Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:20 a.m. May 1 to remove an instance of gendered language.
In September, OU announced $498,129 in grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities had been awarded to university faculty members.
On April 2, the funding was terminated.
Because of funding terminations, research activities, growth and employment are being disrupted.
OU artificial intelligence center
Hunter Heyck, an OU history of science, technology and medicine professor, and two co-project directors received the second-largest NEH grant awarded to an OU professor in the university’s history. The largest NEH grant in OU's history of $500,000 was obtained in 2021 by one of the co-project directors, Kimberly Marshall, an OU anthropology professor.
The grant would have funded the development of The Center for Creativity and Authenticity in AI Cultural Production. The center would have focused on “catalyzing work” around artificial intelligence and its cultural and ethical implications, Heyck told OU Daily in September. The center’s main project was a series of activities that have now been scrapped.
“We lost out on the ability to do these activities. These activities included, at the heart of it, three annual conferences related to AI and society,” Heyck said. “There would have been one each year for the next few years, starting in October, but we won’t be able to have those.”
The project’s themes would have ranged from trust and trustworthiness to authenticity, fakery, plagiarism and creativity. More specific themes ranged from Native American Arts Theory to Intellectual and Cultural History.
Heyck was informed the grant had been terminated through an April 2 letter addressed to Joe Johnson, an OU award coordinator. NEH acting-Chairman Michael McDonald wrote in the letter, “NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda.”
Joseph Thai, an OU law professor, said the move by the NEH to redirect funding is in line with the Trump administration shifting toward federal government spending to promote their priorities and punish those who don’t share them.
“They’ve not hidden that agenda at all. The explanation for grantees losing their awards is that ‘they no longer align with the priorities of the current president,’” Thai said. “Sometimes a wolf comes in wolf's clothing.”
OU Daily obtained termination letters for three other projects that contained the same language. None of the termination letters obtained by OU Daily were addressed to the project directors, also known as principal investigators.
Leslie Flenniken Kelly, OU associate director of award administration, wrote in an email to OU Daily that her office is listed as the primary point of contact for incoming awards.
“The fact that it was addressed to a university staff member who handles many grants, not to me as PI is yet another (small) example of the ‘cutting with a chainsaw not a scalpel’ aspect of these terminations,” Heyck wrote in an email to OU Daily.
Other grant cancellations
Carrie Schroeder, an OU women’s and gender studies professor, had a $349,887 grant terminated, according to a letter obtained by OU Daily. Schroeder’s project, “Expanding Coptic Digital Online Collections,” began in July 2023, with her grant previously scheduled to end in June 2026. As such, a majority of the funds have been spent.
The Coptic language is the final phase of ancient Egyptian, according to Schroeder. The language is the heritage language of Coptic Orthodox Christians, a religious community in the Middle East, with a diaspora in the United States.
According to Schroeder, the existing collection is used by scholars around the world, and she hoped to grow the collection with her grant funding. Now, she’s focused on keeping it accessible.
“We were really poised to be able to release a lot more data in the next year, but if we don’t have the time or people,” Schroeder said. “We can’t grow.”
But that doesn’t mean the project is stunted.
“Fortunately, we do have many friends in Europe who have offered to mirror our websites. So there may be other possibilities,” Schroeder said.
In an email to OU Daily on April 18, Schroeder wrote that discussions about the final invoice are still ongoing but she expects roughly $100,000 in remaining funds will be forfeited.
Raina Heaton, an OU Native American studies professor, had a $345,494 grant terminated, according to a letter obtained by OU Daily. The grant funded a project that aimed to develop, for the first time, online access to the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History’s Native American Languages collection. The project began in 2022 and was set to end in May 2026.
“We have about 9,000 collection materials, 1,300 languages, so it’s a very broad language collection,” Heaton said. “We’re kind of the language archive for the entire central U.S.”
When the grant was originally canceled, Heaton wasn’t sure they’d be able to get the collection online. In an email to OU Daily on April 25, Heaton said the museum had reconciled some concerns and has a target of 90 days to get at least most of the collection online.
Heaton wrote that after previous and pending expenses, $71,244 will be forfeited.
Jehiah Kaulaity, a Native American studies senior, planned on his employment on the project being funded by the grant through the fall 2025 semester. Now, Kaulaity is only guaranteed to work on the project through the summer.
Kaulaity, a member of the Kiowa Tribe, said he’s focused on his academics above all, so the lack of employment doesn’t necessarily bother him. However, the message the funding termination sends does.
“It not only terminates funding, it also terminates that respect, especially for the Indigenous community, because it makes us feel not as important to our own society, to our own government,” Kaulaity said. “As Indigenous people, for something like this to happen, it just shows, I would have to say, a lack of respect.”
Amanda Minks, an OU anthropology and ethnomusicology professor, had a $47,487 grant terminated, according to a letter obtained by OU Daily. The grant funded a project titled “Indigenous Media Portal,” an interactive website providing access to digitized Native American cultural heritage items using photographs, radio and other audio media. The project began in September 2023 and was set to end in July 2025.
While the project was naturally wrapping up, the termination left the project's team “scrambling,” according to Minks.
“We understood the NEH award to be a contracted agreement, and we were in the process of paying for professional services already carried out for the project,” Minks wrote in an email to OU Daily. “We will follow through with our commitments one way or another.”
While the termination doesn’t necessarily set Minks’ project back, she’s concerned about the future writing and the challenges community-engaged projects may face.
Kathleen Brosnan, an OU history professor, had a $219,407 grant terminated, as first reported by The Oklahoman. Brosnan’s grant funded a project titled “The Visual West,” a four-week summer institute for Higher Education faculty in Norman that “reexamines the visual imagery and material culture that shaped ideas about the American West since the nineteenth century.”
Dolores Subia BigFoot, an OU Health Sciences Center psychology professor, confirmed to OU Daily in early April that her $50,000 grant had been terminated. BigFoot’s grant was for a three-day conference for tribal leaders and Native American scholars focused on traditions that emerged from Native American prisoners of war at Fort Marion from 1875-78.
Across the nation
Researchers in Oklahoma are not the only ones to lose their funding.
As reported by the Washington Post, more than 1,200 NEH grants are estimated to have been terminated. Stephen Kidd, executive director of the National Humanities Alliance, told the Washington Post that his organization’s estimate that 1,200 grants had been terminated was based on outreach from recipients.
According to the New York Times, McDonald, whose name is on the termination letters, told NEH senior leadership that 85% of grants were to be canceled and suggested that the agency would focus on more patriotic programming in the future.
The New York Times later reported that NEH plans to redirect some of its funding toward building President Donald Trump’s proposed National Garden of American Heroes, which would consist of statues of a wide range of historical American figures. On Thursday, the NEH published a press release requesting preliminary concepts for the garden.
According to the press release, grant opportunities are available for selected artists. Selected artists could receive “awards of up to $200,000 per statue for the design and creation of up to three statues per recipient.”
This story was edited by Anusha Fathepure, Ismael Lele and Ana Barboza. Geethika Kollu and Avery Avery copy edited this story.
