This week’s edition of Slow Digest was written by C21 Graduate Fellow Jamee N. Pritchard. It is the second essay in a three-part series discussing the essential nature of the humanities.
Don’t miss Part 1 of this series, “Reshaping the Humanities Through Executive Orders,” published May 19, 2025.
Part 2: The Impact of Federal Cuts on the Humanities
Federal cuts to museums, libraries, and cultural centers impact how we preserve history and support our communities’ educational and cultural needs. Gibran Villalobos, a former senior program officer in the Office of Museum Services for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), focused on helping to build the federal guidelines for museum grants for American Latino history and culture. He also spearheaded a grant program called the American Latino Internship and Fellowship Initiative (ALMIFI) that was designed to provide college students studying American Latino life, art, history, and culture with opportunities for internships and fellowships at American Latino museums. With DOGE’s federal cuts to IMLS that laid off staff, grant funding has been terminated and will not make it to the selected organizations this year.
“Without a staff, you have no grants, and without grants, there’s no funding that is going out to the museums,” said Villalobos. He explains that most of IMLS grants have a specific purpose. While he managed the Latino portfolio, other staff managed the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and African American history and culture programs. Other focuses included programs for museum professional development and museum leadership through Inspire! Grants for Small Museums, a program totally dedicated to small museums that are mostly rural, small town, community museums. With a chunk of their budget going to operating costs because of the loss of grants, many of these museums won’t be able to focus on building collections, or in other words, preserving history.
“Everybody’s going to get affected,” said Villalobos. “Small community organizations, organizations that support individuals of color, or as my colleague likes to say, people of the global majority…That funding has now disappeared, so I don’t know what other way of raising the red flag [than] to say this is going to be highly devastating, not just to those culturally specific organizations, but to all museums, the total museum industry.”
Why should you care about this devastating blow to the museum industry?
Museums not only preserve culture but also inspire creativity and foster learning, especially for underserved communities. In rural areas in America, where many of these small museums are located, there might not be other accessible public institutions, other than public libraries, dedicated to educating the public through exhibits, community lectures, and K-12 programming that supplement public school curricula.
Historical preservation is also crucial, and many IMLS grants funded preservation efforts for museum objects and the buildings that house them. Think HVAC systems in museums located in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Florida, and other humid climates that are a threat to archival material. You can’t just pack 500-year-old textiles in a cardboard box and stuff them in a storage unit if funding for your institution’s climate-controlled facility gets cut. Losing historic objects, documents, film, ephemera, and other archival material means losing information about the individuals and cultures that produced them.
The same urgency applies to public libraries. Beyond supporting lifelong learning, literacy, and intellectual freedom, libraries provide critical infrastructure for daily survival, offering reliable internet access, job search assistance, and safe spaces for individuals experiencing poverty, homelessness, or social isolation. Defunding them through IMLS cuts is not just a blow to education, but a direct attack on the public’s right to access knowledge, community, and care.
This threat to public libraries directly endangers innovative, community-centered projects like Manga in Libraries, which investigates the reading habits of BIPOC teens and addresses the knowledge gap of librarians who are undertrained and unfamiliar with manga, the fastest-growing print media format in the United States. This work parallels my research into how and why Black teenage girls engage with science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Both projects explore cultural representation, the social and emotional significance of reading, and the role of librarians, publishers, and educators in supporting BIPOC youth, a historically underserved demographic. At a time when literacy rates in the U.S. are declining, this research is vital to understanding how to better serve the intellectual and emotional needs of our young readers.
Closer to home, UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies is also impacted by the loss of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). A grant awarded by Wisconsin Humanities to support Story Cart, our mobile oral history collection initiative, was pulled after the NEH froze its funding pipeline. Public-facing initiatives like C21’s Story Cart, community roundtables, and public workshops exemplify the kind of publicly engaged humanities work that connects academic research to the lived experiences of everyday people. C21’s Managing Director, Katie Waddell explains, “While C21 stakeholders and university leaders have lauded our public-facing endeavors, our operating budget has never been adjusted to accommodate this programmatic expansion, which the Center initiated only within the past five years. We rely almost entirely on extramural funding to bring Story Cart to Milwaukee. The loss of the Wisconsin Humanities grant jeopardizes the entire trajectory of this project, because the loss of one grant can mean the loss of many.”
Waddell refers to “matching funds” in the grant application process. The applicant must provide or secure cash or goods and services rendered in-kind in a dollar amount equal to the total grant funding requested. “In C21’s case, losing the Wisconsin Humanities grant meant that we were suddenly ineligible to apply for other grants for the same project because the Wisconsin Humanities grant was the source of the cash for the cash match. Getting one grant for a project also validates it for other potential funders, making them more likely to add to the pot,” said Waddell. This process illustrates how one funding loss can create a cascading effect, derailing a single project and limiting access to future opportunities that will benefit both the university and the broader public.
The consequences of defunding IMLS and NEH-sponsored grants deliberately dismantle the public humanities. Institutions such as libraries, museums, archives, cultural centers, and interdisciplinary university centers, like C21, preserve histories, cultural memory, and knowledge systems. They enact an ethic of care in their public engagement and services. These federal cuts are more than a budgetary adjustment in the name of government efficiency; they signal that culture, history, and education are expendable unless agencies, universities, and colleges conform to a narrow ideological vision. It is a power play over who gets to tell our nation’s stories, who gets to learn from them, and whose knowledge and experiences are deemed worthy of research, documentation, interpretation, and preservation.
All Slow Digest posts are independently researched and written by individual contributors. All opinions expressed therein are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of UW-Milwaukee or the UW system.
Look for part III of this essay in the Slow Digest feed on Friday, May 23. Part I can be found here.