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Two days before he skipped Joe Biden’s inauguration and absconded to Mar-a-Lago with dozens of boxes of classified material for an extended period of golf and pouting, Donald Trump issued an executive order [ [link removed] ] listing 245 people to be memorialized with statues in a “National Garden of American Heroes.” Trump also used the executive order to once again express his contempt for the Black Lives Matter movement and others who had protested in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. He said the protesters had attacked “the greatness and goodness of America.” He called them “dangerous anti-American extremists” who sought to “dismantle our country’s history, institutions, and very identity” by defacing or toppling statues. There was no mention of the attack on the Capitol twelve days earlier, but there is little reason to believe that Donald Trump has ever seen the Capitol as representing anything great or good.
Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order and an earlier one that it had amended. Both of those orders were reinstated on January 29th with Trump’s “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday” executive order [ [link removed] ]. Law and tradition would dictate that Congress appropriate funds for the President’s garden project, but neither Trump nor Congressional Republicans seem to care about law or tradition these days. Instead, the statues will be funded, at least in part, by money from the National Endowment for the Humanities—money that was appropriated for state humanities councils and which the law says “shall be” granted to them on the first day of each fiscal year.
For someone truly seeking to dismantle our country’s history, institutions, and very identity, defunding state humanities councils would be a far better first step than spray painting a statue. The state humanities councils promote continuing education in and discussion of history, philosophy, civics, literature, language, anthropology, and law—in other words, our history, institutions, and very identity. Keyboard warriors who like to tell others that they need a lesson in civics might fall in love with their state’s humanities council. They should look it up, donate, and provide links instead of unsolicited advice.
During my 2023 interview for a seat on the board of directors of my state’s humanities council, I said that the advent of generative AI, including audio and video deepfakes, and the proliferation of disinformation across the media landscape had made a grounding in the humanities more important than ever. A few days later, Adrienne LaFrance made a similar argument in The Atlantic. Her article [ [link removed] ] was titled “The Coming Humanist Renaissance,” which I hope was prophetic, because big tech was not and is not coming to save us from the malevolent misuse of AI tools. Tech bros have long understood the damage caused by their Pied-Piper search and social media algorithms but have failed to pull the reins. We, the people, cannot expect them to voluntarily put the public good ahead of profits. To combat the more insidious effects of AI on society, we will have to become better thinkers, better consumers of information, and better people. That’s a heavy lift, but the humanities can help us get there.
I was in the Navy’s nuclear power program, majored in chemistry, and have taught high school science. I was never voted most likely to become an evangelist for humanities education. At the Naval Academy, I took two semesters of the introductory electrical engineering course for technical majors, while midshipmen who majored in humanities took two semesters of a course we labeled “Double ‘E’ for Poets.” I may have implied, once or twice, that my friends majoring in English, history, or political science took crayons and coloring books to electrical engineering class. I definitely was not jealous of the “poets” doing their kindergarten electrical engineering homework and reading novels at their desks while I slaved away at EE for engineers (and other masochists) and tried to decipher physical chemistry. (I once saw a bumper sticker that said, “Honk if you passed physical chemistry.” It can be a challenging class.)
For decades after I graduated, the chemistry, calculus and physics I learned in college only came in handy when my kids needed help understanding their homework. Meanwhile, everywhere I went, I was the person in my unit or workplace who others went to for writing advice. I also felt like the novels, biographies, history, and philosophy I had read made me a more insightful leader. So, the argument that STEM majors were somehow more useful struck me as unfounded then, and it still does today.
The board of directors of Humanities North Dakota meets in June, and I am excited to be the board member who gets to pick a book and lead a discussion about it at dinner the night before the meeting. I am leaning toward A Jane Austen Education, by William Deresiewicz. The book’s subtitle is How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter. And that’s the beauty of the humanities and of book discussions in general: they provide a way into the things that really matter. They let us disagree respectfully because we are talking about a book and its author or characters, not the politics of the moment. We can learn from the protagonist’s struggles without going through them ourselves. We may even change our minds about something. That is not an easy thing to do, and brute force or mean comments on social media will never achieve it.
We armor our minds by making real connections, not superficial friendships on social media, and we will need more of those real connections and brave conversations if we are to preserve and build the greatness and goodness of the United States of America.

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