Plus, federal arts agencies may be at death’s door, but they’re still making grants.

T wo topics today. Will Harvard capitulate this week to charges of flagrantly violating federal civil rights laws, and what ought the government require of it? And are the three core federal agencies supporting the arts dead or alive?

Americans are pithy, in-your-face sloganeers. There’s “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” courtesy of Admiral Farragut; “no pain, no gain,” as Ben Franklin, not Jack LaLanne, first said; and “don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” — ancestry endless, but let’s say that someone American, fighting for freedom against awful people, said it, maybe on Bunker Hill. Let’s add, for now, until the Augean stable called Harvard is cleansed, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Penny Pritzker’s got to go.” It’s a one-line chant, composed by me a few weeks ago, tuneful and succinct. Let’s make it happen.

Pritzker, the billionaire hotel heiress and former Obama secretary of distorted markets, cronyism, and rent-seeking — oops, I meant “commerce” — chairs Harvard’s board. If we believe the legacy news media, and I admit they’re experts at fiction, Harvard and the Feds are about to settle “part” of what’s become Harvard’s rap sheet, now as long as the Charles River. If a settlement is in the works, it has to include the ouster of Pritzker and half the remaining board, and then their replacement by smart, rich Harvard alums who aren’t Dom Perignon pinkos.

Gross antisemitism, hiding Qatari and Chinese money, an illegal admissions regime, lying about patents on inventions funded by the government, illegal and race-based hiring — these top the list of investigations. Then there’s former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s plagiarism, countenancing Chinese spies posing as students, inept stewardship of the endowment, Harvard Medical School staff’s side hustle selling cadaver parts, and on and on. Harvard’s current board has presided over each and every baroque bit of sleaze. “In the name of God, go,” sayeth I, but they won’t unless bulldozed.

American colleges and universities, most having very good, even world-class, art museums, are at the pinnacle of high culture here, “high culture” defined expansively to embrace free inquiry, curiosity, great books, exhaustive archives, and respect for empiricism. Many right-of-center friends have told me they don’t think these schools can be saved. Rot is in their DNA after 50 years of affirmative action, which is lie piled on lie, a hate-America-first mentality, grade inflation, the devaluation of good teaching, and too much money. We can’t yield them to the far left. They’re too important, too rich, and too powerful. At their best, they’re among the secret sauces that make America invincible. At their worst, about where they were only months ago, they’ll destroy the country.

Think about how extraordinary this moment is. Harvard, once a prancing, untouchable Colossus, and Columbia, Brown, NYU, UCLA, Penn, MIT, Cornell, Duke, Yale, and more, now are shown to have feet of clay. Most will pay a new, hefty income tax on their endowments. Columbia is paying $221 million in penalties for brute antisemitism never seen in America. It’s supplying hiring and admissions data, monitored by the Feds and an independent outsider, so the school can’t skirt the law. The University of Virginia’s president was pushed from office because he just couldn’t bear ending illegal admissions and hiring. For him, and at many elite schools, it’s a religion. On the way out the door, he looked like a martyr to a cult — gaunt, sad, and clueless. UVA, Columbia, Penn, Brown, and other schools settling with Jove in the White House will get their federal research billions . . . for this year. Men in women’s sports? Down the swimming pool drain, with Lia Thomas’s medals off to the smelter.

Harvard is said by such short story and novella masters as the New York Times to be willing to pay $500 million to outsiders to run vocational-training programs in lieu of paying the government a fine. No outside monitor, for anything, they’re insisting, which means no compliance with civil rights laws and no quality control on how the $500 million will be spent. Vocational training in Gaza, anyone? Unless the trustees change, nothing will change, at any elite school. Hubristic and delusional, Harvard’s brass will believe that they got away with it.

Of course, it’s an evolving story and depends in part on the White House’s priorities and staying power, not Harvard’s, whose short hairs the Feds have clamped in a vise, and I hear it’s medieval and hope it’s rusty. And whatever deal is announced, it’s only part of the solution for elite campus rot. I hope the Feds quietly prune foreign student admissions to 10 percent of the student body and bar federal student loans for law, journalism, divinity, social work, and teacher schools, and for gender and ethnic studies majors. If schools want to support students for these programs, they can make the loans and bear the risks on their own.

On Pritzker and her ilk, I’m a good Christian but a Methodist, so fire and brimstone are in my blood, and scalps aren’t always bad. My advice? The whites of Harvard’s eyes are before us. Don’t hesitate to fire. “Hey, hey, ho, ho . . . ”

And what’s happening at federal agencies supporting the arts? Since January 20, we’ve seen the trauma called DOGE, workers sent home en masse, many recalled, buyouts, terminations, rescissions, new leadership, money reallocations, canceled grants, and angst galore, but the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) still live and still give. Will they muddle through or get the axe? Is it Dunkirk, or is it Nagasaki? Here’s a look.

On August 1, the NEH announced $34.9 million in new grants. It’s a case of the good, the weird, and the certifiable. The NEH is supporting newspaper digitization projects in Arkansas, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Texas. The average grant is about $300,000. The National Digital Newspaper Program is leading the charge. This program is run by the NEH and the Library of Congress. This very good effort has been under way for a few years and will be a boon to scholarship. Even when newspapers lie — which is best described as “every minute of every day of every week, since 1690,” when the digital project starts — it’s still enlightening to know about what, who’s lying, how, and why.

I can’t argue with the books that the NEH is boosting. There’s $200,000 to the Jack London Society in Savannah for the publication of volume 13 of his collected, annotated works. Hadrian’s Mausoleum and Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome will get a place in the sun via $250,000 to Notre Dame University and a two-volume history. Notre Dame got three grants, which is odd. Who can argue with $450,000 toward a definitive edition of the works of George and Ira Gershwin?

I’ve pushed the NEA and the NEH to support topics for which fundraising would be very tough, not because of worthiness but because of fashion. Who could be more out of fashion than the English Arts & Crafts embroiderer, jewelry maker, and editor May Morris? The scholar at University of Delaware stewarding this project must have popped a Champagne cork on hearing she would get $65,000.

Documentaries are in. Craft in America, Inc., got $700,000 for four programs on craft — things like weaving, furniture, ceramics, working with silver — to coincide with the Semiquincentennial. So will a documentary on the life of the fantastic architect and interior designer Florence Knoll.

My eyebrows rose when I read that the NEH has awarded Georgetown University $750,000 for a research center “exploring the effects of AI on the individual’s experience of democratic life.” I wouldn’t give them a brass farthing. It’s run by horrible people. Goodness, they gave the FBI creep Peter Strzok a teaching gig. They harassed Ilya Shapiro out of his job as head of its Center for the Constitution. They don’t believe in democracy. Georgetown ranks 240th of 250 schools for protecting free speech, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression finds. Harvard is at the very bottom, by the by.

On the topic of certifiability, as in insane-asylum-ready, why in the world would the NEH, under a Trump-appointed team, give the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston $450,000 to reimagine its 18th-century American galleries? My eyebrows levitated in two waves — unlike Mangione, I’m no unibrow — and coursed my forehead. As the MFA tells us, it’s going “to challenge conventional accounts of the past and present a more inclusive vision of the Americas.” That’s sugarcoated code for a sport in the Oppression Olympics called It’s America’s Fault, for sugar plantation slavery, inequality, whatever that means, George Floyd, the disappearance of Wampanoag wampum, those awful, pesky national myths, and Yankee abuse of labor and nature to get tea, coffee, chocolate, silver, and mahogany to Boston. The MFA is woke, woke, woke, without a bat squeak of shame over it, and virtue-signaling is its emotional support broomstick.

An exhibition on the Etruscans at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco gets $100,000. I love the Etruscans, from whom I’m surely descended, for their emotional sculpture, color sense, terra-cotta expertise, and their art of nature. And there’s $197,000 for a book on the letters of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, our 12th and 13th presidents, respectively. It’s an excellent American University project, and the first of three volumes will be out in time for America’s 250th. The war hero Taylor died after barely more than a fraught, frustrating year in office, probably of cholera caused by bad Swamp sanitation. Fillmore, his VP and successor, is most remembered for his later, presidential run as the nominee of the Know Nothing Party. Both had their bright moments, though, and need some sunshine.

Saving the loftiest for last, the NEH made the biggest grant in its history. It’s giving $10 million “to help accelerate work by researchers” at the University of Virginia and other institutions on the papers of Founding Fathers such as George Washington and James Madison. For $10 million, I’d accelerate, Secretariat-fast. The NEH grant also funds an America 250 website presenting a curated selection of Founding Father documents. Reading original material is so much better than an academic’s interpretation, which may or may not be twisted. I hope NEH establishes a regimen of progress payments. Otherwise, UVA might still be working on Washington’s papers for America 300. UVA’s incomplete Washington Papers Project started in 1968.

The NEH appears to be organizing artist submissions for the National Garden of Heroes sculpture project, set to open before July 4, 2026. I wrote about it a couple of months ago. The deadline for proposals was July 1. My spies tell me that the NEH did indeed get some proposals. Stay tuned.

The NEA? It gave $886,000 in late June for art programs for veterans, a good cause. They’re mostly small, $10,000 or $25,000, with a few $50,000 grants, for things such as creative writing, a veterans’ night at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, a veteran improv troupe, and blacksmithing classes. Most members of the NEA’s senior program staff have quit. The NEA’s last four press releases are artist obituaries. Not a good look.

The IMLS hovers at death’s door, sad since of the three it’s by far, and over time, the most effective and apolitical. At the end of July, it gave non-competitive grants ranging from $6,000 to $10,000 to 158 Native tribal libraries for the purpose of “advancing education, workforce development, and heritage preservation.”

In the past few days, the IMLS sent me two press releases, their first since March. One touts Second Lady Usha Vance’s summer reading challenge for kids — read twelve books and you get a diploma and entered into a raffle for a trip to Washington, D.C. Fine, but I got the press release on August 8. Astronomically, summer lasts until September 21. Practically, though, as John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John sang, “summer days, drifting away.” Late, to say the least, for this notice. Another press release announced the Presidential AI Challenge for young people, not an IMLS program. IMLS’s foundational statute is up for congressional reauthorization in September.

I’ll be in the Swamp next weekend for a White House tour and visits to Smithsonian museums. I’m going on the Joe Sixpack tour, nothing special, but I’ll still write about it. At the Smithsonian, I hope not to be struck by the sword of Damocles hanging over the institution. After years of playing politics, the Smithsonian is getting its comeuppance.