How Two Duke Alumni Helped Conservatives Take Over the NEH

Keegan Callanan has a penchant for the theatrical.

Since Donald Trump appointed him to the National Endowment for the Humanities’ advisory council in 2019, Callanan has been one of its most outspoken conservative members. And “Hip Hop as Humanities: Counterstories for the Canon, Classroom, and Country” was exactly the kind of project he would find objectionable. 

The 2024 proposal asked for nearly $200,000 to run a three-week institute for high school teachers to explore the history of hip hop and its potential role in teaching language arts. But Callanan didn’t think the NEH—which distributes grants for research and education in literature, the arts, and other humanities—should encourage rap appreciation in K-12 classrooms, and especially not the explicit, rebellious content in N.W.A.’s classic “Fuck Tha Police,” which the proposal cited.

So Callanan, who is white, read the song’s lyrics, uncensored, during a July 2024 meeting of the subcommittee weighing the request. That included repeated instances of the N-word. In an argument against the educational value of Black popular culture, his recitation set other attendees on edge. Some staff filed a union complaint, and the then-chair also told council members to maintain civility during discussions, according to people familiar with the situation.

Callanan didn’t attend the meeting in which the full council considered the proposal, according to several people who did. The project was funded, and the workshops took place last year. 

A little over a year later, after the Department of Government Efficiency eliminated more than half of the NEH staff and tried to terminate 97% of its grants, Trump fired all but four members of the 26-person advisory board, called the National Council on the Humanities. Three of the remaining members, including Callanan, are conservative academics with ties to North Carolina; two of them spent their formative years at Duke University.

Callanan holds a doctorate in political science from Duke. More recently, he has advised UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, also known as SCiLL, and is close friends with its dean. William English, who was named the NEH’s acting chairman in April, attended Duke for both his bachelor’s degree and his Ph.D., which he completed in political science a year ahead of Callanan. Matthew Rose’s brother is a SCiLL professor who previously worked at Duke.

Nine former NEH staff and council members, most of whom Trump fired, said that the trio has formed a close-knit conservative cohort. The sources said the three back up each others’ arguments, while opposing any projects with a whiff of diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

Since conservatives gained effective control of the agency under Trump, the NEH has doled out two grants to organizations the council members have ties with—both among the largest in its history. Both UNC-CH’s SCiLL and the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education, a grantmaking organization with deep ties to conservative academic movements, received $10 million in January.

Callanan, English, and Rose did not respond to interview requests or a detailed list of questions for this story. An NEH spokesperson didn’t answer detailed questions but said that the council followed recusal policies around conflicts of interest. They also provided this statement:

“In further response to the story you are working on, we would like you to know that NEH applicants should fully expect that their applications and proposed curricular materials may be read aloud in deliberations of the National Council as Members discharge their statutory duties to evaluate and advise on grant applications.”

The Backchannel

The NEH is the only federal agency dedicated to funding humanities projects, supporting universities, museums, K-12 schools, and other organizations. Though the NEH chair has ultimate authority on the agency’s grants, it’s rare in practice for the chair to overrule council members, making them important decisionmakers over U.S. cultural priorities.

A White House spokesperson told The Washington Post that Trump fired the council members because he is “hoping to place members on the board who align more closely with his vision.” At the time of the purge, the council included nine members appointed by President Joe Biden and five by President Barack Obama. All were let go. Trump also fired three women he appointed during his first term.

Trump appointed Callanan, English, and Rose in 2019, along with Russell Berman, the last member left on the council. Trump has not nominated any additional members.

While Berman is also conservative, he has a more typical profile for a National Council on the Humanities member—a distinguished academic (he teaches German studies and comparative literature at Stanford University) with a long line of service to the profession. The other three are more junior. Rose is a senior fellow at the Morningside Institute, a cultural organization that offers humanities programming like lectures and discussion series, while English is an assistant professor at Georgetown. Callanan is an associate professor at Middlebury College, but the political science department lists him as “affiliated faculty.” Erik Bleich, the department chair, told The Assembly Callanan teaches a single four-week class each year.

Callanan and English have political connections, though, in some cases tracing back to their time at Duke. English and Trump right-hand-man Stephen Miller both led the Duke Conservative Union, and English told Duke’s student newspaper that during his Ph.D. years, he periodically advised Miller, who was then an undergraduate. Callanan and English also overlapped in the political theory program with Darren Beattie, who served as one of Trump’s speechwriters during his first term. (He was fired in 2018 after CNN revealed he had spoken at a white nationalist conference, but was appointed to a senior State Department position in Trump’s second term.)

Callanan, as The Assembly reported in October, is the higher education director for the Paul E. Singer Foundation, earning more than $400,000 for his work for the conservative billionaire last year, tax records show. But he has long wanted a political role. A 1995 Chicago Tribune article about then-14-year-old Callanan and his twin brother, Brian, noted that they were avowed conservatives, despite their liberal parents. Brian Callanan, who served as general counsel for the U.S. Treasury Department during Trump’s first term, told the paper he hoped to end up in the U.S. Senate, while the more “reserved and judgmental” Keegan aimed for the House of Representatives: “In a leadership position—like speaker.”

Both he and English have appeared in court in support of conservative causes. In 2024, the New York Times reported that English was frequently hired as an expert witness and cited in court briefings about gun ownership, including the Supreme Court ruling outlawing many restrictions. 

As The Assembly reported, Callanan served as an expert witness defending North Carolina General Assembly Republicans in three voting rights cases, including Holmes v. Moore, the state Supreme Court decision that allowed the government to require IDs to vote.

After Biden took office and began implementing his administration’s priorities, NEH staff and other council members say the duo plus Rose began bringing extra scrutiny to projects they had political objections to.

“We would debate who was going to be more difficult,” Hannah Alpert-Abrams, a former senior program officer at the NEH, said of Callanan and Rose.

Alpert-Abrams, who left in March 2025, before the mass firing, didn’t remember English, but other former staff, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect allies still at the NEH and to avoid issues with ongoing litigation over their firing, echoed similar feelings about him. 

Staff would work for months with academics to hone grant proposals, then bring them before the council for review at one of their three annual meetings. Callanan, English, and Rose were most likely to flag proposals, former employees said.

“A lot of board members didn’t flag anything—they trusted staff recommendations,” Alpert-Abrams said. “Or if they did, it was to have a discussion: to talk about the merits, to talk about the implications for the field, to talk about what it might mean for the agency. But it was pretty rare that other board members would really raise any concerns that would lead to voting against staff recommendations.”

The three would often echo each other’s arguments in separate meetings, giving other staff and council members the impression that they were coordinating behind the scenes. Some also noticed that Callanan was particularly friendly with Michael McDonald, Trump’s nominee for chair. McDonald served as acting chair for about a year, but he stepped down because of restrictions on how long officials can hold “acting” titles. English took his place while McDonald awaits confirmation.

In a January deposition in a lawsuit about the terminated grants, McDonald called Callanan a friend and said that Callanan was “involved in the transition team” after Trump’s victory in November 2024. The two quickly began discussing who would replace then-chair Shelly Lowe. When McDonald decided he wanted the job, he made his case to Callanan.

Money Trails

Callanan’s brief performance of N.W.A. was not the only time he vociferously—and controversially—opposed a potential project.

While discussing a proposal for an archiving project a few years ago, Alpert-Abrams said, Callanan found sexually explicit artwork that was tangentially involved (the grant was only for the digital infrastructure) and read it aloud during a meeting. The project wasn’t funded. 

Callanan also argued against a 2021 grant to study 20th century gay travel guides because it included a K-12 education component, though it received council support over his objections. 

At other times, Callanan and his allies were notably hands off. While the council considered emergency funding during the COVID-19 pandemic, Alpert-Abrams said, Callanan and Rose voted to fund “two projects that were so controversial that the council down-voted our entire slate.” 

One involved a museum whose leader had just been charged with embezzlement, Alpert-Abrams said. (Because the projects weren’t funded, they are not public record, so she requested that we not name them.) Staff recommended not funding the other because of poor peer review scores.

Former staff and council members say Callanan has only attended one meeting in person during his tenure, and largely keeps his camera off during virtual meetings. They were left with the impression that Callanan was an ideologue with little interest in discussion or debate. 

“He seemed very serious, focused, a man on a mission,” said David Hajdu, a Columbia University professor and one of the council members fired in October. “My sense of what that mission was—from framing of a point here, emphasis of a point there, weighing in on a particular topic—is that he was dedicated to upholding conservative principles.”

According to everyone interviewed, Callanan was seen as the leader of the conservative faction. They said English and Rose were more willing to be swayed by counter-arguments.

Rose is “uncommonly smart, and also a person dedicated to his principles, but open,” Hajdu said. “He’s a listener. I’ve seen him compromise—I mean compromise in a good sense.”

The council has met twice since the conservative takeover—a special meeting in October, just over a week after council members were fired, then at a regular meeting held remotely in November 2025. Typically, NEH staff are allowed to attend meetings to observe the discussion. But at the regular meeting, staff were left in a Microsoft Teams waiting room.

Over the course of the two meetings, the council approved $75 million in grants, including a slate of projects connected to the country’s 250th anniversary this year, an editorial fellowship at conservative Christian magazine First Things, and millions to programs on civics and the American founding. Among those were the $10 million grants to UNC-CH’s SCiLL and the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (FEHE).

Callanan is longtime friends with SCiLL Dean Jed Atkins and has been involved in discussions about the school since before it was created. Rose’s brother, John, is a faculty member. Matthew Rose told The Assembly in January that he recused himself from discussions and votes about SCiLL. Neither Callanan nor UNC-CH responded to questions.

FEHE is a grantmaking organization with deep ties to conservative academic circles. Rose’s organization, the Morningside Institute, is one of its many beneficiaries: Between 2022 and 2024, the organization provided over two-thirds of Morningside’s revenue.

“Please know that the agency’s lead career ethics official ensures that appropriate recusals are in place whenever a council member has a conflict of interest with respect to a pending application, or where a council member chooses to abstain in the absence of a covered relationship,” an NEH spokesperson said. “This process was followed with regard to the recent FEHE application.”

Those decisions came on the heels of two other controversial projects: $2 million of NEH funding, plus another $13 million matching private donations, for Trump’s planned archway in Washington D.C., and the largest grant in the agency’s history, a $10.4 million gift to the conservative Tikvah Fund to combat antisemitism. McDonald approved the Tikvah grant two weeks before the other council members were fired, and The New York Times reported that an NEH staff member, who former staff say was allied with McDonald, is married to a former Tikvah program staffer who now works at a foundation launched by a former Tikvah board chair.

All three gifts elided most of the standard review process. The two $10 million gifts were invited proposals, which skip the lengthy staff development phase, and the council voted against the Tikvah grant, only for McDonald to overrule them. 

The grants will allow their recipients to expand their work. At SCiLL, the funding will support eight new professorships, allowing the school to launch two new graduate programs.

But the NEH—now with just three council members, as long as English is serving as chair—is left shorthanded. And former staffers, all of whom are “true believers in public funding for humanities work,” according to Alpert-Abrams, are reeling. 

“I think what the NEH did was really important, and it’s really devastating the destruction of that mission,” she said. “I’m really angry about it.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the union’s involvement in a 2024 incident.