How AI Terminated 1,477 NEH Grants: A Naive Exercise in Casuistry

From 2010 until its sudden termination by DOGE last April, I directed Music Unwound, an NEH-funded national consortium of orchestras and universities.  A letter from Michael McDonald, the acting NEH chairman, informed me that the demise of Music Unwound represented “an urgent priority for the administration.” It was ended “to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities.” 

I now learn, from a splendid March 7 New York Times investigative piece by Jennifer Schuessler, that Music Unwound was cancelled midstream by a couple of young DOGE agents who deployed ChatGPT to determine which existing NEH projects were infected by DEI. Nearly every active grant made during the Biden administration, they decided, was ideologically toxic. 1,477 NEH grants were ended. Forty-two were kept.

Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh, with no background in the humanities, culled short summaries of ongoing NEH projects from the internet. The prompt that they fed to ChatGPT read: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.?  Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” In a deposition, Fox was asked about an NEH-supported documentary exploring the 1873 massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, of dozens of Black men attacked by a mob of former Confederates and Ku Klux Klan members. ChatGPT ruled it “DEI.” Fox agreed – “because it focuses on exclusively anti-Black violence, which is a race,” he explained.

In other words, Fox and Cavanaugh functioned as hitmen in a self-fulfilling exercise in naïve casuistry. But they doubtless perceived themselves as warriors for Donald Trump’s white-washed version of “America First.” Cavanaugh, one reads in the Times, embraced DOGE’s mission of shrinking “useless small agencies.”

All the Music Unwound festivals – dozens of them in all parts of the United States — explored topics in American music, about which it is impossible to talk without reference to “race.” There would be no American music without Black America. Of the most recent Music Unwound festivals, four – in New York, Illinois, Indiana, and North Carolina – were cross-disciplinary celebrations of “Charles Ives’s America” on the occasion of the Ives Sesquicentennial year: 2024. Ives is the great creative genius of American classical music. He is also the American concert composer who most tellingly culls American cultural memory. He fixes on the Civil War, in which his father served, and on Danbury, Connecticut, in which he grew up. His American vision is uplifting, even patriotic. Because it is also capacious, it incorporates the fate of Black Americans. His Second Symphony expresses “sympathy for the slaves” by citing Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe” (which is not a minstrel song in dialect, but an empathetic parlor song). Ives’s “The St. Gaudens at Boston Commons” ponders the heroism of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s legendary Black Civil War regiment. A central purpose of the Music Unwound Ives festivals was to extrapolate these and other messages embedded in the symphonic memory clouds that Ives – and only Ives – densely fashioned. (For an example, click here.)

That alone would have sufficed to flag Music Unwound as “DEI.” But the festivals were never “woke.” They did not argue for the arts as instruments for social justice. The arts are bigger than that, and fundamentally different. (To read something pertinent, click here.) In fact, the Music Unwound Ives festivals would more plausibly be regarded as non-ideological celebrations of “America 250” – the Trump logo now flaunted by both the NEH and NEA.

Another terminated NEH project that I have written and broadcast about is MUSA – “Music of the United States,” initiated in 1988 by the American Musicological Society. It’s funded 41 scholarly editions of American music of all kinds – a New World cacophony including spirituals and Native American songs, blackface minstrelsy, early American symphonies and choral works, transcriptions of piano solos by Fats Waller and Earl Hines, and you name it. In an NPR piece on Trump and the arts, I focused on a MUSA project culling all the songs referenced in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s  Little House on the Prairie children’s books – in effect, a revelatory Middle American 19^th century songbook. No one scanning the full list of MUSA projects – you can see it here – could reasonably infer an underlying DEI agenda.

I now learn from Jennifer Schuester’s Times piece that the American Council of Learned Societies, of which the American Musicological Society is a constituent member, is partnering a lawsuit arguing that DOGE illegally took control of the NEH and inflicted cuts violating both the First Amendment and the equal protection clause of the Constitution. The plaintiffs are asking that the grants be reinstated. 

Michael McDonald, the acting NEH chairman who signed off on the AI-generated verdicts, is Trump’s current nominee to become NEH chairman. It’s also McDonald who recently announced a series of “chairman’s awards” – an unprecedented round of NEH projects awarded non-competitively, and serving a conservative ideological agenda. Typically – up to now – NEH and NEH grants have been adjudicated by outside panelists in order to insulate the process from political interference. Never before have chairman’s awards so dominated an NEH agenda. One lawmaker, Representative Chelie Pingree of Maine, has accused the Trump administration of turning the NEH into a “slush fund.”

That’s a reasonable summation.

For my NPR documentary on Trump and the arts, click here.

For more on Music Unwound, click here.