Academic Freedom Is Expensive, and They Know It

The government does not have to ban my research to threaten it. It only has to make the cost of doing it unbearable.

Last year, the Trump administration terminated more than 1,400 grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.¹

These were not hypothetical projects awaiting approval. They were active grants supporting museums, archives, historical organizations, documentary projects, preservation work, university research, educational programs, and public scholarship across the United States. Together, they represented more than $100 million in humanities funding.

The administration claimed the awards no longer aligned with its priorities. But in May, a federal judge found that the mass terminations were not simply an ordinary change in spending policy. They were unlawful and unconstitutional. The court described them as a “textbook example” of viewpoint discrimination and found that projects had been targeted because they involved subjects connected to race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, immigration status, and other identities disfavored by the administration. DOGE, the court ruled, had no legal authority to select or direct the termination of the grants in the first place.

In other words, humanities grants were not merely caught in a broad budget cut. They were ideologically screened.

Now the National Endowment for the Humanities is contacting recipients and asking whether they want their funding restored. That sounds, at first, like justice working its way through the system. The grants were illegally terminated, a court intervened, and the money is coming back.

Except restoration is not repair.

NEH is asking recipients whether they still intend to continue their projects, whether they still have the staff and institutional capacity to complete them, whether their budgets or timelines must be revised, and whether key personnel remain available. Recipients are warned not to resume work until reinstatement is formally approved. NEH will not provide additional money to cover costs created by the termination, and any new expenses incurred before final reinstatement are taken at the recipient’s own risk.

The government helped dismantle these projects. Now it is asking the people responsible for rebuilding them whether they still possess the capacity to do so.

Do you still have your staff? Do you still have your partners? Do you still have your venue, your archive, your contractors, your researchers, your public-programming calendar? Can you still complete the project after we canceled it, froze the money, scattered the people involved, and forced everyone to reorganize their professional lives?

A restored grant is not restored time. It is not restored staff, momentum, trust, or institutional credibility. It is not the public program that had to be canceled, the employee who found another job, the graduate researcher who could not afford to wait, or the community partner who stopped believing the project would happen.

Courts can restore legality. They cannot place a lost year back into someone’s life.

And while NEH recipients are attempting to reconstruct projects the administration illegally disrupted, the Office of Management and Budget is proposing a much broader transformation of federal grantmaking.

The OMB proposal would revise the government-wide rules governing federal financial assistance, including discretionary grants and cooperative agreements. Federal agencies would be required to conduct additional pre-issuance reviews to determine whether proposed awards align with applicable law, agency priorities, the “national interest,” and, where relevant, the President’s policy agenda. Senior political appointees would be designated to review awards before they are issued. Peer review could continue, but its recommendations would remain advisory rather than controlling.

That distinction matters.

Peer review is certainly not perfect. No system involving human beings, institutional prestige, or academic committees has ever emerged from the sea fully neutral and holding a perfectly calibrated rubric. But its purpose is to have specialists assess the quality, originality, feasibility, and scholarly contribution of proposed work.

Under the OMB proposal, that expertise could be subordinated to a different question: does this project serve the administration’s conception of the national interest?

The proposed rule also says discretionary awards must not fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate initiatives involving the denial of the human sex binary, “illegal immigration,” or “anti-American values.” It contains further restrictions affecting work on gender, DEI, disparate-impact analysis, abortion, and other subjects the administration has repeatedly treated as ideological contamination.

There is a very specific kind of political sorcery involved in calling that neutrality.

“National interest” sounds objective until someone gets to define the nation. “Anti-American values” sounds obvious until you notice which histories and communities are repeatedly placed outside America: Black history, queer history, Indigenous history, immigration history, gender studies, reproductive justice, critical public health research, and any account of the United States that does not treat the country as a porcelain eagle requiring constant dusting.

This is not an attempt to remove politics from scholarship. It is an attempt to make scholarship answerable to political power.

The OMB proposal had drawn around 90,000 public comments by July 7, with universities, scientific organizations, researchers, and advocacy groups warning that it would politicize federal funding and weaken the role of expert review. The concern is not restricted to humanities professors becoming agitated beside the faculty-room coffee urn. Political control over grants threatens scientific research, public health, medicine, education, historical work, museums, libraries, and community programs.

It also threatens work after funding has already been awarded.

The proposal would allow agencies to terminate discretionary awards if they no longer serve program goals, agency priorities, or the “national interest” as those priorities exist at the time of termination.

That last part is the trapdoor.

A project might satisfy the published criteria when it begins, pass expert review, receive an award, hire staff, build partnerships, and start its work. Then the political definition of the national interest changes. Suddenly, the grant is no longer safe because the administration’s priorities have shifted or because someone decides the project has become inconvenient.

The NEH terminations show what that instability looks like in practice. The OMB proposal risks making the logic behind those terminations part of the ordinary machinery of federal funding.

That is the background against which I have been thinking about my own research and my own dependence on federal student aid.

FAFSA is not an NEH grant. Federal student aid is not the same mechanism as a discretionary humanities award. The OMB proposal does not automatically remove my access to FAFSA, nor does a fight over NEH grants directly determine whether my PhD receives student funding.

I know this. I am not confused about the paperwork. No one needs to sprint into my mentions carrying a laminated flowchart and the thrilling little face of someone who thinks bureaucracy counts as a personality.

My fear is not that this specific OMB proposal will cause my FAFSA application to spontaneously combust tomorrow morning.

My fear is that the public infrastructure making research possible is being narrowed, politicized, and made more fragile from several directions at once.

I am an American woman pursuing a PhD examining reproductive health, media, gender, and American political culture. My research asks how American media have shaped public understanding of women’s reproductive health from the FDA approval of the contraceptive pill, through Roe v. Wade, to Dobbs.

I study how media teach audiences what to fear, normalize, blame, dismiss, trust, or punish when it comes to women’s bodies. I study how contraception and abortion become stories about morality, citizenship, family, femininity, danger, shame, and control.

This is not exactly the sort of research the present administration is likely to clutch to its chest like a beloved heirloom. It is more the sort of work it would spot across the room, hiss at like a wet cat, and immediately convene a subcommittee.

The government does not have to formally ban my research to threaten it. It does not need to send me a letter reading, “Dear historian of gender, please stop noticing things.”

It can make grants politically conditional. It can make graduate education harder to finance. It can make universities more nervous about supporting supposedly controversial subjects.² It can force scholars and institutions to calculate whether certain questions are worth the financial risk.

That is not academic neutrality.

That is censorship by invoice.

Academic freedom is usually discussed as a matter of speech: whether academics are technically permitted to research, teach, publish, or say something. But permission is not the same as capacity.

Research costs money.

It requires tuition, rent, food, travel, archives, subscriptions, library access, software, transcription, conferences, visas, childcare, healthcare, and time away from other paid employment. It requires institutions willing to host projects, staff willing to take jobs on them, and researchers able to survive long enough to complete the work.

Academic freedom is expensive.

That is the part people often skip. Scholars are treated as brains hovering inside tasteful cardigans rather than human beings with bills, bodies, and landlords. You can be technically free to study reproductive politics while being priced out of conducting the research. You can be permitted to ask a question while lacking the funding, institutional security, or student aid required to answer it.

That is where my fear about FAFSA enters the story.

Federal graduate aid is already becoming more restricted. Beginning in July 2026, Grad PLUS loans are being eliminated for new borrowers. New graduate borrowers will face annual limits of $20,500 and an aggregate graduate borrowing limit of $100,000, with different caps applying to designated professional programs.

Again, this is not the same policy as the OMB grant proposal. It is not evidence that the government will inspect the title of my dissertation before processing a student loan.

It is evidence that one of the public pathways into graduate education is narrowing.

The Urban Institute has warned that the new limits are likely to push more graduate students toward private borrowing. Its analysis found that students who had previously received Pell Grants, a rough indicator of lower-income backgrounds, were more likely than other students in master’s and academic doctoral programs to have borrowed above the new annual limits.

Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that around one-third of graduate students with federal loans had borrowed above the incoming limits. Among those borrowers, nearly 40 percent might be unable to obtain sufficient private loans without a cosigner under existing lending standards.

So when someone says, “You can still do the research,” I want to know who the “you” is in that sentence.

Who can still do the research when federal aid narrows? Who can continue when grants become politically unstable? Who can wait through an unlawful termination and an uncertain reinstatement process? Who can absorb the cost when project funding disappears for a year? Who can choose a politically contentious subject without worrying that their institution will eventually decide the work attracts too much scrutiny?

The answer is often someone with money.

This is why the campaign against “woke academia” is about class as much as it is about race or gender politics. It does not merely decide which ideas are legitimate. It helps decide which people can afford to become scholars.

If graduate education becomes more dependent on personal wealth, family support, private credit, or access to a wealthy cosigner, the academy does not become less ideological. It becomes more exclusive. It becomes safer for people who can afford disruption and more dangerous for everyone whose ability to continue depends on public funding.

A wealthy student can endure a funding delay. A working-class student may have to leave.

A secure professor can survive the cancellation of one project. A precariously employed researcher may lose their job.

A large institution may be able to challenge an unlawful termination. A small museum, archive, historical society, or community organization may simply collapse.

Political interference in funding does not affect everyone equally. It turns existing inequality into a filtering mechanism.

And this is how an approved version of America gets built.

You do not have to burn the archive. You make sure certain people cannot afford to view it.

You do not have to ban gender history. You make researching it financially radioactive.

You do not have to outlaw reproductive health scholarship. You make institutions wonder whether supporting it will endanger other funding.

You do not have to announce that only patriotic scholarship may survive. You create a grant system in which political appointees determine what serves the national interest, experts become merely advisory, and “anti-American values” remain conveniently undefined.

Then you allow the cost and uncertainty to do the silencing for you.

Public TV in a Private-Everything America

Scholars begin avoiding certain subjects. Institutions choose less controversial projects. Museums soften exhibits. Researchers remove words that might trigger scrutiny. Graduate students reconsider work on abortion, sexuality, race, migration, or gender because they cannot afford to gamble their future on the continued tolerance of political appointees.

No formal ban is necessary. People learn to pre-censor themselves.

This is why restoration cannot repair what happened to the NEH grants. Even if every illegally terminated award were returned tomorrow, the lesson would remain.

The government has demonstrated that funding can disappear because a project becomes ideologically inconvenient. It has shown scholars, museums, historical organizations, and universities that legally awarded support may not remain secure. It has taught institutions to consider not only whether research is rigorous, but whether it is politically survivable.

That fear does not vanish when the money returns.

I know this move. Women know this move. Historians know this move. Anyone who studies power knows this move.

First, create the conditions for fear. Then mock the fear as proof that the people responding were irrational all along.

But fear is not always paranoia. Sometimes fear is what happens when you can read the policy document and the room at the same time.

I am not afraid because I have confused FAFSA with an NEH grant. I am afraid precisely because they are different parts of the same public infrastructure.

One determines whether many students can afford advanced education. Another supports research, museums, archives, teaching, preservation, and public history. Federal grant rules help determine which projects and institutions can survive. None of these mechanisms is identical. Together, however, they shape who gets to produce knowledge and which kinds of knowledge reach the public.

And they are all being pushed through an increasingly narrow gate.

The fight over academic freedom is not only a fight over what can be said. It is a fight over who can afford to say it, who gets paid to investigate it, who receives institutional protection while producing it, and who is pushed out before the question can be asked.

The approved version of America does not require every inconvenient scholar to be sent to the gulag. It only requires enough of us to become too broke, too cautious, too exhausted, or too institutionally inconvenient to continue.

The question is not only what knowledge gets funded.

The question is who gets priced out of producing knowledge at all.

And that, of course, is the point. They do not need everyone to agree. They need enough people to stop trying.

They are not only trying to censor us into compliance.

They are trying to starve us into it.

1. The link here is to a YouTube video I researched and wrote for the Cold War channel about the Great Society which goes into the history of the NEH and NEA.

2. I am more insulated from that as I’m doing my PhD at a university outside the United States, but I still highly rely on American graduate funding from the US Government.