throttling diversity initiatives. It is unclear what, exactly, is happening to those grants—one source told Science that they hoped none would be terminated, because they had all already been vetted and approved; one can hope that no material changes occur. (Atul Gawande noted on X today that cuts had in fact been made to USAID grants, with some 800 already “zeroed out.”) But it is alarming to read that the NSF had an elaborate “decision tree” and list of words that included such basic terms as “women” and “diverse” that would, it appears, get a grant flagged for review, and it suggests that the right sees research that acknowledges diversity as something other than “objective hard science,” as the NPR piece helpfully reported out.
This is a loss on many levels, not least—you guessed it—the level of objective hard science. To take but one example: We know much less about women’s bodies than we do about men’s bodies. And we still don’t understand enough about ethnicity, race, and illness, and how social experiences shape chronic illness. This impacts men, as well; some drugs work better for men than for women, say. If we don’t continue to perform high-level science that focuses on the diversity of bodies and experiences Americans have, we will fail to make much-needed gains, or to understand, say, how treating and preventing heart disease in men might look different from how we do it in women.If the NSF starts to curtail grants for studies that pertain to women and minorities, it would also be turning its back on legal mandates to make scientific research more equitable. In the 1990s, as I wrote about in my book The Invisible Kingdom, Congress, in response to decades of scientific trials that failed to include women and minorities as research subjects, mandated change. In 2014, the NIH picked up that challenge, as the New York Times reported here. That piece contains this incredible quote from Dr. Janice Clayton, who was then associate director of women’s health at the NIH: “We literally know less about every aspect of female biology compared to male biology.” Eleven years later, I suspect this is still true! To take just one example I have written about, we still don’t understand very much about why autoimmune diseases—which are rising at what some researchers told me are “epidemic rates”—overwhelmingly affect women.
On Friday, the administration announced that it would now unilaterally implement a limit to so-called “indirect costs” on grants from the National Institutes of Health. There is much more to say about this—but it’s like taking a sledgehammer to a more nuanced issue. (For one things, indirect costs change depending on what city you are in.) While there may be room for some fiscal reform on indirect costs—to understand that, I would have to report it out, which I haven’t yet done—the change so dramatically reduces the amount it will subsidize (reducing the usual 67.5% indirect cost rate at Yale to 15%) that the consequences will be like a shock wave in the sciences. In essence, the federal government, by using a sledgehammer instead of targeted, sophisticated reform, has downplayed the place of science in America. It risks our losing a generation of potential scientists by making the actual work of science seem dauntingly politicized. And it means we will trail our competitor nations. All kinds of life-saving studies will be delayed or not performed.
There is much more to say and nearly all of it needs to be backed by thoughtful research and reporting—which I hope to continue to do, here and elsewhere. But what I hope to suggest here is that the changes to the NIH’s way of doing science is less about fiscal reform and much more potently an attack on humanism itself.
Later this week, I’ll return to craft—I owe you all a piece about “chunking” personal narrative and research. It is coming soon!
P.S.: As I continue to write about this changing landscape, I would love to hear from you, especially if you have examples of conferences or studies being cut or changed. Please DM me here!
Meghan
\
The NEA just sent out an email with the new guidelines today at around 1pm pst.