Art, culture, literature, thought — collectively, these disciplines and others make up what’s known as the humanities. Recently, the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, cut 80% of the National Endowment for the Humanities’s staff, also cutting almost all grant programs and rescinding grants and program contracts that have already been awarded. Why are the humanities important, and how does public funding help society — and you? Here to explain that, we have two guests — Michael Haley Goldman, executive director of New Hampshire Humanities, and Joe Marshall, president of the Jefferson Historical Society.
By Rosemary Ford and Caitlin Agnew
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
Melanie Plenda:
Michael, can you give us some background on the cuts? What happened and when? How did you find out?
Michael Haley Goldman:
This has all taken place in just the last few weeks, really. April was when we got notice of the changes in policy.
It's probably important to take a step back and think about how this federal funding has been coming. New Hampshire Humanities is an independent nonprofit, so we're a little bit different from some of the other groups that have been seeing changes to the federal funding coming in the state, like the State Library or the State Council for the
We aren't part of the state government, but we do have an affiliation with the National Endowment for the Humanities, meaning that, even though we're a nonprofit, we receive federal funding that is matched by private funding here in the state of New Hampshire. That federal funding is something that we usually get in about a five-year contract, and we received notice late on April 2nd that an email came out from the National Endowment for the Humanities indicating that our existing grants in contract had been fully canceled.
So that means all funding before April 1st was stopped, which is about $500,000 of funding for New Hampshire Humanities to support the cultural sector of New Hampshire that was pretty much unavailable in the middle of our year.
Melanie Plenda:
What impact has this had so far on New Hampshire Humanities and New Hampshire?
Michael Haley Goldman:
I’ve been proud to say that we've been able to head off a lot of the worst possible impacts. But that doesn't mean there's not been a lot of damage here in New Hampshire from this change. We've been as careful and clever as we can be in using the funding that we have available. All of the grants that we give out — we usually give out more than $100,000 in direct grants each year — that we had already scheduled are going out, but there's about $40,000 that we were planning to, with the second half of the year, that's just not going out to New Hampshire.
We had to reduce it by a little less than 100 programs this year. That's usually hundreds of programs that we do around the state that we basically fund in what you could call mini-grants.
Melanie Plenda:
Joe, please tell us about the Jefferson Historical Society and its work with New Hampshire Humanities.
Joe Marshall:
The Jefferson Historical Society is also an independent nonprofit, and we are staffed entirely by volunteers. Our mission is to preserve and promote the town of Jefferson's history.
In regards to Michael and his staff and our deepening relationship with them over the past couple years, we applied for us to be able to present an exhibition, “Crossroad Changes in Rural America.” We worked with Michael and his team through that application process.
Through the process as we were ultimately chosen to be one of the venues to host the exhibit,our relationship with the humanities has deepened, and it is become extremely obvious to us as to how important it is for organizations like ourselves, to be able to bring what is really quite a large event to our community, and it's all been through the help of the New Hampshire Humanities.
There's been a tremendous, tremendous amount of training in personal work and site visits and just overall support and encouragement through the humanities to essentially help all of us bring our communities together up here.
Melanie Plenda:
And Joe, that exhibit is going on now. What impact has the society or Jefferson seen from it?
Joe Marshall:
In regards to Jefferson, we have been through quite a little bit, as with everybody else, during the tail end of COVID. We lost our town hall to a fire in February of 2021, and with that, we had to find a new home for the town to do its work. We are now situated in what's known as the Jefferson Community Center, and it's a very large building, a former elementary school, and is being repurposed to house the community.
That is when we applied for the exhibit. It was kind of a crossroads moment for us as a community, with this type of venue becoming available to us. As far as I'm concerned, and I know there are many others that feel the same way, it has enhanced our ability to function as a community and brought people together in a way that we have not been able to do previously. So we're pretty excited about that and what it opens up to us for the future.
Melanie Plenda:
Let’s talk more about the benefits of the humanities. What are the tangible, or perhaps in tangible, benefits for having the humanities and these public programs?
Michael Haley Goldman:
People get hung up on this idea of “what is the humanities?” and you can go through this laundry list of academic subjects, but what I think is really important, what's often maybe intangible, is what the humanities does, and at the heart of that is how it brings people together in community. Just like what's happening in Jefferson, just like what's going to be happening around the project at the Museum of the White Mountains at Plymouth State University.
It's really about the way that we come together to talk about who we are as individuals, talk about who we are as communities, and talk about where we're going. The humanities is the fabric within which all of that happens. When we go into communities, we are trying to help those communities do what they want to do as a group. We are about how they come together to talk about the problems they have, about what's important to them, about how they see their challenges and their solutions — all of those things come naturally out in the kind of humanities program that we do. We've been learning over the last 50 years as an organization, how to create the environment for that to happen.
Joe Marshall:
We've had this fantastic run of togetherness within our community. This has been something that has built a great deal of anticipation over the past two years, brought the community together, and that has been a wonderful thing to see. I believe it's helped us as an organization, and it will help us in the future. We cannot thank the humanities enough for what they've done to help us move forward.
Michael and his group have promoted and made available to us some of those “New Hampshire Humanities To Go” programs. We've had four of them here, and it has brought in incredible audiences and tremendous speakers, and it is really bringing that community aspect, and I can’t say this enough. I can just see this after all this happening just moving forward exponentially.
Melanie Plenda:
Michael, you mentioned investing in the humanities. Can you talk about the economic impact of that?
Michael Haley Goldman:
There's a lot of different numbers, and I will talk about the economic impact, because that knowledge is really important and a really big part of why it's necessary to have cultural investment within the state. But I also want to remember that economic value is only one value, as we are investing in New Hampshire.
But economically, we know that we have a pretty much a 2-1 investment. So for every dollar of investment from the federal government, there's $2 invested privately to respond to that. And if you look at the creative economy, which we’re a part of and is an affiliated, but not identical, part of what we do, that's more of an average of 5-1.
Even for what we're talking about with Jefferson — this is a small Smithsonian exhibit that my organization and organizations like mine bring to the entire country, and they talk about even larger investments around the idea that this little exhibit is really having something like a 7-1 impact in terms of what it brings to a community, because people come to see an exhibit, and then they spend their time in town spending money that they wouldn't otherwise spend.
So this is really not something that we should see as a free meal that is being given to New Hampshire. It is an investment that brings back far more local investment than what it actually costs us to do in the state.
Melanie Plenda:
Michael, what happens next for New Hampshire Humanities? How will it deal with these cuts going forward?
Michael Haley Goldman:
I think the most important thing for me to say is that we are not going away. We have been in the state for 50 years, and we intend to be here for the next 50 years. But I also can't say that that is going to be as easy as it would have been under other conditions, and that we really need the community to show its support for New Hampshire Humanities and show its support for the cultural sector at large.
This is a really difficult time for all of the cultural organizations within the state as we look at the possibility that the State Council for the Arts might be dropped from the state budget. I realize that is not final yet, but the fact that we're even talking about that as a real concern. The fact that the Institute for Museum and Library Services, which is one of the least-known federal groups but is a huge underpinning of libraries across New Hampshire through the State Library, is talking about having that funding lost to the state. This is an incredibly important time for groups like mine to be present and to be supporting amazing groups like Joe's and other groups in every city and community. All these places in New Hampshire that need their support to keep these cultural touchstones, these incredible organizations that underpin our communities alive and well and active within New Hampshire, and we intend to do that. But we are going to need culture, we are going to need the support, and we aren't going to do the work at the level that we've been doing if we have half the budget that we had last year. We won’t be in 172 communities next year. We will still be there, but it will be on a much lower level. It’s going to be felt town by town in New Hampshire.
Melanie Plenda:
Well, good luck to you both. Michael Haley Goldman, executive director of New Hampshire Humanities, and Joe Marshall, president of the Jefferson Historical Society. Thank you for joining us.
“The State We’re In” is a weekly digital public affairs show produced by NH PBS and The Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at Franklin Pierce University. It is shared with partners in the Granite State News Collaborative, of which both organizations are members. For more information, visitcollaborativenh.org.