On the NEH and Our Path Forward
Crossposted from the Knowledge Commons team blog.
Over the last several weeks, we've seen colleagues of ours across the country posting about the direct impacts they're experiencing of the current attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities, including sudden and extensive terminations of previously awarded grants. We hurt for everyone who's trying to figure out how to carry on, not least because we're in that same space with you right now.
On April 2, 2025, we received notification that our NEH Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grant, awarded in 2020, was terminated effective immediately. We had just celebrated in a January post the completion of our fundraising match; the NEH grant offered us $500,000 to be released as we certified a 3:1 fundraising match. That combined $2 million in funding was to provide us with the runway necessary to bring the Commons to sustainability.
Insofar as there is good news here, it's that we'd been certifying gifts annually, and so most of the NEH funds had already been "obligated" (for whatever meaning that term now holds), and we'd been spending the receipts as needed over the last several years, with an expectation that the combined fund would be fully spent down in early 2027. In real numbers, the termination of the grant resulted in something less than $100,000 in losses for our budget – a significant amount for a small team operating on a shoestring, but not an insurmountable figure.
However, on April 10, 2025, we received further -- if not yet formal -- notification that our contract to provide the NEH's Designated Public-Access Repository was also being terminated, effective on that date. This loss is devastating for us, both for the financial impact it represents (another $200,000 loss over the same two years) but also for the unceremonious end to a goal we'd set for ourselves years ago. There’s also a real, human impact involved: we’d just completed an extensive search to hire a developer to work with us on that project, and were deep in the process of putting together an offer letter to an amazing candidate when the funds disappeared.
Not to mention the bigger picture here: that designated public-access repository is no longer needed, because it is assumed that the NEH will no longer be funding research, and thus there will be no results of research to make publicly accessible.
And worse: a huge percentage of our friends and colleagues at the NEH, whose work on our behalf has helped shape knowledge production across our fields, have lost their jobs, and are seeing the decimation of everything that they built and maintained with such care and professionalism.
Back here on the Commons team, we're mourning our losses, but also trying to carve out a path forward, one that will allow us to keep doing the key work of supporting open-access scholarly collaboration, communication, and preservation. We'll be sharing pieces of this plan with you over the coming weeks, which will include seeking institutions who want to join us (hint: KC Works is ready to host repositories for colleges, universities, and other organizations), and as you might expect, we'll be asking for community support as well. We’re more determined than ever to ensure that we can continue to provide a community-governed, non-profit alternative to the corporate platforms that threaten to capture, or even silence, so much of the work that we care about.
Please be in touch as you carve your own paths forward, and let us know how we might help.
- ← Previous
Writing Again - Next →
Gitea
Webmentions
No replies yet.
10 Likes
4 Reposts
