Political interference in education and specifically in the Humanities is nothing new (Reitter & Wellmon, 2023), associated not least with certain disciplines' supposed nation-building affinities. Nonetheless, when The New York Times reported on 5 August 2025 that 'The National Endowment for the Humanities abruptly cancelled virtually all of its existing grants in April, citing a desire to pivot to “the president’s agenda”', researchers and others around the world were shocked. This marked yet another instance of the second Trump administration's politicised interference in – in this instance both public and private – education institutions.
Governmental attacks on academic freedom in the US
The cancellation of the grants was designed to circumscribe and control those institutions' activities so that they would follow a particular narrow party-political agenda inconsistent with the notion of higher education as a democratic agora encouraging a critical engagement with a diversity of views and practices.
While I was in Chile in January 2025 visiting a workshop of The Biosociocultural Interdisciplinary Research Network on 'Rethinking Theories and Research Practices on Biodiversity and Gender', I had already seen the fear and distress of colleagues from the USA who were working on all manner of gender issues. They were at the centre of the attack of the second Trump administration to eliminate anything to do with DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) – a mantra that had been the backbone of many Humanities and Social Science university programmes and an important aspect of Human Resource management in the public and private sectors. According to CNN, 'President Donald Trump hours after swearing in … began making good on promises to wage a war against such policies, inking an executive order banning efforts such as “environmental justice programs,” “equity initiatives” and DEI considerations in federal hiring.'
And although some US higher education institutions stood up to these pressures, many did not. Under threat of fiscal sanctions and legal cases they could ill afford, universities changed or closed programmes and accepted problematic institutional oversight to stave off these attacks.
In the meantime in Europe…
From the viewpoint of most of higher education in Europe, all this seemed rather alarming as it raised questions not only about the implications of these moves for research collaboration with US Humanities and Social Science programmes (as well as those in other disciplinary areas) but about the broader issue, much debated within Humanities and Social Sciences, of the relationship between state, society, and higher education. Diversity, equity and inclusion are notions strongly aligned with democracy, with a plurality of voices, with freedom of speech, and with respect for the other. Already some years before the first Trump administration (2016–2021), in 2010, Martha C. Nussbaum in Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities had impassionedly argued the case of an education for profit-making versus the case for an education for a more inclusive type of citizenship (p. 7).
Both models of higher education began to vie with each other in Europe when some countries such as the UK and the Netherlands came firmly under the sway of the so-called New Public Management and the rise of audit culture, articulated inter alia through student fees. The establishment of student fees went hand in hand with the notion of the student as customer and questions about the labour market relevance of certain disciplines. This happened concomitantly with the rise of identity-category-based disciplines such as gender studies, Black Studies, Ethnic Minority Studies, etc. These disciplines shared the making explicit of the perspectives from which they approached their subject matter – a move supported by theoretical framings such as 'history from below', making the marginal central, and encouraging a plurality of voices to participate in knowledge production and debate. This latter development encouraged the democratisation of education and notions of a more inclusive type of citizenship.
Education-for-profit vs education-for-inclusive-citizenship
The education-for-profit and education-for-inclusive-citizenship models are driven by different logics. The former is anti-democratic as it favours well-to-do families who can afford student fees; the latter is more democratic in its intent. This intent, however, has been under threat for some time, including in Europe.
In an interesting lecture on 'Humanities: The past, present – and future?' at Lancaster University in early 2025, Stefan Collini, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, argued that higher education Humanities research had been too quick to fall in line with the agendas of governments and research councils. These agendas ask that research, including in the Humanities, meet the grand challenges facing society at large, and can lead to the making of unsustainable claims, e.g. that editing a 17th century text might contribute to stemming climate change, and the like.
Those of us who have done assessments in national and international research funding institutions may be all too aware of how academics have been increasingly encouraged to make grandiose and indeed unsustainable claims about the impact of their work by the ways in which research programmes are framed towards societal impact, outreach to as many communities as possible, etc. These are, of course, in themselves, laudable aims but they may not be the only ones or the most appropriate ones for all disciplinary domains and research activities. What is clearly required is a re-thinking of the role of Humanities – and this should not be driven by party politics or electoral cycles.
Humanities for the well-being and well-functioning of society
Instead, we need to ask what the Humanities contribute to the well-being and well-functioning of society. And despite Bertolt Brecht's dictum, 'Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.' (First food, then morality), if we accept that a well and well-functioning society should be driven by respect for one another, empathy, creativity, the equitable distribution of resources, that it should enable debate and critical analysis, allow for a plurality of voices to be heard, and for disputes to occur without violence, then we might want to discuss which disciplines contribute to such ends and how. Here the Humanities clearly have a central role to play, and this role must be recognised by governments and research funding bodies in enabling the Humanities to thrive.
What the future should hold
A thriving Humanities is characterised by the recognition of its importance as indicated by the support, including fiscal and research, its disciplines receive to develop and by the qualities of the students, staff, and researchers these disciplines generate and attract. We know that the Humanities' disciplines and research are alive and changing – this has always been the case, as Collini's lecture for instance shows. The new hybrid disciplines – medical humanities, digital humanities etc. – are evidence of this. These emerging fields constitute opportunities for cross-fertilisation and interdisciplinary working – both of which are highly desirable and contribute to the well-being and well-functioning of society. They encourage debate, critical thinking, and new forms of analyses leading to new knowledge.
What we do not want is the dominance of narrow political interests in either education or research, in the Humanities or elsewhere, since this stifles creativity, the imagination, analytical agility, empathy, and ultimately the well-being and well-functioning of society. This is evident in the problematics of fascist and otherwise oppressive regimes which seek to deny pluralities of voices by violently suppressing these, persecuting academics that do not tow their lines, and creating divisions within their populations as well as destroying in/tangible cultural assets.
As the current US government encourages populist and fascist parties and governments around the world, attacks on the Humanities are bound to increase in an effort to curtail its democratising impulses. This indeed is one of the key threats facing the Humanities now, and it requires a coming together of Humanities and other disciplines to resist such domination.
References
Reitter, P., & Wellmon, C. (2023). Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nussbaum, Martha, C. (2010) Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
About the author
Gabriele Griffin is Professor Emerita of Gender Research at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she was Director of Graduate Studies at the Centre for Gender Research until 2024. She was also coordinator of the VR-funded PhD School 'Gender, Humanities, and Digital Cultures' (2023-2028). She is Extraordinary Professor at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies, University of the Free State, South Africa.