As for the possible elimination of the NEH, I unfortunately know how and to whom governmental scholarships in the Humanities are awarded here and in Canada and how they are spent. So in my opinion, good riddance. People have gone completely nuts trying to invent reasons why Humanities need massive influxes of cash but it’s all lies and waste.
For as long as these scholarships – that are entirely inaccessible to most of us – exist, they can be used to persecute any one of us for not wasting our lives on hopelessly pursuing them. I’ll lose nothing but stress and annoyance once they are gone, so I have no reason to bemoan their disappearance.
We need to stop buying into the lie that Humanities die without capital. No, we die once we give ourselves over to capital.
Clarissa's Blog 
Thank you for your perspective. People are so addicted to misery that they refuse to see that they are still capable of writing, doing art, etc. Not getting funding to write is simply an excuse not to write. If you want to be a writer, you don’t need money. You need the work ethic and perseverance to see a project through to the end. Real writers write, whether there’s money involved or not.
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Precisely. The NEH grants keep going either to the same people who make MLA book fairs inaccessible to their poorer colleagues or to people who do gimmicky things like digital databases of the book covers of books that mentioned some oppressed groups.
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Yeah, I can’t bring myself to get too upset about this.
Some of the most valuable work in the humanities is done by the vast army of high school teachers, TAs, and adjuncts who face classrooms full of bored kids in required classes and perform the hard work of converting that boredom into curiosity and interest in texts and works of art. Those folks don’t get NEH grants.
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Exactly. It doesn’t make national news when a public school ups the teaching load from 3:3 to 4:4 or when students who come from poverty see their MAP grants eliminated.
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NEH funds a lot more than those individual book grants that I don’t like either.
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Bad news for Humanties graduate students, though.
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And he will not scrap the NSF, because creationism is soooo scientific!
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Why would graduate students care?
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Do many professors receive those NEH grants? Maybe I’m wrong here…
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It’s either for people who are already rich and famous or for people who come up with good bullshit stories about the oppressed.
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So it’s different than in Québec.
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It’s completely different. In Quebec there’s real funding that benefits actual people.
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This is some of the stuff that the NEH funds. https://www.neh.gov/explore Maybe you find it worthless, but don’t say that the only thing they do is individual scholarships for professors
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Individual or collective, professors or anybody else – none of it is coming our way. The only impact it has on us is very negative.
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Disagree. It is not about me getting a grant. It is about the educational resources they create. I use several of their projects regularly when teaching Lstin American studies course. It doesn’t matter who got the grant
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I’m not advocating the destruction of the NEH but I won’t spend a second defending it. Let those who find it useful defend it.
We have such severe issues here in Illinois that useful projects for teaching are like a first world problem for us.
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