Cal Poly history lecturer Cameron Jones waited nearly six months to receive the $150,000 federally-funded research grant awarded to his team’s project, AfricanCalifornios.org, when a two-sentence email hit his inbox and changed everything.
Federal officials stated in the email that the grant was “administratively withdrawn,” canceling the grant and preventing Jones from filing a complaint. He followed up to find out why the grant was cancelled, but never received a response.
“Most of my money was going to go to hire students,” Jones said. “That’s job opportunities, that’s opportunities for ‘Learn By Doing’ by working on these projects.”
Jones’s project is among 14 federally-funded Cal Poly projects that faced funding cuts or termination since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, according to unofficial documents obtained by Mustang News. Jones’ grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is the first and only NEH grant the College of Liberal Arts has ever received.
The NEH notified all grantees across the country that funding for their projects was slashed, leading to the cancellation of virtually all the institutions’ grants in April 2025, although Jones was not notified until two months later.
Michael McDonald, who was appointed by the Trump administration a month earlier, informed senior NEH leadership that upward of 85% of the agency’s grants would be cancelled, according to The New York Times. The NEH implemented these cuts in early April, citing “recent implementation of Trump administration executive orders.”
While some projects had their funding reinstated, others remained in limbo. Jones and his team were left to rebuild their budget model by developing a crowdfunding site, which launched at the start of February.
Although Jones hopes the site will generate enough revenue to keep some student interns employed for a quarter or two, the crowdfunding goal is only $10,000 — one-fifteenth of the original NEH grant. Jack Martin, a Cal Poly graduate and research intern for the AfricanCalifornios.org project, is the sole intern who remained on the project as an unpaid “visiting scholar.”
“I’m more mad because this could have forwarded so much for what we’re trying to accomplish, so it’s less about me personally,” Martin said. “It’s more about what we could do with that money besides me.”
Martin said the project taught him how to be a historian and guided him to the particular niche he focused on in his master’s thesis. For Martin, this project embodies everything the “Learn By Doing” philosophy stands for.
“You’re not just coming to college to do college. You’re actively taking part in a process of making a difference.”
Jack Martin, Cal Poly graduate and research intern for the AfricanCalifornios.org project
Graduates and faculty feel real-world implications
Academic Senate Chair Jerusha Greenwood said she and her colleagues have felt a “chilling effect” in the higher education sector, as the Trump administration targets Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts, according to a White House press release in April 2025.
“It’s tough to measure if there’s been a chilling impact in terms of what new courses faculty might propose in terms of the content that they might want to explore. But, there’s no way to really measure that because you can’t measure a negative in that respect,” Greenwood said. “You can’t measure what isn’t happening.”
To counter federal pressure, the Academic Senate passed a resolution calling on Cal State universities to create a compact among universities similar to that of the Big Ten schools. The Big Ten Mutual Defense Compact is a proposed initiative led by faculty senates across the Big Ten Academic Alliance to protect member universities against federal, political or legal pressures.
“If, by chance, the federal government comes after our schools in terms of lawsuits, investigations or any sort of disruption to academic freedom or to limit academic freedom, we would form an impermeable wall that said ‘No, not here,’” Greenwood said.
Despite the resolution’s sendoff to the Cal State University Chancellor’s Office and the CSU Academic Senate, Greenwood said that the initiative “didn’t really go anywhere.”
Looking ahead, Cal Poly leaders are trying to strengthen the campus’s protections against executive orders, such as those involving research and immigration that have already affected campuses.
This story originally appeared in the February printed edition of Mustang News. Check out more stories from the issue here.