Seven of the terminated NEH grants were awarded to Matrix, MSU’s Center for Digital Humanities and Social Science. Matrix also had six additional grants under review at NEH and five in development for submission at the time of termination. 

The grants funded Matrix projects like Enslaved.org, a program designed to build, analyze and preserve historical datasets related to enslaved people of African descent; American in the Kitchen, whose goal was to digitize 200 American cookbooks from MSU’s vast collection of historical cookbooks; and the African-American, African, and African Diaspora Quilt Studies Digital Resource, which sought to preserve the works and stories of Black quilt makers worldwide. 

Each project reflects an immense amount of work, researchers said. Even newer projects granted funding at the beginning of this year, like America in the Kitchen, required years of prior work that went into the grant writing and the approval process. 

"It’s a tremendous amount of work that’s lost. It’s a fairly big team working on this project and it feels so incredibly wasteful," said Helen Veit, professor of history and America in the Kitchen director.

Unlike recent NSF terminations, which were focused on certain keywords used in projects, the NEH terminations appeared to be indiscriminate.

"This was just a wholesale slaughter of all the NEH projects," Matrix director Dean Rehberger said. 

Once funding was cut, hourly employees like undergraduate and graduate researchers had to be let go, Rehberger said, and researchers are no longer being paid to work on the projects. 

The three additional grants and fellowship that were terminated were within the College of Arts and Letters (CAL). The college's associate dean for research and graduate studies, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, lost funding on her project as a result. 

Fitzpatrick’s project is called Knowledge Commons, an online network for scholars and practitioners to create profiles, communicate with others in their field and deposit their work in the repository. 

Knowledge Commons is almost 10 years old. In 2020, Fitzpatrick received a $500,000 grant from NEH to develop and rebuild the network. Every year for the next five years, the funding was released to Fitzpatrick and her team on the condition that they matched the funding with their own fundraising efforts. Knowledge Commons had to raise a three to one match in order to receive funding. 

Since receiving the grant, the team has raised $1.5 million and received $400,000 in NEH funding. This year, they were supposed to receive the final $100,000 installment of their grant — then it was terminated. 

Additionally, in 2024, Knowledge Commons received a $200,000 contract from NEH to turn KCWorks, the Knowledge Commons digital repository, into a larger humanities repository for all federally funded humanities research. This contract was part of the Nelson Memorandum, released in 2022 by the Biden administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. The memo instructed federal funders of research to make all of the results of their funded research publicly available. 

The contract has now been cancelled.

"It’s particularly devastating for us, not just because of the loss of funding, and loss of funding is important, but the loss of the impact that we’re going to be able to have," Fitzpatrick said. 

Much of this work that has been terminated — Knowledge Commons, Enslaved.org and America in the Kitchen — is focused on making historical work publicly available through digital means.

"This is all work that is public facing, that’s community engaged, that’s really thinking about cultural heritage in ways that it’s not just scholars talking to themselves," Fitzpatrick said. "It’s really there for the public and it’s a huge loss to public life in this country."

History and humanities research is often an act of remembering and documenting, Rehberger said. The work is not partisan, he added, and is essential to who we are as Americans and as human beings. 

"If we don’t remember those voices, if we don’t remember the enslaved, if we don’t remember the kinds of art and photography and work that we do, what kind of country are we? What kind of world are we?" Rehberger said. 

Now researchers are at an impasse, suddenly without funding and facing large uncertainties about where to get alternative funding.  

Viet and her team continue to do unpaid work as they seek out fundraising opportunities that would allow the project to continue. 

Alternative funding sources are an option, but as more and more grants are cut across the nation, private foundations are likely to be inundated with requests for funding, Rehberger said. There are also a limited number of places for humanities researchers to go to for funding in the first place.

“Funding in the humanities is very hard to come by, and so when NEH terminates grants … it's unbelievably disruptive for those scholars, and those dollars are very precious," said vice president of Research and Innovation Doug Gage. 

Fitzpatrick also noted the importance of public funding for humanities research. If private foundations are the only ones funding this work, she said, then it will increasingly seem like the humanities are a luxury item.

"The more we let philanthropy handle that sort of funding, the more we lose a sense of the public good, and that’s something that belongs to all of us and it should belong to all of us," she said.