Trump cuts upend state’s humanities programs; Michigan Read on hold

For the past couple months, Jennifer Rupp, executive director of the Michigan Humanities Council, has been, metaphorically speaking, tied to a train track waiting for a freight train and not knowing its schedule.

This past Thursday, she awoke to an email with a letter attached. The train had arrived.

At midnight Wednesday, all state councils received a letter from National Endowment for the Humanities’ acting chair, Michael McDonald, immediately terminating all funding, including reimbursement of funds already spent by grantees but not received in some cases. Michigan’s Council received about $900,000 annually from the federal government.

“We have no access to any funding,” said Rupp.

She said it is likely that the Federation of State Humanities Councils, which represents the 56 state and jurisdictional councils like Puerto Rico, will sue.

“It is an illegal capture of funds,” Rupp said. The Michigan Council provides funding each year to a variety of libraries, museums and arts groups through competitive grants. Grants this past year paid for exhibits and programs featuring everything from oral histories of the American Indian School experience to origin stories of migrants mounted by the Historical Society of Greater Lansing.

The Humanities Council also has sponsored the Great Michigan Read for 18 years, exposing the state to books and authors of some renown, including  Angeline Boulley, a Native American writer who penned the #1 New York Times bestselling “Firekeeper’s Daughter.”

Rupp told City Pulse the next Great Michigan Read featuring Curtis Chin, author of “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir,” is on hold and unless the funding decision is reversed, layoffs at the local agency will be considered. Using federal funds and underwriting, the Council has given away more than 100,000 books and program materials since the Great Michigan Read started.

Our country may be entering into an era of “Fahrenheit 451” for libraries, museums and arts groups. Recent cuts and the elimination of grants and layoffs at the federal level will seriously impair and eliminate programs and services at state and local libraries. In Michigan, that could mean the loss of nearly $10 million in federal funding and double that if you count local match.

“Fahrenheit 451” is a classic dystopian tale about book banning by the late Ray Bradbury. Two famous quotes that came out of this literary gem are “a book is a loaded gun” and “books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.”

At seven statewide organizations, including the Michigan Humanities Council, it now appears that anything even suggestive of approaching DEI will be severely restricted or ended in its entirety. What that means for the Smithsonian’s Institution’s African American and American Indian national museums in Washington is unclear since their essence are stories about slavery, discrimination and colonialism.

Although the American Indian museum was not specifically named in the president’s recent executive orders, it’s likely its exhibit policy will be watched closely since one of President Donald J. Trump’s favorite presidents, Andrew Jackson, was responsible for the Indian resettlement and land grabs in this country.

In addition to ongoing attempts to ban books at libraries, these institutions along with small museums were targeted for federal cuts. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency led efforts that resulted in layoffs and grant cuts at the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provides funding for these groups at the local and state level.

Larry Wagenaar, executive director of the Michigan Historical Society, said cuts to museums and libraries are “totally tragic.”

One major cut which Michigan library patrons will see if efforts at cutting state funding (Washington, Connecticut and California have already received recission letters) are successful is the elimination of MelCat and MCat programs that allow patrons to get books and use databases on loan from distant libraries when they are unavailable locally.

State Library officials said that more than 1 million books each year are delivered to patrons this way.

The letter from the National Endowment for the Humanities terminating the Michigan Humanities Council’s federal funding.

This free service would have made industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie smile. Carnegie built thousands of free libraries. He would have been apoplectic at the news to deliver cuts rather than books. Lansing’s Carnegie Library, which opened in 1905 and ultimately evolved into Capital Area District Library, still stands on Shiawassee  Street and has been repurposed by Lansing Community College.

In addition, hundreds of small community museums will have no access to the grant funds that were administered through IMLS and used to launch exhibits and modernization.

Federal cuts will devastate the Michigan Humanities Council’s grant programs. Rupp said the cuts are “heartbreaking and will absolutely erode being able to tell all people’s stories.”

Wagenaar said federal funding “was a promise made. Federal funding used to be the gold standard of funding.”

Waagenar said that “these cuts are coming at a time when the Historical Society of Michigan has signed up a record number of students for high school History Day where they compete.” National History Day  is in part funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Debbie Mikula, director of the Michigan Library Association representing more than 2,500 libraries and executive groups in the state, said the IMLA cuts would end interagency loans of books and material and cooperative use of proprietary databases.

“These programs have taken more than 20 years to establish,” she said.

“The ending of grants would decimate these programs which readers in rural areas rely on,” she said.

“There just aren’t enough philanthropic organizations or wealthy donors to make up the loss of federal funding.” Mikula said.

“Libraries are one of the last public institutions available for free,” she added.

Finally, the National Endowment for the Arts and the state and local agencies that it funds are crossing their fingers hoping the travails of other agencies won’t reach them. 

In the meantime, other than loss of funding it’s likely you will see programs that receive federal funding continuing to scrub their websites of any DEI-style language and thinking twice about what type of programming and exhibits they will launch. Self-censorship will become the norm, according to several museum executives I talked with.

“The arts, museum and cultural agencies losing federal funding will have to go to the private sector, and they all will be competing for the same dollars, Mikula said.

In the meantime, Attorney General Dana Nessel joined with 19 other state attorneys general last week to sue the Trump administration in federal court to block its efforts to cut federal funding to libraries. The lawsuit is similar to other lawsuits against the administration based on the premise that it exceeded the power given it in the Constitution. The lawsuit was filed in the Rhode Island U.S. District Court and seeks immediate injunctive relief.