The National Endowment for the Humanities announced last week that it was awarding $10.1 million to UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, also known as SCiLL.
The gift—all but $100,000 of which comes as a matching grant—will support new faculty positions in “American Political Tradition, Great Books and Leadership, and the Classical Tradition,” according to the NEH. A UNC-CH press release stated that it will also support the school’s plans to launch a master’s program in military leadership for active-duty officers and a doctorate program designed to prepare future civic educators.
SCiLL has ties to the National Humanities Council, which guides NEH’s funding decisions.
In October, The Washington Post reported that the White House abruptly fired most of the 27-person council. Only four members remain. All were appointed by Donald Trump.
One of the four is Keegan Callanan, a political theorist and college friend of SCiLL director and dean Jed Atkins. Callanan has been connected with SCiLL since it was first conceived, as The Assembly reported this fall. He also works as an adviser for the foundation of Paul Singer, the chairman emeritus of the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute.
Another NHC member is Matthew Rose, brother of SCiLL professor John Rose and director of the Barry Center on the University and Intellectual Life. SCiLL professor Connor Grubaugh held a Barry Center fellowship last year at Duke University.
“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,” NEH Deputy Director Paula Wasley wrote in a statement to The Quad. “This process was followed with regard to the recent UNC application.”
Matthew Rose told The Quad he recused himself from discussions and votes about SCiLL’s funding. Neither Callanan nor UNC-CH responded to questions.
The NEH’s recent round of grants sit uneasily with some humanities scholars, in part because of the selection process.
“Since these grants are neither part of a critical review process nor competitively evaluated by external panels of experts in the discipline, their disbursement under the name of the National Endowment for the Humanities discredits the integrity and history of that institution,” UNC-CH classics professor Donald Haggis told The Quad in an email.
Haggis also said that the Trump Administration’s cuts to the NEH last year “are doing significant damage to research in classical studies, history, and philosophy, and indeed classical education in general, which some of these ad hoc reappropriations purport to promote.”