The National Endowment for the Humanities on Thursday announced $71 million in new grants, including nearly $40 million to classical humanities institutes and civic leadership programs that have been promoted by conservatives as a counterweight to liberal-dominated higher education.
The grants, awarded to 84 projects across the country, come as the Trump administration has moved to bring the agency into line with its priorities, sometimes directing money to ideological allies.
They include support for museum exhibits, scholarly publications and other work the endowment has long supported. But the majority of the funding — including three grants of $10 million, among the largest in the agency’s history — goes to hiring faculty, recruiting students and developing courses at classical humanities programs and civic centers.
One award provides $10 million for hiring 16 faculty members at the University of Texas and helping “launch academic majors in Strategy and Statecraft and Great Books.” Another provides $10 million in matching funds to the University of North Carolina to build an endowment to fund “a world-class civics faculty.”
A third $10 million grant will go to the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, a network of humanities programs at 17 mostly private schools that describes its mission as “renewing elite universities” and training “the next generation of cultural leaders.”
Other large grants include $1.7 million for a newly established civics program at the University of South Carolina, $5 million to one at Ohio State University and $2 million to the Abigail Adams Institute, an independent center in Cambridge, Mass., for a project called “supplemental humanities at Harvard.”
Awards also include $2 million to fund fellowships for college graduates and three writer-in-residence positions at First Things, a conservative magazine.
Only one grant goes to an Ivy League school: $60,000 to a scholar at Dartmouth for a study of medieval religious relics.
Many of the large grants, including those to the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, the University of Texas and the University of North Carolina, were noncompetitive, meaning the recipients were selected to apply, according to two people familiar with the applications.
The endowment and its acting chair, Michael McDonald, did not respond to requests for comment.
The grants arrive amid the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against higher education, as well as a roiling debate over what some conservatives see as universities’ abandonment of the study of the Western intellectual tradition.
In a hotly debated essay last month in Compact magazine called “Why I Left Harvard,” James Hankins, a historian of the Italian Renaissance who recently joined the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, said Harvard, where he taught for 40 years, had let the teaching of Western history “die on the vine.”
The grants also come after a tumultuous year at the endowment, which has a budget of $207 million. In February, the previous chairman, Shelly Lowe, a Biden appointee, departed at Trump’s direction. In April, McDonald canceled nearly all the agency’s existing grants, saying that they were not in line with “the president’s agenda.”
The latest grants, however, do not include any relating to one priority, the planned National Garden of American Heroes. Mr. Trump has charged the agency with helping to build it, and the agency solicited designs for individual statues in May.
The garden’s site has not been announced, though in a recent interview with The New York Times. Mr. Trump said it would be somewhere in Washington.
But the new grants do include about two dozen relating to the country’s 250th birthday, including $2.25 million to the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia and $3 million grants to support work on the papers of presidents John Adams, James Monroe, Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson.
These are not the first large awards at the agency, which in recent months has moved away from its longstanding focus on awarding many smaller grants to a more recipients through a competitive process.
In September, the agency announced a $10.4 grant, which it described as the largest in its history, to Tikvah, a conservative Jewish educational organization, to develop a Jewish Civilization Program aimed at combating antisemitism, to be disseminated in part through university-based Western Civilization programs.
That grant, which was noncompetitive, was awarded despite the fact that the National Council of the Humanities, a group of 26 outside scholars who must evaluate most grants, voted not to recommend it. Shortly after the announcement, the White House fired all but four council members without explanation.
The remaining scholars are all Trump appointees. Three are current or former employees or affiliates of institutes in the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education network.
Some Democrats have criticized what they see as the abandonment of competitive grants and rigorous peer review. In October, Chellie Pingree, a Democratic congresswoman from Maine and the ranking member of the House committee that oversees the agency, sent a letter to McDonald requesting more information, claiming that the agency was being turned into a “slush fund” for the administration.
Jennifer Schuessler is a reporter for the Culture section of The Times who covers intellectual life and the world of ideas.
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