“It’s like you’re sitting in a bar, and there are all of these fights going on all around you,” the novelist Ann Patchett is telling me. “You look over, and you think, ‘Not my fight.’ And you look down the bar, and you think, ‘Not my fight either.’ And then someone comes into the bar, and this horrible fight ensues, and you think, ‘Oh, God, that’s my fight.’”
Ms. Patchett is not sitting in a bar when she tells me this story. She’s sitting in her family room explaining how she got involved in trying to save Humanities Tennessee, an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, at a time when the future of humanities programming looked very bleak. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency had just defunded the N.E.H.
State humanities councils have never depended entirely on federal funding to survive. The program was meant from the beginning to foster public-private partnerships. But how could they possibly make up the loss of all their federal funding? At a time when hundreds — thousands? — of other nonprofits, locally and nationally, were trying to do the same?
This was Ms. Patchett’s fight, as she put it, because she is a regular headliner at the annual Southern Festival of Books, one of Humanities Tennessee’s most visible programs. She is also the owner of Parnassus Books, which, like the festival, is one of the tent poles that supports the literary life of Nashville. When one of those tent poles takes a hit, it leaves the whole literary community a little wobbly.
Ms. Patchett had a simple plan for overcoming the paralysis of doom that many of us were feeling in those early chain saw days of DOGE: She would ask the bookstore’s social media followers — some 500,000 people across platforms — to help her raise money for Humanities Tennessee by donating $20 each. If you need to fill a funding gap of hundreds of thousands of dollars, $20 is a drop in the bucket. But together, she explained in her Parnassus video, “We might be able to be the tide that lifts the boat.”
Donations poured in, not just from readers in Tennessee but from those in all 50 states.
According to Tim Henderson, chief executive of Humanities Tennessee, Ms. Patchett’s appeal brought in approximately $70,000 in small donations linked directly to the Parnassus video. But several much larger gifts — including two in the six figures — came in indirect response to it, too, from charitable foundations that understood what the loss of public humanities would mean for a state, and for a country, and were in a position to do something about it.
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